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The Introspectivists By Millar Usiskin, Jana
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The Introspectivists (Inzikhistn), the first group of modernist Yiddish poets in America, were part of the Jewish American Renaissance and flourished in the years following the First World War. The movement was headed by Jacob Glatstein (Yankev Glatshteyn), Aaron Glanz-Leyeles and N. B. Minkoff, and later by Yehuda Leyb Teller. The Introspective poets rejected traditional, highly-stylized forms, instead employing narrative fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, free verse, word play and neologisms and irony in their work. Glatstein, Leyeles, and Minkoff formalized the movement’s aesthetic principles in the first anthology of Introspectivist poetry, In Zikh (‘In Oneself’).