Global Poetry and Provincial Poetics

Abstract

AbstractThis review of three books—two works of contemporary literary criticism and one anthology—considers how ideals of multiculturalism and linguistic hybridity have informed recent thinking about poetry and its political ends. Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry in a Global Age is praised for its formal attentiveness and Jen Hedler Phillis’s Poems of the American Empire for its inventive incorporation of Virgil’s Aeneid into its understanding of modern poetry’s vacillation between lyric and epic registers. Meanwhile, the anthology American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, edited by Michael Dowdy and Claudia Rankine, is described as a book well-suited for students interested in various strains of and controversies within contemporary poetics. Several contemporary poets (Cathy Park Hong, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Raquel Salas Rivera, Bhanu Kapil) are discussed as well as some modernist poets, particularly those who, like Ezra Pound, offer examples of a multilingual poetics from earlier in the twentieth century.