Contemporary Poetry

introduction 3

objects remains uninterrogated.^4 Even a brief snapshot of poetry
anthology titles since the 1950 s indicates the predominance of the
‘really really’ new. Take as examples the following cross- section:
Robert Conquest’s New Lines ( 1956 ), Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry
( 1962 ), Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry ( 1960 ), Michael
Schmidt’s New Poetries ( 1994 ), Michael Hulse, David Kennedy
and David Morley’s The New Poetry ( 1993 ), and Claudia Rankine
and Lisa Sewell’s American Poets in the 21 st Century: The New
Poetics ( 2007 ).^5
A key question is how do we read ‘new’ and can the word ‘con-
temporary’ be substituted for ‘new’? Gertrude Stein reminds us
that the term ‘contemporary’ denotes a complexity of time frames.
As Stein proposes in her early essay ‘Composition as Explanation’
( 1926 ), World War I necessitated that art forms needed to be ‘so
[.. .] completely contemporary and so created the completed rec-
ognition of the contemporary composition’.^6 Stein insisted that as
a result an acknowledgement of the contemporary occurred since
‘Every one but one may say every one became consciously became
aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern composi-
tion.’^7 We might also be warned that perceiving literary forms as a
simple dismantling of what has already preceded can be problem-
atic. American poet Ron Silliman, using an analogy of the athlete,
notes how an emphasis on the zeitgeist can seem to reject a present
perception of writing:

The production of novelty, of art objects that could not have

been predicted, and cannot be accounted for, by previous

critical theory, is the most problematic area in aesthetics.

Like a record in sports made only to be broken, a poetics is

articulated in order to be transcended.^8

Remarking particularly on the evolution of form in American
poetry, Silliman notes that what we are witnessing is a form of
‘acceleration in literary historicity’ where a poet’s aim can often be
seen as a vague commitment to ‘Make it Different, if not New’.^9
With this in mind I will be considering the ‘contemporary’
as poetry written in English produced over the past forty years.
Wherever possible I gesture towards a historical context, especially