18 contemporary poetry
regional languages of the global South. Even so, one way to
complicate an imperial ‘Anglophony’ from within criticism
of English-language poetry is to explore the multiplicity of
Englishes in which poetry is written, some of which, such as
the Jamaican Creole of Claude McKay, Louise Bennett and
Linton Kwesi Johnson, was once seen as unworthy of poetry.
Another is to widen the geographic scope of Anglophone
poetry studies so that poems from the United States, Britain
and Ireland are read alongside poetries from English-speaking
dominions, territories and ex-colonies. (p. 19 )Ramazani’s study moves the contemporary critic away from tightly
defi ned and contained defi nitions of national literatures and pro-
motes instead the adaptation of English across countries and
cultures. This book in turn attempts to illustrate how the dis-
semination of English has produced an expansive practice of
Anglophone poetries. A decision was made early in the project to
divide the range of poetries thematically, as opposed to discrete
national identifi cations. To this aim, the Edinburgh Critical Guide to
Contemporary Poetry seeks to enact conversations between poetries
which would not customarily be read in tandem, and to dismantle
too often rigid dichotomies between so-called ‘mainstream’ and
‘experimental’ poetries.
While I do not hold completely with Ramazani’s opening posi-
tion in his Transnational Poetries that ‘Poetry is more often seen
as local, regional or stubbornly national’ (p. 3 ), I do fi nd myself
receptive to his description of cross-fertilisation between different
poetries as creating an energising force fi eld:
Because poetic compression demands that discrepant idioms
and soundscapes, tropes and subgenres be forces together
with intensity, poetry – pressured and fractured by this
convergence – allows us to examine at close hand how global
modernity’s cross-cultural vectors sometimes fuse, some-
times vertiginously counterpoint one another. (p. 4 )Yet I am far from suggesting that contemporary poets have taken
one global aesthetic path into pluralism. Bruce Robbins pertinently