introduction 13ences in dub poetics. As Rich refl ects in ‘Blood, Bread and Poetry’,
‘Women have understood that we needed an art of our own: to
remind us of our history’ (p. 536 ).
MULTIFORMALISMS: FORM AND CONTEMPORARY
POETRY
Charles Olson in his celebrated essay ‘Projective Verse’
( 1950 ) claimed that ‘FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN
EXTENSION OF CONTENT’. Olson argued for an open
poetics, what he famously termed as ‘composition by fi eld’, as a
challenge to predetermined form and composition. Reading recent
poetry, Olson’s essay has a surprising resonance, particularly his
insistence upon musicality and what he termed kinetics (or a form
of poetic energy) as a guiding principle to poetic form. While
contemporary poets might engage with open propositions of form
guided by the liberties of free verse, it would be a mistake to con-
sider contemporary poetry as ‘formless’. The frequent analogies
between poetry and musicality made over the past decades by
poets such as Bernstein, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Baraka and Kate
Fagan suggest that the alliterative, onomatopoeic and material
possibilities of language remain central to contemporary composi-
tion. Although far from the ‘call to order’ through craft, measure
and rhyme exhibited in Conquest’s New Lines, numerous con-
temporary poets fi nd formal constraints as a way of exploration
and paradoxically enabling variation in their writing. An evident
example in this study is Hejinian’s use of numerical rules for her
evolving poetic prose autobiography My Life ( 1980 ). Written at
age thirty-seven, the autobiography included thirty-seven sections
each with thirty-seven sentences. On its republishing at age forty-
fi ve, eight new sections were added and eight sentences added in
each of the existing sections, as Hejinian considered it a generative
and ongoing work. Many of the poets I examine in this book are
engaged in an exploration of the longer poetic work (or sequence),
which depends upon anaphoric structures for development and
structure – poets as diverse as Michael Palmer, Gwyneth Lewis,
John Kinsella, Geoffrey Hill and Juliana Spahr.