172 contemporary poetry
‘global’ and ‘globalisation’, she suggests that the former indicates
‘an already-existing state of things’, whereas the latter suggests ‘a
process that’s been inaugurated, a condition we’re constructing’
(p. 762 ). The utopian image inscribed at the heart of the propo-
nents of a new global poetics raises key problems for Huk. For her,
terms such as ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘transnational’ retain ‘at least
some traces of writing’s sitedness and specifi c historied movements
over borders’ (p. 770 ). Huk is far more suspicious of terms such as
‘Americas’, ‘world’ and ‘global’ since these poetics correspondingly
‘permit no intra-national, national or discreet group identifi cations
or projects aside from the largest impossible ones’ (p. 770 ). Central
to Huk is what is lost in these larger totalities; she probes ‘What gets
elided in these constructions of negative totality... [i]n other words
what have we got to lose (both in the possessive and imperative
sense of that phrase)? Or perhaps what do we want to lose?’ (p. 770 ).
While this chapter’s focus is not upon the processes of globalisa-
tion per se, or the proposition of a world literature, it is important
to discern how contemporary poetry addresses the development
of English as a global language. Indeed, we may well ask how do
contemporary poets respond to a plurality of Englishes? In the past
it had become axiomatic to consider that processes of globalisa-
tion create a stylistic homogeneity. Jahan Ramazani, paraphrasing
Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests that as a response to globalisa-
tion people are ‘constantly inventing new forms of difference, new
hairstyles, new slang, even from time to time, new religion and
we might add new forms of poetry’.^3 Ramazani’s proposition of a
transnational poetics explores how contemporary poets ‘have also
imaginatively transvalued and creolized these global forces to bring
into expression their specifi c experiences of globalized locality and
localized globality’.^4 Equally, Wai Chee Dimock reminds us that
English-language poetries can no longer be seen as ‘the product of
one nation and one nation alone, analyzable within its confi nes’.^5
In considering Anglophone poetries in tandem with the globalis-
ing tendencies of the post-war period, it is important to acknowl-
edge Sujata Bhatt’s ambivalence about how an ‘oppressor’s tongue’
may eventually shift to grandchildren learning to ‘love that strange
language’.^6 Since English is a global language, we need to con-
sider how one language can refl ect plurality and diversity without