Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley This series provides accessible yet provocative introductions to a wide range of literatures. The volumes will initiate and deepen the reader’s understanding of key literary movements, periods and genres, and consider debates that inform the past, present and future of literary study. Resources such as glossaries of key terms and details of archives and internet sites are also provided, making each volume a comprehensive critical guide. CONTEMPORARY Williams CONTEMPORARY POETRY Nerys Williams POETRY Edinburgh Critical Guides Discussing the work of more than sixty poets from the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, CONTEMPORARY PORTRY New Zealand and the Caribbean, from Sujata Bhatt to M. Philip NourbeSe and from John Ashbery to Eliot Weinberger, Nerys Williams guides students through Nerys Williams the key ideas and movements in the study of poetry today. With reference to original manifestos and web-based experiments as well as the role of information culture in shaping and distributing poetry globally, she engages with the full vitality of the contemporary poetry scene. Key Features • Wide topic range – from performance to politics, from lyric expression to ecopoetics and from multilingual poetries to electronic writing – enables provocative thematic links to be made • Discussion of global Englishes, dialects and idiolects aimed at those studying poetry on postcolonial literature and contemporary poetics courses • Contemporary relevance: relates poetry to reporting on global conflict, including the impact of the Iraq War • Student resources include a chronology, web resources, a glossary, questions for discussion and a guide to further reading Nerys Williams lectures in American Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978 0 7486 3885 7 Cover design: Michael Chatfield Edinburgh Critical Guides Word count 178 Pantone 702 Contemporary Poetry WILLIAMS PRINT.indd i 08/02/2011 11:40 Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature Series Editors: Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester and Andy Mousley, De Montfort University Published Titles: Gothic Literature, Andrew Smith Canadian Literature, Faye Hammill Women’s Poetry, Jo Gill Contemporary American Drama, Annette J. Saddik Shakespeare, Gabriel Egan Asian American Literature, Bella Adams Children’s Literature, M. O. Grenby Contemporary British Fiction, Nick Bentley Renaissance Literature, Siobhan Keenan Scottish Literature, Gerard Carruthers Contemporary American Fiction, David Brauner Contemporary British Drama, David Lane Medieval Literature 1300–1500, Pamela King Contemporary Poetry, Nerys Williams Victorian Literature, David Amigoni Forthcoming Titles in the Series: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Hamish Mathison Crime Fiction, Stacy Gillis Modern American Literature, Catherine Morley Modernist Literature, Rachel Potter African American Literature, Jennifer Terry Postcolonial Literature, Dave Gunning WILLIAMS PRINT.indd ii 08/02/2011 11:40 Contemporary Poetry Nerys Williams Edinburgh University Press WILLIAMS PRINT.indd iii 08/02/2011 11:40 Contents Series Preface ix Acknowledgements x Chronology xii Introduction 1 ‘New, Newer and Newest’ Poetry 2 Poetics? 4 Before the 1970s: Poetic Precedents 6 New Lines, The New Poetry, The New American Poetry 7 Blood, Bread and Poetry: Gender and Poetics 11 Multiformalisms: Form and Contemporary Poetry 13 Structure of the Book 17 Chapter 1 Lyric Subjects 25 Towards a Theory of Lyric Expression 27 Elegy and Epistle: Andrew Motion and Lee Harwood 28 Speaking (Auto) Biographically: Cathy Song and Grace Nichols 31 Self-refl exive Lyrics: Portraiture in John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt and Jorie Graham 39 Nobody’s Voice: Michael Palmer 47 Conclusion: Jennifer Moxley’s Deceitful Subjective 51 WILLIAMS PRINT.indd v 08/02/2011 11:40 vi contemporary poetry Chapter 2 Politics and Poetics 58 Founding Propositions: Politics and Post-World War II Poetry 59 A Day in Politics: Inauguration Poets Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander 63 Pastoral and Ludic: Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon 67 The Politics of Language: Poetry and the Public Sphere – Charles Bernstein 72 Reporting War: Eliot Weinberger 76 Politics and Poetics of Exile: Choman Hardi 80 Veteran’s Experience: Yusef Komunyakaa 82 Reclaiming History: Rita Dove’s ‘Parsley’ 85 Conclusion: Reading the Archive – M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! 