20 contemporary poetry
historical excavation by Rita Dove of accounts of mass murder in
the Dominican Republic.
Much critical attention of late has been given to the relationship
between poetry and theories of performance. Chapter 3 initially
considers the proposition of a ‘projective’ poetry – as a perform-
ance both on and off the page – in the work of Amiri Baraka’s
jazz poetic, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s declamatory style and
Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah’s
versions of a ‘dub’ poetic. Paul Durcan and Don Paterson’s poetry
offers the proposition of the poet as performer. Theoretically
the chapter engages with a proposition of ‘performativity’ in
Hejinian’s poetry as well as a phenomenological performance in
Kate Fagan’s work. Closing with Caroline Bergvall, the chapter
examines the defi nition of multimedia work often referred to as
‘performance writing’.
Ideas of space and environment form the basis for the fourth
chapter, which examines how poetry represents the environment.
Propositions of environmental thinking – such as ecocriticism,
ecological writing and ecopoetics – guide in different ways Gary
Snyder, Juliana Spahr and John Kinsella’s poetry. Through an
interrogation of ideas of place, the chapter analyses the poetry of
Robert Hass, Anne Szumigalski and Geoffrey Hill. While place
and environment might initially trigger refl ections upon regional
landscapes, the discussion also provides readings of the cityscape in
the poetry of Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan.
The relationship of the regional to the global is central in Robert
Minhinnick and Lorna Goodison’s poetry, while the disorient-
ing psychogeographical spaces of Iain Sinclair’s work provide an
alternative way of mapping the modern metropolis.
My fi nal chapter ‘Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries’
explores how contemporary poetry addresses the development of
English as a global language. Beginning with the more immediate
use of dialect in Tony Harrison’s poetry, the discussion examines
linguistic hierarchies and regional and national identifi cation, and
how these are confronted in Tom Leonard and Jackie Kay’s poems.
Introducing ideas of an ‘ethnopoetics’, Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo’s
native poetries provide a further perspective on the imperial dis-
semination of English. Bilingualism, translation and interlingual-