This chapter first considers the conceptual complexities involved in any reference to “the poem.” The poem can, for instance, be defined as a particular instantiation of a universal, called “poetry,” or it can be defined in opposition to other kinds of literary genre, linguistic artefact, or linguistic performance, from verse treatise to political slogan. The term “poem” may also be normative as well as descriptive, a marker not only of genre but also of success. Finally, the poem has sometimes been conceived in opposition to conceptual thinking itself, from which perspective the discourse of poems differs radically from the discourse of ideas. Treating examples by W. S. Graham, Ben Jonson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Wallace Stevens, this chapter argues that, given this situation, poems continually strive to overspill their concept, whether by achieving the status of The Poem or of Poetry Itself, by breaking out of the confines of “mere” poetry and becoming part of the fabric of reality, or by changing what “poems” can be and what “poem” can mean.

What does prophetic poetry look like now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and what could it become? The poets of this Afterword – Rob Halpern, Hezy Leskly, Anne Carson, and M. NourbeSe Philip – take up the countertradition of “weak prophecy” in various ways. They turn toward what is weak and ungainly, torn, stuttering, glitchy, and leaky, in order to “untune” (as Halpern calls it) national melodies, to reach into the “stinking, eviscerated innards” (Philip) of the language of oppression, to suggest a new way of organizing what is inside and outside, “another human essence than self” (Carson). Their prophetic untuning does not represent (only) a lack or a loss; it is not merely the expression of the poverty, violence, and suffering of the contemporary moment. By marking this poetry as “prophetic,” we can say that it means, through its very weakness, to use a dialectic gaze to actively redeem the past together with the future.

Dickinson’s inability to tell the story of slavery is contrasted with M. NourbeSe Philip’s lifework Zong!, a book that attempts to listen to the missing, those who have been obliterated from the judicial archive or murdered in the Black Atlantic. Zong! is derived from a set of procedural constraints, using a legal summary of the Gregson vs. Gilbert decision – a case that determined whether slaves thrown overboard could be claimed as insured goods – to produce sequences of dispersed poems, associated texts and performances. Philip compares these procedural constraints to entering the hold, and her acts of linguistic selection and discarding to those of the slave masters. This radical attempt to restage the violences of history and recover the lost are complicated by her contention that the lyric poet must act as a bridge between the individual and the group. This chapter consider how Philip’s practice moves from page-based experiments with formal constraints, through an antagonistic relationship to the colonial lyric, into collective performance. It considers the significance of re-enactment and ritual in Philip’s work to channel the voices of the ancestors and disrupt the silences of the archive.