Contemporary American Poetry Research Articles

Sites and Sociability in Contemporary American Poetry

Sites and Sociability in Contemporary American Poetry Rebecca Couch Steffy (bio) Anne Dewey and Libbie Rifkin, eds., Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013. x + 270 pp. $42.00. Lytle Shaw, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. xiv + 379 pp. $39.95. Over the past twenty-five years, many scholars in contemporary American poetry studies have turned their attention to the social matrix that contextualizes the production of poetry. In 1989 alone, three crucial studies appeared. Michael Davidson’s The San Francisco Renaissance argued persuasively for the way in which lifestyle and literary values converged in a certain place and time to create a sense of community around poetry that presented an alternative to mainstream Cold War–era consensus. Walter B. Kalaidjian, in Languages of Liberation, explored the power of poetry to critique dominant culture and to challenge the conventional wisdom of literary criticism. He examined a wide range of midcentury poets, from James Wright and W. S. Merwin to Adrienne Rich and Gwendolyn Brooks, in order to reveal poetry’s “social text”—“not merely [its] inscription of historical events, but equally important, its social transactions with various interpretive communities, conglomerate and small press markets, the academy, and other spheres of cultural production” (xii). Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery set a precedent for rediscovering modernism’s diversity, especially in underrecognized [End Page 402] political poetry and its publics.1 These books arguably laid the groundwork for what could be called U.S. poetry criticism’s “cultural turn.” This ongoing shift seeks to complicate the diachronic relationship of the aesthetic object to a canonized tradition by understanding the impacts of synchronic ties: the geographical site, localized scene, network, or diaspora in which it comes to life; institutional sites that promote or exclude it; and sites of production and preservation such as archives, workshops, and small-press publishing outfits that enable critical and recuperative forms of cultural memory. Important studies by Christopher Beach, Cheryl Clarke, Maria Damon, Andrew Epstein, Alan Golding, Timothy Gray, Daniel Kane, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Bob Perelman, Ann Vickery, Timothy Yu, and others, including the authors under review here, have further developed this trajectory. Two new texts, Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics and Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, an anthology of essays edited by Anne Dewey and Libbie Rifkin, confirm the staying power of this scholarly direction and offer new insight into the terms of its debate. Richly documented and ambitiously conceptualized, Lytle Shaw’s Fieldworks offers an illuminating narrative of how experimental poets and artists used site-specificity in the postwar period to reconsider the practices of contextualization and authorization that organize forms of knowledge. For Shaw, site-specificity as an artistic mode is perhaps best understood as a double move that intertwines material practice linked to place with discursive claims to disciplinary fields and their conventional genres. A robust literary history of the poetics of place, from William Carlos Williams to Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, and Amiri Baraka, Fieldworks is also a fascinating art-historical account of site-specificity since minimalism, focusing prominently on Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. Drawing on these and younger artists, including Mark Dion, Renée Green, the Flarf poetry collective, Robert Fitterman, and Lisa Robertson, Shaw demonstrates that claims to site-specificity, whether in [End Page 403] poetry, sculpture, or installation, always rely on mediating rhetorical frames in which writers and artists incorporate, deform, and recode disciplinary methods and conventional genres of writing from neighboring fields and discourses, including historiography and ethnography (4) as well as natural history, archaeology, nationalism, and urbanism (10). Because site-specific strategies draw our attention to context as a “site of intervention” and are the result of “choices about which kinds of discourse to engage and . . . how these might be processed or resituated” (263), they also serve as a provocation to challenge, from the ground up, “the normative rulers by which the world is measured” as Shaw suggestively writes (261). Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize in American Literature from the University of Alabama Press, Fieldworks is a major achievement and...

Andrew Bennett, "Romantic genius and contemporary American poetry"

Andrew Bennett, "Romantic genius and contemporary American poetry"

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal

This essay tracks the reception of the story of the Bengali wolf girls, Amala and Kamala, in the American popular media of the 1940s. I argue that the terms of that decade’s debates are taken on some sixty years later when Bhanu Kapil, an Asian American poet, revisits the wolf girls’ story in her third book, Humanimal [a project for future children] . For commentators in the 1940s, animality is the ground condition for bodily health and normality, but it must also be transcended in order to achieve the normative future. Their analyses of the wolf girl Kamala’s failure to transcend her animality demonstrate the American scientists’ conflation of animality, coloniality, and disability. This same failure, however, makes Kamala valuable to contemporary American poetry’s representation of the nonsubject. Kapil’s poetic form counters the triumphant developmental narrative that American scientists hoped to impose on the wolf girl’s story. Instead, Kapil’s deliberately retrogressive text uses Kamala’s animality to make links between different experiences of animalization across colonial and postcolonial time. Rather than restore the wolf girls to lyric subjectivity and normative selfhood, Kapil inscribes a different relation among language, ethics, and species, creating a poetic form that corresponds to their non- or not-just-human being.

