Contemporary American Poetry, Literary Tradition, and the Multitude

Abstract

It is almost impossible to establish coherent narratives when confronted with the infinitely diverse field of contemporary American poetry. One influential attempt to categorize this field has been to divide contemporary poetry into two schools. Hank Lazer argues that American poetry today falls primarily into two “opposing poetries”: an experimental, avant-garde poetry—most prominently that of the language school—and the poetic mainstream, which he criticizes for its “frequent misidentification of poetry with self-expression” (Opposing Poetries: Issues 1). While for Lazer, experimental, language-oriented poetry constitutes “innovative, and thus truly revolutionary or transgressive, contemporary writing” (Opposing Poetries: Readings 86), Jennifer Ashton claims that “lyric and antilyric poetries alike have remained committed to the liberal (and now neoliberal) value of self-expression” (219), and that, in fact, strikingly absent are truly transgressive forms of poetry that “resist the human capital model (and with it the omnipresence of self-expressivity in the lyric)” (229).1