Edited by Alan Michael Parker
Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are considered-and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so. Thus charged were the twenty-two contributors to The Imaginary Poets, who in response produced poems “translated” from eighteen languages including Dirja, Vietnamese, Yiddish, and even from Egyptian hieroglyphs, poems that may be read in the grand literary tradition of heteronyms and alter egos. Calling into question the axioms of translation and the use of fiction-in-poetry, The Imaginary Poets offers a glimpse of twenty-two poets in splendid, distorted, carnivalesque self-portraits.
The Imaginary Poets was awarded Silver in the 2005 Independent Press Publishing Award contest for Best Anthology.