A Survey of Contemporary African American Poetry, Drama, & Fiction

Analysis of literature indicates that varying viewpoints about different elements which define contemporary African American Literature has been identified. Majority of the scholarly works on African American writing are built on foundation of culture, political oppression and the need to express their true needs. This paper explores the current trends in contemporary African American Literature by examining tenets in poetry, fiction and drama. Through the ages African American poetry, novels and drama can be considered to a chronicle documenting the struggles of a race which has been debated, debased and their humanity violated to the fight against oppression, social and political empowerment. From the views of this paper it can be concluded that the African American writing is not simply a reflection of the chain of events that took place but was a factor in change. Most of the writers and the works which have been highlighted in this essay have shown one primary theme: the use of literature as the means to voice their anger about social and economic repression. Keywords: s

Space and Pattern in Linear and Postlinear Poetry

This article derives from two interdisciplinary research projects funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, involving the application of psychological experimental techniques to the study of poetic form and reader response. It discusses the semantic and expressive effects of space and pattern in innovative forms of contemporary British and American poetry. After referring to some historical and theoretical contexts for these issues, the article analyses the results of experiments using eye-tracking, manipulations of text, memory tests and readers' recorded responses and interpretations. The first group of poems studied were lineated, with extended spaces within lines and displacement of lines from the left margin. Referring to a poem from Geoffrey Hill's Canaan (1996), the authors show that such use of space may serve to articulate syntactical structures, but may also promote richer interpretation by encouraging cross-linear semantic connections. The second technique studied was the break from linear into postlinear poetry, as an initially lineated sequence shifts to pages of dispersed text. In readings of Susan Howe's Pythagorean Silence (from The Europe of Trusts, 1990), the authors detected more radical effects of space, shape and pattern, with associated consequences for interpretative strategies and aesthetic responses. Finally, the article discusses the potential for both mutual support and heuristic challenge between an empirical study of reader response, and a historical-theoretical approach as exemplified by Jerome McGann's interpretation of Pythagorean Silence.

Disaster Poetics: Keats and Contemporary American Poetry

Following the spate of devastating tornadoes that struck the United States in spring, 2011, the American poet, Mark Levine--also the author of F5 (2008), book of journalistic non-fiction about the massive tornado outbreak of 1974--wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com that begins by quoting Keats. If the destruction visited by the tornadoes seems a freakish demonstration of nature's power, Levine comments, might be more extraordinary [...] is capacity to pretend that disaster--and the sudden upending of ordinary life that it brings forth--is not part of very fabric, what might have called 'A partner in your sorrow's mysteries.' (The quotation redirects the import of Keats's line from the Ode on Melancholy, since in the context of the poem the line insists, by contrast, on the value of not taking any artificial partner in sorrow's mysteries: Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be / Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl / A partner in your sorrow's mysteries, writes, before turning in the next stanza to compare melancholy fit to sudden weather [1. 6-8; 11]). What caught my attention here was not so much the general point Levine makes--though its capaciousness is least want to recognize about lives, vulnerability to disaster might be the most basic thing share--as the recruitment of poet as disaster's lyric signature. Keats functions in this instance as shorthand both for collective vulnerability to disaster and for consolatory form of melancholic feeling won from the proximity of disaster. When I came across Levine's piece, I had already been thinking about the way and disaster are linked in his difficult, compelling poem John placed close to the heart of his collection Enola Gay (2000). Like the collection as whole, the poem depicts (as Ashbery puts it in the jacket blurb) a post-cataclysmic, pre-apocalyptic world, where life hangs on haphazardly in the wake of some unspecified catastrophe but without--yet--either total annihilation or the surprise of something totally unexpected. This in-between time recalls Keats's description of his own posthumous existence, or the temporality of the Titans' grief in Hyperion (think of Thea's listening fear [...] as if calamity had but begun [I. 37-8]), or the knight at arm's sojourning on his cold hill's side in La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1. 44). The poem opens with logically challenging (or logically challenged) dexis, like the start of story (so there were) and like puzzling return (weren't already here?), that sets the tone for the disorienting narration that follows: Here were. Here here were. Graphite and plaster and cardboard and canvas. A dozen human fingers of yellow rays. Mere fully exposed here fully protected. [...] The newly-dead were not lazier than we. (48) In the possibly post-nuclear, apparently war-ravaged scenario of agonized indolence the poem describes (despite the insistence of here, the poem never really explains where we were), our ideal vase / was still with us, still friend to man, to whom it is reciting, sadly or hilariously, treatment methods / were eager to share (48-9). (1) In poem that is part homage, part elegy, part ironic riff, Levine uses the figure of as the pivot between lyric and its present conditions of existence, its history, and what seems the compromised possibility of its future. The figure of plays special, even peculiar, role in the imaginary of contemporary American poetry in ways whose effects insist symptomatically across the range of poetry, sometimes in emphatic fashion, as in Levine's uses of Keats, and sometimes obliquely. The discussions in several excellent studies, including Jeffrey Robinson's Reception and Poetics in (1998), Michael O'Neill's The Alt-Sustaining Air (2007), and James Najarian's Victorian (2002), indicate the richness of the field. …

