introduction 21ism form key considerations in Gwyneth Lewis, Li-Young Lee
and Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poetry. In closing, Tusiata Avia and
Daljit Nagra’s poetry shows how the poetic text can become a space
for linguistic cross-fertilization and the exploration of idiomatic
texture. Poet-practitioners greeted the emergence of the Internet
with considerable optimism, and my conclusion offers a reading
of the impact of multimedia and web technologies upon poetic
language and form. For poets such as John Cayley, the possibilities
of technology are celebrated as a site for visual and textual experi-
mentation, otherwise known as ‘electronic writing’. Other poets
consider the Internet as tool of poetic composition and chance
operations such as ‘Flarf’ poetry. Evidently the Internet offers a
role in the dissemination of poetic material as well as the awareness
of breaking news material instantly, which proves crucial to the
work of labour activist and poet Mark Nowak. I close on a consid-
eration of what this may mean for the potency of a poetry that aims
towards political activism and communal engagement.
Invariably there are omissions in this project; the fi eld of
Anglophone poetics is a vast one, yet I would hope that the
book grants a cross-section of recent developments, practices and
future concerns. To this end this volume provides a snapshot of
what Schmidt gestures to as: ‘the enabling continuities, the ele-
ments both of specifi c difference and of commonality, the “vulgar
tongue” which individuals refi ne according to their light, but also
according to its own blazing lights’.^35
NOTES
1. Juliana Spahr, American Poets in the 21 st Century, ed. Claudia
Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2007 ), p. 131.
2. Lyn Hejinian, ‘If Written is Writing’, The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and
Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1984 ),
p. 29.
3. Ezra Pound, Make it New: Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1935 ).