Research Guide to American Literature

The work of Jorie Graham, on the other hand, focus on an individualis-
tic perspective instead of accessibility. In the title poem of The Dream of the
Unif ied Field: Selected Poems, 1974–1994 (1995), the use of a varied line and
the free association of disparate images—often idiosyncratic—make meaning
more difficult to grasp. That, however, may be precisely the point; the poem
illustrates the mind—the “unified field”—through which all individuals receive
and sort through reality in order to make meaning.
In their American Hybrid Swenson and St. John challenge the categoriza-
tion of poets into mutually exclusive camps. They note the emergence of what
amounts to a new school in American poetry—poets who combine techniques
of the traditional and the experimental, poets who “access a wealth of tools,
each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined
with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.” According to
Swenson and St. John, “Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate
to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry—thereby increasing
the expressive potential of language itself—while also remaining committed
to the emotional spectra of lived experience.” Poets such as Ortiz, Pinsky,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Glück, and Cathy Song have demonstrated the
ability to absorb a variety of influences, moving between formalism and experi-
mentalism, in and out of free verse and traditional forms. Furthermore, the
forms are no longer solely Anglo-European in origin. Lorna Dee Cervantes,
Sandra Cisneros, Alberto Ríos, and Gary Soto incorporate Spanish language
while also echoing its rhythms. Native American oratory and storytelling can
be heard in the work of Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, and Wendy Rose.
Audre Lorde draws from African oral traditions of chant and call, while Nikki
Giovanni, Michael S. Harper, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ishmael Reed, and Natasha
Trethewey infuse their poems with the rhythms of jazz and blues. In The Veiled
Suite: The Collected Poems (2009), the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid
Ali demonstrates a wide variety of poetic forms, including most notably the
ghazal, an ancient Persian form consisting of couplets with a strict rhyme
scheme and requiring that the poet include his own name, as well as references
to love and to wine.
Finally, debates about the nature of poetic quality, or aesthetics, predomi-
nate in discussions of contemporary poetry. The editors of the Norton Anthol-
ogy of Contemporary Poetry note, “Aesthetic criteria are notoriously impossible
to pin down,” before offering an inclusive and useful list of characteristics: “cre-
ative daring, figurative reach, verbal dexterity, formal skill, historical respon-
siveness, social significance, psychological complexity, emotional richness, and
the inventive engagement with, and revision of, literary and extraliterary genres
and discourses.” This description is broad enough to include both traditional
and experimental poetry and takes into account many features of the poetry
that engage (or even emotionally move) individual readers. American poetry in
the contemporary period embraces a diverse group of poets who offer multiple
and varying attributes and contributions. Taken together, their work suggests

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