In time: poets, poems, and the rest

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to A to a Workshop, in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book's innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, Letter to a German Friend, which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams' essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.

Labor and the Lyric: The Politics of Self-Expression in Contemporary American Poetry

This project is about the persistence of lyric in the last half century, a persistence that I have come to think of as striking for several reasons: first, because it has taken place despite periodic and important attacks on the lyric; second, because as it has increasingly come to seem to me, those attacks have themselves functioned as part of the apparatus that keeps lyric going; and third (the last thing I came to realize but probably the most obvious), because what's at stake in lyric's persistence is something like the political economy of the poem in our time. And I should also say—to give some content, even if only anecdotal, to the juxtaposition of grand abstractions like “political economy” and “function of poetry in our time”—that this project has been conceived and is being written in a time when the conditions under which academic work is performed are being radically transformed. By which I mean that, at institutions like my own (the University of Illinois at Chicago), professors in the humanities are asked to perform increasingly like a cross between business managers and clerks rather than literary critics and historians. And it has increasingly seemed important to me that the conditions under which many of us now write should also be a part of what we write about.

What Theory Can Learn from New Directions in Contemporary American Poetry

This essay develops three arguments. First, it elaborates how some contemporary poets who began working in experimental traditions are turning against the idea that the poem is primarily an aesthetic object emphasizing the material qualities of the medium. Instead, they seek to elaborate notions of rhetoric based on ideas of witnessing rather than on ideals of persuasion. Second, it supports that shift by proposing critiques of those modernist ideals based on the rejection of rhetoric. Finally, it turns to speech act theory as its ground for this new rhetoric. But it proposes replacing the hopelessly overdetermined concept of the “performative” by exploring three properties of the demonstrative—its capacity to invoke ethos, to express care and emotion, and to display paths to knowledge despite the fact that discursive explanation is not readily available. The poem demonstrates the usefulness of the demonstrative by a reading of Williams’ “Spring and All.”

