2 contemporary poetry
The aim of this book is to introduce students to a broad span
of ideas and movements, as well as essays and debates that sur-
round and inform contemporary poetry. By examining a range
of contemporary Anglophone poetry, the book seeks to promote
adaptive reading strategies and to create links between a variety of
poetic forms and genealogies. Interpreting ‘poetics’ as the thought,
strategies and statements ‘behind’ the poetry, this guide aims to
introduce key manifestos as enabling devices for interpreting indi-
vidual texts. In offering a range of different poetries, I show the
differing ambitions of authors for their poetry, and how the work of
contemporary poets interacts with politics, culture and society by
questioning boundaries and often transgressing assumptions. My
discussion considers how poetry comments upon the world and the
status of representation itself, as well as how poetry might develop
in the twenty-fi rst century and the interaction of media with poetic
forms. A central consideration for contemporary Anglophone
poets is how to consider the complexity of asserting differences in
a global culture without resorting to didactic defi nitions. In this
aim, the book considers poetry from the USA, United Kingdom,
Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean, Canada, India and
Kurdistan. My overarching intention is to illustrate how a plural-
ity of approaches to poetic form and linguistic textuality enables
innovative modes of thought. American poet Lyn Hejinian may
well suggest this multiplicity of poetic approaches when she states
‘where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas
for vocabularies’.^2
‘NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST’ POETRY
It often seems that Ezra Pound’s rallying cry ‘make it new’ is still
very much in circulation and with it the dangers of fetishising the
next new paradigm for writing.^3 From a modernist perspective, one
can read Pound’s calling as the need for literary endeavour to fi nd
new forms in which to address the material of the modern. New
ways of representation may defamiliarise the everyday, or break
down what the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky referred to as
the automation of perception in which the ordinariness of everyday