87 Chapter 3 Performance and the Poem 98 Open Field Poetics and Projective Verse: Adaptations 99 Countercultural Performance: Lawrence Ferlinghetti 101 Performing Race: Amiri Baraka’s Jazz Poetic 102 Dub Poetry and its Descendants: Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah 107 The Poet Performer: Drama and Comedy in Paul Durcan and Don Paterson 112 Performativity: Lyn Hejinian 116 Performance, the Voice and the World: Kate Fagan 121 Conclusion: Performance Writing and Experiment: Caroline Bergvall 124 Chapter 4 Environment and Space 133 Reading Space and Environment 133 Ecocriticism: Landscape and Ecology in Gary Snyder’s Poetry 134 A Poetics of Place: Geoffrey Hill, Robert Hass and Anne Szumigalski 137 The Spatial Turn 144 Space, the City and the Poem: Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan 146 Psychogeography: The Poet in the City – Iain Sinclair 151 WILLIAMS PRINT.indd vi 08/02/2011 11:40 contents vii Travelogue from the Regional to the Global: Robert Minhinnick and Lorna Goodison 154 Ecopoetics and the Future 157 Apocalyptic Landscapes: John Kinsella 159 Conclusion: Juliana Spahr’s Ecopoetics and Ideas of Connection 161 Chapter 5 Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries 171 Global Poetry or, English as a Global Language 171 Dialect and Phonetic Poetry: Tony Harrison, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead 173 The ‘big one, better tongue’: Jackie Kay 179 From Orality to Text: Ethnopoetics in Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjo’s Poetry 181 Bilingualism and Translation in Poetry 184 ‘My glossolalia shall be my passport’: Gwyneth Lewis 185 Immigration and Linguistic Difference: Li-Young Lee 189 Interlingual Poetics: Lorna Dee Cervantes 192 Idiolects or Ideolectical Poetries 195 Linguistic Cross-fertilisation: Tusiata Avia 198 Conclusion: Daljit Nagra 199 Conclusion 207 What is Electronic Writing? 208 Content-specifi c Electronic Writing: John Cayley, Jenny Weight, Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, Reiner Strasser and M.D. Coverley 210 Electronic Experimentation and Language: Peter Finch and Trevor Joyce 214 Poet’s Playground: ‘Flarf’ Poetry 217 Documentation and Poetry: Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary 219 Textured Information: Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankine 223 Disseminating Poetry 225 WILLIAMS PRINT.indd vii 08/02/2011 11:40 viii contemporary poetry Student Resources 231 Electronic Resources 231 Questions for Discussion 237 Glossary 240 Poetry Anthologies 247 Guide to Further Reading 249 Index 255 WILLIAMS PRINT.indd viii 08/02/2011 11:40 Series Preface The study of English literature in the early twenty-fi rst century is host to an exhilarating range of critical approaches, theories and historical perspectives. ‘English’ ranges from traditional modes of study such as Shakespeare and Romanticism to popular interest in national and area literatures such as the United States, Ireland and the Caribbean. The subject also spans a diverse array of genres from tragedy to cyberpunk, incorporates such hybrid fi elds of study as Asian American literature, Black British literature, creative writing and literary adaptations, and remains eclectic in its methodology. Such diversity is cause for both celebration and consternation. English is varied enough to promise enrichment and enjoyment for all kinds of readers and to challenge preconceptions about what the study of literature might involve. But how are readers to navigate their way through such literary and cultural diversity? And how are students to make sense of the various literary categories and periodisations, such as modernism and the Renaissance, or the proliferating theories of literature, from feminism and marxism to queer theory and eco-criticism? The Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature series refl ects the challenges and pluralities of English today, but at the same time it offers readers clear and accessible routes through the texts, contexts, genres, historical periods and debates within the subject. Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley WILLIAMS PRINT.indd ix 08/02/2011 11:40 Acknowledgements Firstly, my immense gratitude to both editors of the series, Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, for their original interest and subse- quent support for this project. Their patience, alert editorial eye and encouragement were appreciated throughout. I would also like to thank the work of Jackie Jones and staff at Edinburgh University Press. Thanks go to colleagues at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. In particular I would like to acknowledge my lively conversations with Michelle O’Connell, Porscha Fermanis and Ron Callan – and the support of Maria Stuart and Mary Clayton. I am also grateful to Nick Daly for encouraging research life in the department in such a produc- tive way. Pauline Slattery’s wonderfully effi cient management of undergraduate academic life in the school (with the help of Marguerite Duggan and Anne Cleary) made this process less painful. The experience of teaching the MA in American Literature and a course on ‘Poetry and Poetics’ at UCD has informed this project