The Oxford handbook of modern and contemporary American poetry

The Oxford handbook of modern and contemporary American poetry

The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry Marianne Kunkel (bio) Rita Dove , ed. The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Penguin. A poetry anthology's table of contents is inevitably a "who's who" list talked about by serious poets and writers. But in the eyes of this audience, especially in those of its self-invested guardians of poetry, an anthology often is disappointing because of whom it leaves out or includes. An extreme example of this sense of intense disappointment is demonstrated in Helen Vendler's November 2011 review of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove, in which she slammed the book's "multicultural inclusiveness" that underrepresents canonical greats like Wallace Stevens and James Merrill. Who can forget Dove's equally biting response? However, anthologies play more significant roles than simply constituting a "Hall of Fame" of literary achievement. This poetry anthology may one day be a historical artifact, a record not only of great twentieth-century American poetry but also of the literary climate of the early twenty-first century. And in this time of economic recession when government [End Page 166] programs are cutting costs, we cannot overlook the prevalence of anthologies in schools. Poetry anthologies promise high school and university students an affordable and thorough introduction to poetry. It was while reading The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), edited by J. D. McClatchy, in a college poetry course that I discovered the works of William Matthews, Kay Ryan, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Most students cracking open a poetry anthology for the first time recognize the names of only a few very popular poets—Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes. Students flipping through this anthology's table of contents, biographical notes, and almost four hundred poems will, teachers hope, be drawn in. What details might wow them to the point that they like poetry and want to write it? To which poets' lives and works will they most relate? Any poetry anthology can showcase exceptional poems from a particular place and time; an additional strength of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry is its commitment to telling powerful, encouraging stories about demographic trends in twentieth-century American poetry. Comprising the works of a whopping 175 poets, this chronologically ordered anthology opens with selections from Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology. Six male poets in, Amy Lowell's work appears. It is easy to count more than sixty female poets: oft-anthologized Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Sharon Olds, and less common picks like Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (famously married to poet Paul Laurence Dunbar), Roberta Hill Whiteman, Reetika Vazirani, and the hilarious Barbara Hamby. These surprise picks add welcome variety to what could be a thin and predictable female lineup. Dunbar-Nelson's "I Sit and Sew" expresses a unique combination of respect and resentment toward women's traditional wartime tasks, and Hamby's irreverent "Hatred" pines for apocalyptic ruin during the "last vestiges of the tawdry twentieth century." Ten percent more women are represented in this anthology than in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, and 5 percent more than in McGraw-Hill's Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2003), edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. Plus, this anthology's refreshingly brief biographical notes help explain the increase in the number of American female poets by describing the few early- to mid-century women featured—Amy Lowell, Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop—as "independently wealthy," a label that disappears from the biographies of many women who published between 1970 and 1999. Men's opportunities to publish have improved as well, as evident in the education details of the biographical notes; although T. S. Eliot's and Wallace Steven's Ivy League diplomas were typical for male poets of their generation, Philip Levine's state school education and Etheridge Knight's self-education while in prison prove that poetry is less and less a means of expression for only the wealthy. At first glance, not only female students but also students of color will be impressed. This anthology addresses race both in the content of...

Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.d., Loy, and Toomer

Book Review| March 01 2012 Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.d., Loy, and Toomer Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.D., Loy, and Toomer. By Vetter, Lara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. xi, 219 pp. $80.00.On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry. By Finkelstein, Norman. Iowa City: Iowa Univ. Press. 2010. xii, 277 pp. $39.95. Maeera Y. Shreiber Maeera Y. Shreiber Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2012) 84 (1): 203–205. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1541049 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Maeera Y. Shreiber; Modernist Writings and Religio-Scientific Discourse: H.d., Loy, and Toomer. American Literature 1 March 2012; 84 (1): 203–205. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1541049 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

"That One Was the Oddest One": Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry

