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Congratulations, you've assembled an unimaginable grouping. I'll say it straight. There's a fair amount of good stuff in Sandburg which tends to get drowned out by the rant, Levine is pretty much worthless, and Oppen is one of the very best American poets. But they're so extraordinarily different that fitting them in the same sentence must have been difficult. Did I misread Sean? I don't think he was ascribing a jingoist intention to "Born in the USA," intentional or otherwise. What I thought he was saying was that the rhetoric, clearly meant ironically, lends itself to the misuse it has sustained. Best, Mark >there's a certain _pleasure_ to be had in Armitage -- as there is, >in a US context, Carl Sandburg or Philip Levine or (the gods forgive >me) even Oppen -- Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University of California Press). http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland "Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The Nation