Bernstein's list of the younger generation of New American Poets (born between 1937 and 1944)
Clark Coolidge
Michael Palmer
Lyn Hejinian
David Melnick
Tom Mandel
Michael Lally
Ted Greenwald
Ray DiPalma
Nick Piombino
Ann Lauterbach
Peter Seaton
Jim Brodey
Charles North
Fanny Howe
George Quasha
Charles Stein
Robert Grenier
Ron Padgett
Stephen Rodefer
John Taggart
Maureen Own
Lorenzo Thomas
Lewis Warsh
Michael Davidson
Tony Towle
Bill Brekson
Geoff Young
Kathleen Fraser
John Perlman
and honorable mention Tom Raworth, born in England in 1938
many or all of these poets "share, without ever so stating, a rejection of anything extrinsic to the poetic process and to the poem--an insistence on the particularity of that process, the nonreducible nature of the choice made, the obsecenity or absurdity of paraphrase or extrapoetic explanation, and a suspicion or rejection of conventional literary, and equally nonliterary, career patterns" (208)
"Or put it this way: I find in many of the works of these poets an intense distrust of large-scale claims of any kind, an extreme questioning of public forms, a tireless tearing down or tearing away at authoritative/authoritarian language structures. I hear in their works an explosion of self-reflectiveness and a refusal of the systematic combined with a pervasive engagement with dislocation up to the point of personal terror: an insistence of the human scale of poetry--on the 'human crisis'--in a culture going bonkers with mass markets, high technology, and faith in science as savior."