Contemporary American poetry is vast and so diverse it defies mastery. No matter how much I read and teach in this area, I remain profoundly ignorant; every year at least one major poetry prize goes to someone I've never heard of. Such are the surprises that come with vitality and countless sources. Anthologies, magazines and blogs proliferate, tacitly tracing territories or bluntly advancing aesthetic positions in a genre that is even more complicated and conflicted--and more broadly popular--than the rest of English studies. (Take a look at the debates raging in the back pages of Poetry if you wish to eavesdrop, and that journal occupies the broadest center of the conversation.) Poetry used to be more manageable, at least as I recall my graduate school years when an unspoken sectarianism reigned, enabled by geographic regionalism, the comparative isolation and containment of university writing programs and small presses, and the absence of an Internet. In those days, far fewer poets practiced at every level. The growth of the academic scene offers only one measure: in 1984, 31 programs granted the MFA (recognized as a terminal degree in creative writing); in 2009, the number of MFA programs reached 153. These programs provide institutional support--including publishing venues and professional positions for many kinds of poets and poetry--and they afford a profoundly diverse student population immediate access to the field. At New York University twenty years ago, I studied with poets who more or less followed Whitman in their veneration of the physical body and natural world, their use of conversational and confessional language, and a preference for the epiphanic lyric or narrative--a bias that surely inflects my editorial taste to this day. Of poets included in this issue, Susanna Childress, Peter Cooley, Robert Cording, Mark Jarman, Chard de Noird, Jennifer Maier, David Wagoner, Shanna Powlus Wheeler, and Todd Davis might be examples of this type, as is Mary Oliver, whose recent work Davis analyzes. With such a rich tradition to work from, it went without saying, why would there be any need to look beyond our own tribe? For instance, why consider the spawn of Emily Dickinson, with their fixation on language's limits and its impossible extremes, an aesthetic circle then associated with the other end of the state at Buffalo--let alone whatever was happening on the other Coast? Twenty years ago, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry belonged to a dangerously different world, fueled by manifestos and continental philosophy; propelled by experiment, play and fragmentation, with discrete publishing networks and audiences. Fanny Howe, discussed in this issue by Romana Huk, is affiliated with that group, as is G. C. Waldrep, identified with the earlier parabolic tradition. Recalling the comparative aesthetic insularity of that time, I think of the Bible story of Lot and his daughters in the cave after the destruction of Sodom. (Of course those girls slept with their father; they believed he was the only man left on earth!) But isolation is a fiction not only of memory, and poetry now is as mongrel as anything else truly American. Recall the generative forces of feminism and other identity politics rooted in the 1970s; add multiculturalism, neoformalism and new stresses on narrative from the 1980s; combine the various performance communities that took poetry off the page and out of the academy during the 1990s, and you begin to see how we might arrive at the pluralistic and highly energized place we find ourselves today. Like many ideas we used to hold absolute, poetry's sectarian caves and tribes can now be described in terms of social construction or personal taste. Some poets still defend their own aesthetics as exclusive and sovereign, but many others read widely and even write beyond and between boundaries. …