the territory of the possible. But not all difference does that, so we need to keep attentive to differences that are actually augmentative rather than those that aren’t. TC: You edited American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of Poetry. Can you speak to the process of anthologizing? CS: This is extremely relevant to what we’ve just been talking about. First, it’s important to note that I coedited it with David St. John, which was a determining element of the project and a process in its own right— and an extremely rewarding one. The impetus for the project was the persistently espoused dichotomy between the experimental and the conventional. The model that’s advanced in many contemporary articles and blogs (that of a continuum from the conventional personal lyric at one extreme to the formally-challenging experimental at the other) is completely out of date, and doesn’t represent what we actually see in the written work. Instead, most contemporary poetry doesn’t fall along any sort of continuum and is often not open to such comparisons, either on grounds of relative experimentalism or any other. The range of American poetry being written today constitutes a field of radically different practices, which is so much more interesting than the experimental-conservative continuum. American Hybrid was an attempt to show that scattered diversity, and offer an alternative model,
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