Innovative Poetry Research Articles

New, Newer, and Newest American Poetries

KOALA To survive you have to be willing to do anything. Anthologies! That's where the money really is, or might be. At least so I imagine from my fuzzy animal distance. Reprint the material! Dominate the gene pool! Rise like Godzilla and make them read you for fucking ever! - Bob Perelman, Manchurian Candidate: a remake The we're told, is, at least in theory, dead. Meanwhile, the poetic is commonly argued to have become so diverse and democratically inclusive as to be unlocatable, unrecognizable as a mainstream. This same historical moment, however, with its purported all-inclusiveness that would render the notion of an meaningless, has brought the publication of five self-consciously anthologies of American poetry within a few years of each other: Eliot Weinberger's American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993); Douglas Messerli's From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960-1990; Paul Hoover's Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick's The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets (all 1994); and Leonard Schwartz, Joseph Donahue and Edward Foster's Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1996).(1) What especially interests me in our current situation, and in these texts specifically, is the apparent re-emergence of a version of the late-1950s and early-1960s anthology wars, as anthology editors are once again unapologetically using terms like avant-garde, center, mainstream, and so on. Does this return of anthology wars rhetoric represent merely the flogging of a dead socio-aesthetic horse? Jed Rasula, for one, argues that it does. He finds Weinberger and J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Vintage, 1990), for instance, waging a massively retrospective - a combat centered on nostalgic invocations of the 1960 anthology wars, with the editors cavorting about in period dress like history buffs reenacting the battle of Gettysburg (1996, 449).(2) Rasula has a point here; it's no longer 1960. But if this debate is so outdated, why has its rhetoric returned to anthologies of innovative poetry in the mid-1990s? What function does that rhetoric serve now? Aside from maintaining a good deal of historically descriptive power, it is being used by contemporary editors to further the development or construction of a New American Poetry tradition derived from Donald Allen's influential 1960 anthology of that name - a text that these editors both explicitly and implicitly invoke. In turn, connection to The New American Poetry becomes a way for editors to situate historically and even help authorize contemporary writing. The construction of this New American tradition via recent anthologies - especially in the rhetoric or self-presentation of these texts, rather than their structure, contents, and so forth - is my subject in this essay.(3) Rasula is fight to point out the limitations of what I would call the center-margin model that shapes both my chosen anthologies, in their different ways, and to some extent my analysis of them. One such limitation is the risk of a too-easy and falsely stable binarism. Weinberger and Hoover, for instance, both tend to assume that mainstream poetic practice and ideology is monolithic and that know it when we see it. As Hank Lazer suggests, however, this reduction of poetic variety to an allegedly monolithic mainstream is itself a rhetorical straw man of the (similarly multiple) avant-garde (1996, 136). Nevertheless, if we think of center, mainstream, and margin as cultural locations that are in process rather than fixed, these misleadingly topographical metaphors can retain some analytic usefulness. If I seem both to suggest the inadequacy of a center-margin model and also depend on it for understanding patterns in recent anthologies, my point is that this model is growing more complex rather than collapsing completely. …

Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK

Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK

The Gertrude Stein awards in innovative American poetry, 1993-1994

The Gertrude Stein awards in innovative American poetry, 1993-1994

Margaret Atwood: vision and forms

A prolific writer versatile social critic, Canadian novelist poet Margaret Atwood has recently published Bluebeard s Egg (short stories), Interlunar (poetry), Handmaid s Tale critically acclaimed best-selling novel.This international collection of essays evaluates the complete body of her workboth the acclaimed fiction the innovative poetry. The critics represented hereAmerican, Australian, Canadianaddress Atwood s handling of such themes as feminism, ecology, the gothic novel, the political relationship between Canada the United States.The essays on Atwood s novels introduce the general reader her development as a writer, as she matures from a basically subjective, poetic vision, seen in Surfacing and Edible Woman, to an increasingly engaged, political stance, exemplified by Handmaid s Tale. Other essays examine Atwood s poetry, from her transformation of the Homeric model her criticisms of the United States relationship with Canada. The last two critical essays offer a unique view of Atwood through an investigation of her use of the concept of shamanism through a presentation of eight of her vivid watercolors.The volume ends with Atwood presenting her own views in an interview with Jan Garden Castro in a conversation between Atwood students at the University of Tampa, Florida.

Rediscovering Our Sources: The Poetry of Mina Loy

Although British by birth, Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been considered an American modernist poet since her arrival in New York in 1916.1 One of the European expatriates from World War I, she shared the glamour and notoriety accompanying this group's pursuit of artistic and personal freedom, and her exceptional beauty, cerebral disposition, and cosmopolitan background distinguished her among the artists surrounding avant garde impresarios Alfred Stieglitz, Walter Conrad Arensberg, and Alfred Kreymborg. This milieu provided a sympathetic audience for her daringly innovative poetry, and to its writers' experiments in word, line, and image she contributed her firsthand knowledge of European modernism. The American little magazines were her publishers. Even before she arrived in the States her poems (and experimental plays) had appeared in Camera Work, The Trend, The International, Rogue, and Others, and in the late 1910s she moved with the experimentalists to The Little Review and The Dial.