This chapter introduces the book’s main objectives and scope. After introducing modernism, the period that preceded the poetry under consideration in this book, this chapter provides an overview of the main features of post-1945 American poetry, explores poetry’s continuing relevance and cultural role in our current moment, and discusses three central, overlapping themes and issues that this book argues are at the center of contemporary poetry: self, language, and culture.

Along with the destinations Bishop traveled to and lived in for a time – Key West, New York, Brazil, Mexico – Paris holds a key place. Her extended periods of time there where she studied the French language, met fellow artists, and immersed herself in the culture, became a wellspring for her poetic development. While it is her earlier poems where she incorporates her experience of Paris most directly, even later work reflects her continuous interest in those French poets whom she most admired. Bishop frequently refers to those writers: Baudelaire, especially, and the symbolists and surrealists who follow him. Bishop did not adhere to any one poetic school; however, her poems and stories reflect her engagement with many traditions, including her reading of modern French poetry and poetics. This chapter traces Bishop’s relationship to Paris and French poetry, biographically and aesthetically, focusing on the city’s impact on her work.

Responses to experimental writing by Irish women poets have tended to be framed in terms of the American tradition. This has served to obscure the distinctiveness of these poets, both as a strand of the Irish tradition and among themselves, in the highly individual bodies of work produced by Susan Howe, Maggie O’Sullivan, and Catherine Walsh. The American-born Howe has been linked to the Language poets, but represents a complex intertwining of personal history and literary exchanges between Ireland and the United States. With its heavy use of parataxis and open-field poetics, Howe’s work opens itself up to wide historical vistas. O’Sullivan’s work, written from England, also stresses open-field forms while showing affinities with the sound poetry of Bob Cobbing and the ‘antiabsorptive’ poetics of Charles Bernstein. Nevertheless, the connection with the Irish tradition is strongly stressed, as is the case also with Catherine Walsh. Walsh’s writing on Dublin is unique in modern Irish writing, notably in its focus on minority and marginalised communities. In the ‘forms of attention’ required by all three writers, Irish women’s poetry remakes itself in unexpected and fascinating ways.

This essay argues that at the center of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetics, is a commitment to Gnosticism, a quest to find alternative ways of knowing. As an analogue to his sense that poetry at its best poses questions rather than seeking facile answers, Komunyakaa’s gnostic poetics is built around the impulse to embrace oppositions in which his poems endorse “critical values such as the virtue of transgression and the unity found in oppositions.” This essay argues that Komunyakaa’s poetics pursue a heuristic posture reminiscent of the emotional interiors revealed in blues music. Komunyakaa’s poems seek to explore the “strange debts we owe to others” along with “the strange debts we owe to ourselves, our imagination.”Looking at his later volumes of poems engage a variety of European landscapes and tropes, the influence of jazz and the blues on the poet’s oeuvre remains consistent. Employing Edward Pavlíc’s reimagining of James Baldwin’s notion of the “dark window” as a critical frame, this essay endeavors to provide a nuanced appraisal of Komunyakaa’s career, situating his poetry at the intersection of gnosis and improvisation.

Locating a pedagogical impulse in the Reconstruction texts of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, James Madison Bell, and Albery Whitman, Stephanie Farrar’s “Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry during Reconstruction” identifies an emergent form of Black poetry pioneered in Reconstruction that has previously gone essentially unrecognized: long narrative verse that thematizes and analyzes the formation of Black citizenship. In laying claim to a form deeply linked with both national identity and whiteness, the chapter suggests that Black writers seized the cultural power of narrative verse to force a reckoning with the ongoing impact of slavery and the new mechanisms of racial hierarchy that replaced it. It draws attention to the form’s multiscalar cultural work as an analysis of, history of, didactic model for, and even enactment of modes of citizenship for Black Americans, and it illustrates the special role of the AME Christian Recorder in promulgating this poetry as an instrument of Black nationalism, attempting to counter attacks on black social and political life during Reconstruction and to theorize the conditions and components of freedom itself.

Jonathan Ellis situates Plath’s work in relation to the American poetry scene of the 1950s and early 1960s. He analyses how a mid-century generation of poets like John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell responded to Modernism through the birth of Confessionalism. Ellis draws on Plath’s letters, journals, poems and stories to analyse her own role in and thinking about this aesthetic turn. He considers the impact of Plath’s contemporaries, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, as well as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, May Swenson and Isabella Gardner. Situating Plath’s poetry in relation to the work of these poetic godfathers and godmothers, Ellis looks in particular at questions of gender and nationality.