This chapter explores some of the new developments, trends, and movements that have characterized contemporary American poetry in the period since 2000, a period in which poetry grapples with a tumultuous, rapidly changing culture and continues to become increasingly diverse. The chapter focuses on three of the most important developments: the collapse of the old binary opposition between mainstream and experimental and the emergence of a new hybrid mode; a new openness to remix, sampling, and the use of found language and documentary materials in poetry associated with movements such as Conceptual poetry and Flarf, which can be seen, in part, as a response to the rise of the digital age and new questions about originality and appropriation it has ushered in; and a resurgence of politically engaged, formally adventurous poetry, especially by poets of color, in the era of Obama and Trump. The chapter focuses on representative poets, including Jorie Graham, Dean Young, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tracy K. Smith, Robin Coste Lewis, Claudia Rankine, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, and Terrance Hayes.

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.

Beginning with the widely discussed poem read by the young poet Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, this brief conclusion addresses the vital role that poetry continues to play in our cultural life, while also suggesting how much the borders of the poetic canon have irrevocably shifted since the beginning of the period this book covers. The chapter concludes this study by reflecting on how American poetry has responded in myriad ways to the cultural changes and historical events that have punctuated American life since 1945, while undergoing dramatic evolution and change in terms of its form, style, and content.

This chapter argues that Marxist-feminist methods informed by new readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s can provide capacious and flexible critical tools for feminist analysis. Drawing in particular on the concept of real abstraction, I demonstrate an approach to Marxist-feminist literary study that avoids structuralist and economistic understandings of cultural production, as well as the simplistic notions of false consciousness and ideology critique that inflect much twentieth-century Marxist literary criticism. Rather, Marx’s critique of value as a social form that operates “behind our backs,” as a set of impersonal compulsions that push forward independent of thought, can help us to better understand the dialectics of aesthetic experience – exemplified here in my reading of feminized poetry – as an important mode of sense-perception attuned to (or even able to “theorize”) the dynamic and contradictory reproduction of gender and its mediation by capital.

This article examines the fraught relationship between loss and poetic creation in Catullus 101 and in Anne Carson’s Nox. I argue that Catullus 101 performs a process of mourning through substitution, turning from absent brother to present poem. This process risks becoming an abandonment of his brother, and significant contradictions linger in the poem between the demands of mourning and of learned poetry. I then show how Anne Carson takes up these tensions in Nox while exploring philology and mourning as two related responses to loss. I argue that Carson practices an obsessive philology in Nox, whose unending project offers a model for an ongoing intimacy with her own lost brother. I conclude by returning to Catullus and demonstrating that in his poem, too, forms of literary erudition and intertextuality offer the mourner the possibility of significant and ongoing relationships across a gulf of absence.

W. H. Auden made it clear in his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ and various prose writings on Byron that what counted for him was the poet’s ‘voice’: ‘I like your muse because she’s gay and witty / […] / I like her voice that does not make me jump’.1 ‘Voice’ was no small matter for Auden, since as he famously declared in ‘September 1, 1939’ it was all he had ‘[t]o undo the folded lie’.2 Addressing Byron in the form of a verse-letter allowed him to find a new voice for himself. Within the context of Letters from Iceland, the format permitted him to talk on public matters while adopting the tone of a private communication; and, in addition, it allowed him to develop a broader conception of poetry’s scope, by finding in it a place for the non-earnest – something, as he saw it, that had been lost along the way in the development of poetry since Byron’s time. It gave a new direction to his own writing, preparing the way for the longer poems of the second half of his career.

While the etymology of apocalypse is closely associated with that of revelation (both signify unveiling or revealing), the latter term also evokes the complete opposite—a reveiling or recovering. And if we look closely at how apocalypse figures in recent literature and literary theory that concerns itself with our imagination of cataclysm—particularly ecological and financial—we find an apocalypticism that understands both crisis and our path to averting it as a matter of embracing ignorance and unknowability over knowledge or knowability. In a host of recent works of poetry that have sought to imagine a horizon of political and environmental change, the horizon is frequently all we are permitted to imagine because what lies at or beyond it is supposedly inaccessible to human understanding. This tendency, which is consonant with some recent developments flying under the broad banner of the New Materialism, deserves a new name: the agnotological turn. This chapter focuses on two recent works of American poetry that push in important ways against that turn: Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse (2013) and Jane Gregory’s Yeah No (2018)

This chapter argues that contemporary Irish-language writing demands a critical response that recognizes its increasingly transnational or global thematic range. The endangered status of the language, far from demoralizing writers, seems to provide them motivation to transcend limiting sociolinguistic realities. The minority subject position becomes a lens for engagement with global issues, as witnessed in a large and diverse body of poetry related to contemporary wars and international conflicts and in a body of fictional writing that engages with transnational history and cultural critique. Contemporary Irish-language writers collectively display an acute awareness of Irish participation or collusion in oppressive imperial or colonial projects. A selection of examples is cited to demonstrate how the resources of the Irish linguistic and literary tradition have been brought to bear on contemporary and historical events and predicaments. In giving voice to global concerns, the Irish language ironically becomes a potent medium with which to question the primacy of national ethnic identification.