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5 - Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2021

By
Ann Vickery
Edited by
Timothy Yu
Timothy Yu
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Summary

Twenty-first-century poetry by women demonstrates a multiplicity of perspectives, connection and loss, and continuing revolutions across gender and genre. At the outset of the twenty-first century, “gurlesque” poets such as Arielle Greenberg stress artifice and performance in a heightened, ironic attention to the gendered body on display. While gurlesque focuses on the artifice of gender performance, hip-hop and performance poetries focus on authenticity and forms of truth-telling, engaging the politics of fourth-wave feminism. After 9/11, a sense of precarity would be heightened in the new millennium through manmade crises and natural disasters. A rise in decolonizing poetics has given particular attention to the subjection of the female body of color and modes of resilience. The new millennium is perhaps best characterized by writing that is linguistically innovative and embodied, known variously as post-Language poetics, a new lyricism, or hybrid poetry. Digital technologies brought paradigmatic shifts to the ways in how poetry circulated and who could write it.

Keywords

poetrywomenfeminismAmerican literaturegurlesqueperformancedecolonialhybridlyric
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry , pp. 71 - 89
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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