In editing this special poetry supplement, I wanted to break down some of the insularity that exists between East Coast readers and West Coast writers. This explains my editorial bias toward poets who live or have lived on the West Coast. More importantly, I wanted to put together an issue of contemporary poems which would measure up to the following rule of thumb for what, in one of his essays, T. S. Eliot calls “genuine poetry”: “Has this poet something to say, a little different from what anyone has said before, and has he found, not only a different way of saying it, but the different way of saying it which expresses the difference in what he is saying?” I hope Agni’s readers will agree with me that these poems merit such scrutiny, and will find in this supplement work that deserves to be called “genuine.” My thanks to the contributors whose work—wayward, spirited, musically and emotionally vital—seems to me a benchmark for contemporary poetry.

Tom Sleigh
Cambridge, 1989