“A Little Room in a House Set Aflame”

Abstract

Contemporary American poets have developed myriad thematic and formal strategies to register the ethical, economic, and political conditions produced by globalization. This chapter explores the possibilities of a poetry that, because it is situated within a North American position, is highly reactive to the rapidly changing forms that globalization has assumed since the 1970s. Part of the task that American poetry in the twenty-first century takes up is to negotiate clashing scales, navigating between movements, collectives, individuals, regions, and nations. Rankine's American lyric comprises prose anecdotes, song-like poems, film stills and scripts, and reproductions of paintings and sculpture. Rankine and Hayes defamiliarize the lyric and the sonnet by charging them to examine the exclusionary logics of national identification and American citizenship. In the twenty-first century, American poets make it clear that to write poetry is to write within the official discourses used to justify occupation, mass murder, and dispossession in the name of capital accumulation.