Contemporary Poetry

Introduction

I

love reading all those optimistic things that people say

about poetry. Those sweeping statements about poetry

being all about love, or poetry being all about countering the

oblivion of darkness, or poetry being the genre to comfort in

times of trouble. They make me feel good about poetry.

But poetry doesn’t really work that way for me. For me,

poetry is a troubled and troubling genre, full of desire and

anger and support and protest, primarily useful because it

helps me think. Lyn Hejinian’s essays, her explorations of

inquiry, have been really helpful to me on this. My theory is

that poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so open

right now. There are so many rules about how to write poetry,

that there might as well not be any at all.^1

Juliana Spahr’s statement, taken from an anthology American Poets
in the 21 st Century: The New Poetics, gestures towards two seem-
ingly antithetical directions for contemporary poetry. Poetry can
be seen as a salve for troubled times and a medium of comfort.
From another perspective, poetry offers a means for examining
and exploring the world. Spahr suggests that the form of analysis
offered by poetry may even provide discomfort. Her statement val-
orises contemporary poetry’s openness as a genre, yet paradoxically
she suggests that the proliferation of alternative rules liberates our
understanding of what poetry might be.