Aesthetic and Social Community: Multicultural Poetry and the Anthologizing of Poems

Abstract

Scholars from various disciplines have explored the concept of multiculturalism from the perspectives of citizenship, recognition, representation, tokenism, constitutionalism, and other vantage points, with politics and education receiving most of the attention.1 While many efforts have been made to explore these aspects of multiculturalism, its significance in poetry, particularly in poetry's composition and critique, has not been duly taken into account. Multicultural poetry designates a critical abstraction in which poetry is classified by relation to a communal culture, history, or customs. In this definition, multicultural poetry is therefore inclusive of poetry written by ethnic minorities, women, non-mainstream religious practitioners, and members of other communities. To maintain a focus, this article delimits its discussion to poetry's relationship with ethnicity and probes the interplay between aesthetic and ethnicity in three sections–Mainstream Poetry Anthologies: Tastes, Schools, and the Issue of History, Multicultural Poetry Anthologies: Situated Poetry and Group Poetics, and Ethnopoetics as a Choice.