This is somewhat belated (I think the book came out in 2010) review of American Hybrid, a poetry anthology of ‘hybrid’ poetry widely viewed as being both a good start towards chronicling the dominant form of American poetry right, and also as being not really successful.

Peter Riley, the reviewer, takes some umbrage at how contemporary British poetry is (in his eyes) ignored and belittled (which is too bad, because I am now convinced that greatest experimental poet since Ashberry in the 50s and 60s is Cambridge’s J.H. Prynne).

I mostly just want to give Riley credit for this line:

There is an imbalance because it is assumed that there is an avant-garde, which there isn’t, and that there is an enemy conservative poetry of equal weight, which there isn’t either.

The review is interesting and isn’t really about American Hybrid and ranges over subjects like the much discussed proliferation of MFA programs and the now insidious/dominant MFA style (apparently, they just don’t have that many MFA programs for poets over there, so this strange, cloistered poetic-industrial-academic complex doesn’t really exist over there) and how experimental poets in America, even when they meet counterparts on the British Isles, have little interest in what their UK cousins are doing, and how American Hybrid compares poorly to the canonical New American Poetry: 1945-1960.