"That One Was the Oddest One": Weirdness in Contemporary American Poetry

"Sing to Me Now": Contemporary American Poetry and Song

"Sing to Me Now":Contemporary American Poetry and Song Jahan Ramazani (bio) The old question of the relation of poetry to song may seem an unlikely framework within which to explore new American poems, published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The primal unity between song and lyric poetry (the Greek lyrikos meaning "singing to the lyre") is often said to have been fractured long ago by written texts and then exploded by print culture. In Giorgio Agamben's history of European lyric, "the poetic text's definitive break with song (that is, with the element Dante called melos)" came about around the twelfth century, when a poem became "essentially graphic" (32, 33). James William Johnson dates this "crucial metamorphosis" later, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when "the poet ceased to 'compose' his or her poem for musical presentation but instead 'wrote' it for a collection of readers"; now suited "to a visual as well as an auditory medium," the lyric "found itself bereft of the very element which had been the foundation of its lyricism—music" (714). Whether the "story of the separation between song and speech" is set in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or another period, it is haunted by the possibility of a split even at the point of origin, according to Jacques Derrida: "Degeneration as separation, severing of voice and song, has always already begun" (199). Despite efforts by Ezra Pound and other modernists to heal this primordial breach, recuperating a poetics in which "the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together" and poets "compose verse to some sort of a tune" (Literary Essays 91; Selected Prose 37), the gap [End Page 716] between poetry and song, understood as verse set to music, arguably yawned wider in modernism and its aftermath. Contemporary American poetry's largely free-verse techniques have relegated most song forms to the margins, while most songs have clung to regular forms. But to dismiss song as having no critical purchase on contemporary poetry leaves a host of questions unaddressed. If poetry and song have irrevocably parted ways, why do many contemporary poems—both "experimental" and "mainstream"—call themselves "songs" in their titles and texts? How do we explain contemporary poems' abundant quotations of song lyrics from rock, pop, blues, rap, jazz, opera, folk, and other music? How do we understand the survival of at least some song structures in contemporary poems? What is the influence on poetry of the rise of technologies for the mass distribution and circulation of recorded song in digital form? Though we might think of the intergeneric and intermedial crossing between poetry and song as more relevant to medieval carols, Renaissance madrigals, and Romantic ballads, we learn something about contemporary poetry by teasing out its self-understanding in relation to song, both its interfusions with song and its implicit self-definitions by contrast with it. Among contemporary writers whose work exemplifies poetry's fruitful and fraught intersections with song in the 2000s are American poets seldom thought of as having much in common with one another, including Rae Armantrout, Michael Palmer, Tracie Morris, Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, Kevin Young, Patricia Smith, Terrance Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, and Paul Muldoon (explored after a glance back at James Merrill, as well as a brief look at Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, C. K. Williams, Alberto Ríos, D. A. Powell, and others).1 [End Page 717] The frequent use of "song" in the titles of contemporary poems, where it often means something like "poem suggestive of the sound, spontaneity, and simplicity of song," never entirely eclipses the figurative leap from one kind to another. Like his early poem entitled "Song" in Field Guide (1973), Robert Hass's "Three Dawn Songs in Summer" in Time and Materials (2007), though lacking the formal properties typical of song, elicits song's associations with emotion, brevity, and impulse. In the second of the "dawn songs," summer light is described as "very young and wholly unsupervised. / No one has made it sit down to breakfast. / It's the first one up, the first one out"—a personification that partly justifies the title by linking the light's delightful...

On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (review)

On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry (review)

On Mount Vision: forms of the sacred in contemporary American poetry

On Mount Vision: forms of the sacred in contemporary American poetry

The Plain Style in Southern Poetry

In one of essays, W.H. Auden reminds that it Keats's urn and not Keats himself who says 'Beauty Truth, truth beauty' (Ode 210). Then, in next paragraph, Auden gainsays that pronouncement: Art, says, arises out of our desire for and truth [italics mine] and our knowledge that they are not identical (377). He goes on to establish a dichotomy between truth and in poetry, characterizing tension between two as a rivalry between Ariel and Prospero, with Ariel, The Tempest's airy spirit, whose glory and limitation that has no passions, representing beauty, and shrewd and pragmatic Prospero representing truth. Although, says Auden, good poems involve some degree of collaboration between Ariel and Prospero ... it usually possible to say of a poem and, sometimes, of whole output of a poet, that it Ariel-dominated or Prospero-dominated (338). In fact, it seems possible to make such a claim about an entire group or school of poetry--for instance, contemporary southern poets writing in plain style. No doubt poets I have in mind--Dave Smith, Andrew Hudgins, Rodney Jones, Robert Morgan, Betty Adcock, Donald Justice, and others--do not see themselves as part of a school, and it may be that they do not arrive at plain style in same way. But in writing primarily Helen Vendler refers to as first-order poems, those with a first-person, narrative base (75), and doing so in such a way as to clearly privilege Prospero- or truth-dominated mode over an Ariel-dominated one--that to say, by speaking plain--these poets assert primacy of truth and plainness over in context of contemporary art, culture, and writing in American South. Some are more adamant in their assertion of importance of truth over than others. Dave Smith more adamant than most. The first section of 1985 collection of essays, Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry, constitutes a sort of manifesto arguing, in effect, for importance of truth in poetry. He reiterates this idea in a number of ways, in discussion, for instance, of poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, who, Smith says, what might be called a pure and whose work describes as extremely lyrical and melodious. The pure poet an escapist, Smith tells us, all expression. Regarding Tagore's love poems, Smith remarks that he seems more in love with idea of love than with any person. He concedes that Tagore's poems are in fact beautiful, but in suggesting the of a young girl's ankle bracelets... one never quite feels it a whole, mature vision. One misses entirely girl's dirty feet, barnyard smell, even dailiness of village life. Because of Tagore does not incorporate in poem, Smith concludes, his pure music finally dismissible.... Tagore's eloquent simplicity and transparent feeling ... do not sustain us (14). Smith sums up feelings by saying that consequences of purity are limited expression, limited knowledge, limited audience, and mere beauty (14--15). Of course, nowhere does Smith argue against need for in poetry, and in fact we find in reviews of volumes such as David Huddle's Paper Boy a dismissal of that poetry which attempts to be truth and no beauty, or at least completely fails in its attempts to produce in its search for truth. Smith says Huddle's compositions... are poems primarily because they have similes and are lined. We are drawn through them not by poetry's compelling sound but by fiction's suspense. The language too inert to engender either transcendence or transformation of factual and local detail. Smith concludes by saying that Huddle is rarely a bad writer, but as a poet has no ear and mediocre. His poems are, I would say, semitough prose anecdotes (41). And Smith saying here except that poetry demands not only truth but as well--that, in fact, it not poetry unless it has latter component? …

Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder

Contemporary American poets do not care for Victorian poetry. For evidence of this assertion we might look at the November/December 2007 issue of The American Poetry Review: What trace of the Victorian, if any, do we see? Paul Muldoon, an Irish transplant, vouchsafes an interview about Byron (Romantic, not Victorian, but nineteenth-century at least.) (1) A poem by Stefi Weisburd titled Descent of Man would have been impossible without Lyell and Darwin (not poetry, but Victorian); it mentions neither those Victorian scientists nor the pregnant contemporary phrase intelligent design, but their influence is obvious: Vestigial footprints, of human, of beast/score the earth like musical notes, / and what a beautiful score it is, only / the believers are too hoarse to sing. (2) Half of almost every page is blocked off for advertisements for new collections, editions, works of criticism, and creative writing programs, and these include a notice for a Bilingual 50th Anniversary Edition of C. F. Macintyre's Symbolist Poetry and an epigraph by Flaubert gracing the advertisement for the James A. Michener Center for Writers MFA in Writing (France, not Britain). The many prizes are named after modernists: the 2007 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize, The Robinson Jeffers Tor House 2008 Prize for Poetry, the W. B. Yeats Society of New York Poetry Prize, the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Ira Sadoff's History Matters: A Minority Report mentions James Wright, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Emily Dickinson. Reginald Gibbons's essay On Apophatic Poetics mentions Catullus, Aquinas, Horace, Shakespeare, Marvell, Donne, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Andrei Voznesensky, and Emily Dickinson--the last apparently a blow for the nineteenth century, but American. Yet Victorian Aestheticism has left accidental, unremarked, but decided traces on the landscape of contemporary American poetry in the French forms, especially the villanelle, which Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Reading and Writing Metrical Verse defines as follows: A poem of nineteen lines, set out in five tercets and a final quatrain. The poem works on only two rhymes; the first line and the third line of the initial stanza are repeated, exactly or almost exactly, throughout the rest of the stanzas, as follows: a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a a,b,a,a. (3) The villanelles and triolets and rondeaux and ballades beloved of the Aesthetes were endangered for most of the twentieth century, but the villanelle in particular is now a common animal in the biome of contemporary American poetry. Its nineteen lines, its five tercets and single quatrain, its two rhymes and two alternating refrains habitually appear in anthologies and little magazines and MFA theses and Collected Works. Although our sample issue of The American Poetry Review does not itself house an example, the catalogs of names that appear in every advertisement of a poetry program or event will inevitably include burnished contemporary American poets who have written villanelles. The full-page advertisement for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference and Bookfair has the wherewithal to print pictures, not just names, of the enticing authors who will be there: excluding the prose writers, the list consists of Sonia Sanchez, James Tate, Yusef Komunyakaa, Louise Gluck, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, and Natasha Trethewey. Mark Strand's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 collection Blizzard of One included the double villanelle Two de Chiricos for Harry Ford, and in 2000 Strand co-edited The Making of a Poem: A Northon Anthology of Poetic Forms, which began with a long entry on the villanelle. Natasha Trethewey also won the Pulitzer for her 2006 Native Guard, which includes the altered villanelle Myth. (4) The other poets attending the 2008 AWP conference might eschew the writing of a villanelle, but they do not ignore it. …

Finkelstein, Norman. On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry. Contemporary North American Poetry Series, eds. Alan Golding et al. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 277. $39.95 cloth.

Finkelstein, Norman. On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry. Contemporary North American Poetry Series, eds. Alan Golding et al. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 277. $39.95 cloth.