The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems

ModPo has engaged 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition. In The Difference Is Spreading, Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have invited fifty poets to select and comment on a poem by another writer, demonstrating the importance of community, socioaesthetic networks, and expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. They believe that the most challenging and dynamic poems are those that are open, asking readers to participate in making their meaning.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 272 pages
Publication date: 22 March 2022
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Since its inception in 2012, the immensely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has captivated a staggering 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its unwavering focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that spans from the illustrious Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to some of today's freshest and most experimental written and spoken verse. In their captivating book, The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have graciously handed the microphone over to the poets themselves, inviting fifty of them to select and comment upon a poem by another writer. The approaches taken in this anthology are diverse, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. However, a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, coupled with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the paramount importance of community, socioaesthetic networks, and lines of connection in poetry. Through the meticulous curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford convey their belief that the poems that are most challenging and dynamic are those that are open—the writings that invite their readers to actively participate in the process of shaping their meaning. Poetry truly comes alive when a reader and a poet come into contact, whether the reader is a celebrated poet or a novice, as it encourages the reader to engage in interpretive work. Without that convergence, poetry remains inert, unable to stir the hearts and minds of those who encounter it.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812253238