Contemporary Poetry

introduction 19

reminds us that identifying oneself as part of a ‘global feeling’ is not
necessarily at the expense of national identifi cations.^34 He proposes
that ‘forms of global feeling are continuous with forms of national
feeling’, adding that although:

Potential for a confl ict of loyalties is always present, cos-

mopolitanism or internationalism does not take its primary

meaning or desirability from an absolute and intrinsic opposi-

tion to nationalism. Rather it is an extension outward of the

same sorts of potent and dangerous solidarity. (p. 15 )

Opening with ‘Subjectivities’, the fi rst chapter considers the
representation of the personal in the work of recent poets and
how the everyday can become part of a poetic composition. I con-
sider initially a theory of lyric expression in the elegies of Andrew
Motion and Lee Harwood. The representation of women’s biogra-
phy is fundamental to the work of Grace Nichols and Cathy Song,
which develops to an analysis of ‘self-refl exive’ lyricism in the por-
traiture poetry of John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt and Jorie Graham.
Concentrating on the poetry of Michael Palmer and Jennifer
Moxley, the discussion considers what happens to the individual
speaking voice or lyric ‘I’ when the self is displaced from a centre
stage and an experience of language takes its place.
Tackling the tricky proposition of poetry and politics, Chapter
2 investigates poetry’s relationship to commentary on war and ter-
rorism through the poetry of Northern Ireland (Seamus Heaney,
Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon). The chapter also consider the
reports of the Iraq war by Eliot Weinberger and Charles Bernstein,
as well as Choman Hardi’s account of the Iraqi genocide or Anfal
in Kurdistan, and Yusef Komunyakaa’s experience as a Vietnam
veteran. Central to this chapter is a worry about creating poetry
which may read as rhetoric. A section is given to the presidential
inauguration poetry of Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander.
The chapter also considers how politics can be examined through
a certain textuality, a process which could be thought of as no
longer writing ‘about’ politics but ‘with’ them. This proposi-
tion is of particular relevance to my comparative reading of M.
NourbeSe Philip’s account of slave trading, which is compared to