Contemporary Poetry

6 contemporary poetry

might also consider Gwyneth Lewis’s refl ections upon the impact
of bilingualism upon her work, or John Kinsella’s considerations
on the intersection of poetry and the environment and the creation
of what he terms a ‘poisoned pastoral’. A central concern motivat-
ing the majority of these poets is their analysis of poetic language
as a method of examination or, as Hejinian notes, poetry as ‘a
language of inquiry’. Hejinian notes that the distinctions between
theory and poetry in her own work are indeed negligible:

Theory asks what practice does and in asking, it sees the con-

nections that practice makes. Poetic language, then, insofar

as it is a language of linkage, is a practice. It is practical. But

poetry insofar as it comments on itself... is also theoretical.^13

My discussion of essays, manifestos and refl ections on poetry
in this volume considers the relationship between poetic theory
and practice to discern how a poetics can be mediated through
composition.

BEFORE THE 1970S: POETIC PRECEDENTS

In their collaborative essay ‘Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto’,
Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover playfully propose that poets need
‘To stop wringing [their] hands over poetry’s lost popularity, that
autocritique more stirring than any Maoist’s. The manifesto is obli-
gated to say There are other countries where poetry still matters!’^14 For
all the whimsy of Spahr and Clover’s positions, they both believe
that contemporary poetry matters, as both a disseminator of ideas
and an enquiry about the world. My division of the fi eld of contem-
porary poetry in this book into fi ve chapters – ( 1 ) subjectivity, ( 2 )
politics, ( 3 ) performance, ( 4 ) place and environment, and ( 5 ) global
Englishes – illustrates the expansiveness of poetry’s responsiveness
to the world around us. While my project begins with the poetry
of the late 1960 s, it will be useful to map out some important prec-
edents to the manifesto essays and groupings which emerge in the
twenty-fi rst century. Romana Huk in discussing the relationship
between Anglo-American poetries notes that there is an American