Men of Our Time

Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking volume, Fred Moramarco and Al Zolynas bring together a comprehensive and widely representative selection of poetry reflecting both the diversity and commodity of male experience in the United States today. Since the beginning of the contemporary phase of the women's movement in the 1960s, various anthologies devoted to the poetry of women have articulated and defined a distinctive sensibility attuned to the particularities of a woman's life in our time. Although much has been written recently about the male role in our society as well, the discussion generally has assumed a sociopsychological or mythic perspective. Poetry, Moramarco and Zolynas believe, can reveal most about the nature of male life today, especially the enormous changes men have experienced in recent years. As the editors state in their introduction, "A quiet revolution has been taking place in men's poetry over the past few decades, as men have been chronicling the 'history of their hearts' and have been examining those relationships central to their being in the world: their connections to their fathers and mothers; their own sense of fatherhood and of being sons and brothers; their marriages, divorces, and other aspects of their love lives; as well as the ways they conceive of maleness and femaleness." The poems collected in Men of Our Time--257 from more than 170 poets--include a wide mix of ethnic and racial perspectives that reflect the multicultural tenor of American life. They reveal men's most intimate feelings about the loss of childhood, sexual anxieties and fantasies, aging, self-sufficiency and dependency, and the perennial quest for a masculine identity. Above all, the poems are unapologetically grounded in a distinctly male experience or imagination. Men of Our Time reclaims a poetry that is connected to and expressive of men's lives in the closing decade of the twentieth century.