Exponential growth can be a head-scratcher. Accounts and taxonomies that seem inviting near the start of a growth curve can seem like fool’s errands afterwards. And the story of queer—or gay and lesbian, or queer and trans, or LGBTQ+, or LGBTQIA+– poetics since the late 1960s is a story of exponents, of proliferation from stigmatized rarity to celebrated (but still endangered) ubiquity. Does Randall Mann share linguistic goals with Pat Parker? Chen Chen with Samuel Ace? Reginald Shepherd with Carmen Giménez Smith? A sampling offered by me (a white, prosperous, midcareer, polyamorous, Northeastern trans woman with kids) may be more likely to include poets who share my identities, as well as my tastes, and to overlook those who do not. But there is—at least in the arts—no view from nowhere: one informed view is better than none.

This chapter discusses how contemporary poets are influenced and inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, which unleashed a broad surge of poetry by women who began to write openly about their lives and to use their work to directly critique sexism and patriarchy. The chapter examines debates and tensions within women’s poetry of the period, including fraught questions about how poetry might best address female experience, gender roles, race and intersectionality, the relation between poetry and politics, and the tension between more mainstream lyric approaches and more avant-garde experimental feminist poetry. The chapter focuses on a range of representative poets, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, and Kathleen Fraser.

This chapter considers Elizabeth Bishop’s published and republished uncollected work focusing on her figuration of racial difference in both South and North America. It will engage with existing scholarship on Bishop’s Brazil poetry, as well as her problematic 1965 New York Times Magazine article on Rio’s 400th Carnival. Bishop’s poems engaging with racialised figures (“Manuelzinho,” “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” “Cootchie,” “Songs for a Colored Singer”) will be read against her engagement with and definition of a particular kind of whiteness, often in contrast to the primitive, exotic or native, as observed “In the Waiting Room.” This chapter ultimately maps Bishop’s cartography of racial otherness as a way of exploring the interiority (and integrity) of the self.