Contemporary Poetry

introduction 5

was energized’, since philosophy’s linguistic turn ‘made the scene
of writing itself the source and end and test of the art of critical
thinking’ (p. xi). McGann notes that the most signifi cant poetry
after 1848 ‘has been consciously language oriented as opposed
to content driven’ (p. xi). Central to McGann’s consideration of
more recent and radical contemporary poetries is that they imply
‘a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition on
one hand and the way we might engage a critical practice, on the
other’ (p. xii).
One can consider twentieth-century poetics as a ‘thinking
through’ of ideas and declarations of intention. Essays and mani-
festos by poets from the 1950 s onwards provide a context for
understanding current poetic thinking. This book introduces ideas

• from American poet Charles Olson’s consideration of poetry as
  kinetics or energy in his famous essay ‘Projective Verse’ ( 1950 )
  that is central to understanding ideas of poetic performance, to
  Kamau Brathwaite’s consideration of the development of ‘Nation
  Language’ which provides alternative approaches for considering
  the plurality of Englishes in Caribbean poetry. In addition Charles
  Bernstein’s examination of what he poses as ‘ideolects’ in his pro-
  vocative ‘Poetics of the Americas’ ( 1996 ) creates a mode of poetry
  reliant less on a multiplicity of identities than a plurality of differ-
  ent languages. We might add to these essays, ideas taken from Lyn
  Hejinian’s proposal of an ‘open text’ in her essay ‘The Rejection
  of Closure’ ( 1985 ) where the reader’s participation is key in the
  construction of poetic meaning, or in an alternative and more
  immediate key Mark Nowak’s refl ection upon poetic writing as
  performing a form of activism through a documentary impulse. We
  could also gesture towards Caroline Bergvall’s attempts to articu-
  late what poetic ‘performance writing’ entails and John Cayley’s
  propositions of ‘electronic writing’. Many of the ideas that can be
  said to form a ‘poetics’ are not made as explicit as a manifesto essay;
  these can be remarks made by the poets during an interview or
  refl ections in prose that are not quite as didactic as a programmatic
  description of poetic intent. Here one might include M. NourbeSe
  Philip’s refl ections upon her use of legal archives in her volume
  Zong! ( 2009 ) for examining the slave trade, as well as the volume’s
  glossary to the African languages she incorporates into her text. We