Poetry—Debates and Developments
American poetry published since 1970 features a broad range of voices as a result
of demographic and social changes in American culture that allow for fuller
equality of, and hence fuller representation of, previously disenfranchised
groups, including women, members of ethnic minorities, gay people, and
recent immigrants. Prior to the early 1970s the formal study of literature was
restricted almost entirely to the study of white poets, and poets studied were
far more likely to be men than women. Poetry published since 1970 exhibits
many voices that resist traditional categories and classifications. Despite this
resistance and a flourishing of poetic forms and thematic issues, it is possible
to identify certain literary groupings, such as the postconfessional poets, and
the language poets, and to identify distinctive approaches, such as slam poetry,
and feminist poetry. The emergence of ethnic writers introducing new idioms
and new social concerns to American poetry must also be considered.
For most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Ameri-
can poetry has been divided between that written in traditional verse forms
(including rhyme and meter) and that written in free verse. Free verse rejects
traditional rhyme and meter, and with, at times, varying line lengths and
uneven (or missing) stanza patterns, may not read or sound at all like conven-
tional poetry, although it still includes properties of rhythm and musical sound.
This distinction is important between poets who describe their work as experi-
mental, concerned with breaking standards for logic and syntax, for example,
and poets who see themselves as innovative within the conventions of preexist-
ing traditions. Cole Swenson and David St. John, in American Hybrid: A Norton
Anthology of New Poetry (2009), describe experimental poetry as including such
features “as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence,
multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure,” all of which can be
confusing when approached by a reader schooled in more-traditional forms.
By contrast, Swenson and St. John describe more-traditional poetry as that
which demonstrates “coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure,
symbolic resonance, and stable voice.”
These two tendencies appear in the work of two schools, the Lan-
guage poets and the New Formalists or neoformalists. On the forefront of
experimental poetry are poets associated with the school of Language (or,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the name of the magazine published from 1978 to
1982) poetry. Language poets, although a diverse group, tend to downplay
the importance of the individual speaking voice in poetry, believing instead
that language speaks us as much as we speak language, and that language is
fraught with contradictory meanings. Two poets associated with this school
are Michael Palmer and Susan Howe. In contrast, the 1980s brought renewed
interest to formalism in American poetry. Strong Measures (1986), edited by
Philip Dacey and David Jauss, featured structured works by contemporary
American poets; not since the 1960s had a major anthology been devoted to
poetry featuring traditional forms. It was followed by Ecstatic Occasions, Expe-
dient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems