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[1] Cole Swenson and David St. John, American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company: xx.

[2] Any invocation of the poetry wars is contentious and polemic; indeed, one is likely to find oneself in a debate about whether the poetry wars happened at all. I will forestall these problems (briefly) and offer my own contentious and polemic definition of the poetry wars at the start of the essay’s third section. In the discussion that follows, I largely focus on the avant-garde side of the poetry wars, though a more complete treatment of the subject would follow parallel developments on the lyric side of the aisle.

[3] As has been the case for a while. See Julianna Spahr, “The Scotch Taped: Recent Poetry Without Philanthropy,” ASAP Review, September 12, 2024: https://asapjournal.com/review/the-scotch-taped-recent-poetry-without-philanthropy/.

[4] David Lau, “Avant-Garde Then and Now: A 2023 Poetry Chronicle,” Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion 16 (2024): 129.

[5] Jennifer Ashton, “Poetry of the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Jennifer Ashton. Cambridge University Press, 2013: 216.

[6] Lau, 130. After listing the ailments of contemporary poetry, detailed above, Lau concludes that they are “evidence of an imperial art.”

[7] Lau, “Avant-Garde Then and Now,” 130. Lau’s examples are of this return to modernism are Brian Ang and Ben Lerner. Lau is not alone in his contention about the field. In an interview conducted toward the end of her life, Marjorie Perloff concludes, “Poetry is not the important art right now. It just isn’t.” She goes on to argue that “the beginning of the 21st century is very much like the beginning of the 20th century,” suggesting that a new round of modernist disruption is necessary to address the ills of contemporary poetry. What are those ills? She specifies, “…what’s happened with identity politics is destroying poetry.” Marjorie Perloff, interview with Richard Kraft, Acts and Facts, podcast audio, January 22, 2022. https://www.buzzsprout.com/892342/episodes/9888751.

[8] Cathy Park Hong, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and It’s Not Kenneth Goldsmith,” The New Republic, October 1, 2015: https://newrepublic.com/article/122985/new-movement-american-poetry-not-kenneth-goldsmith

[9] Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Lana Turner 7 (2014): 253.

[10] Park Hong, “There’s a New Movement.” Park Hong revisits this argument in a recent interview, where she notes that, despite an intensive and ongoing commoditization of identitarian writing, “there has been this explosion of different ways of writing one’s experiences…My students of color feel much more liberated and much more comfortable writing about what they want to. They also feel it’s not so much about representational politics, but more about all the different formal ways they can express how they see the world.” “‘Not Really Disciplined About Disciplines: An Interview with Cathy Park Hong.” The Drift, July 12, 2023: https://www.thedriftmag.com/not-really-disciplined-about-disciplines/.

[11] Ibid. As should be clear, my argument here is closely aligned with Hong’s. I prefer the poetics of solidarity to the poetics of social engagement—but only because I want to specify the kind of social engagement which has characterized poetry in the decade since Hong’s essay appeared.

[12] Timothy Yu, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century Poetry, edited by Timothy Yu. Cambridge University Press, 2021: 7.

[13] Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Penguin Random House, 2020.

[14] Robert Lowell, “Acceptance Speech.” National Book Awards, New York, November 1960: https://www.nationalbook.org/robert-lowells-accepts-the-1960-national-book-awards-in-poetry-for-life-studies/.

[15] Natalia Cecire, Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019: 4. Cecire sometimes uses the word “experimentalism” as an alternate name for the Language movement.

[16] Cecire, Experimental, 14.

[17] Marjorie Perloff, “Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 25, No 3 (1999): 433.

[18] Mark Wallace, “Toward a Free Multiplicity of Form,” in Telling it Slant, 192.

[19] Stephanie Burt, “The Elliptical Poets,” in A Poetry Criticism Reader, edited by Jerry Harp & Jan Weissmiller. University of Iowa Press, 2006: 45.

[20] Elizabeth Willis, “A Poetics” in Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, edited by Reginald Shepherd. Counterpath Press, 2008: 259.

[21] Reginald Shepherd, “Defining Post-Avant Poetry,” Reginald Shepherd’s Blog, February 29, 2008: https://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2008/02/defining-post-avant-garde-poetry.html.

[22] Ron Silliman, Ron Silliman’s Blog, September 14, 2007: https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/recognizability.

[23] Steve Evans, “Introduction to Writing from the New Coast,” in Telling it Slant, 13.

[24] see also Cecire, Experimental, 38.

[25] Ibid, 19. He goes on to specify: “But this does not discredit liberation as a project so much as it testifies to the formidable resources of those who oppose it.”

[26] Dorothy Wang, Thinking its Presence, 12.

[27] Harryette Mullen, “Poetry and Identity,” in Telling Slant, 30.

[28] Cecire, Experimental, 190. Cecire provides a more detailed analysis, including addressing the specific writers who were invited to the table in this moment. I recommend her book entirely, and this section particularly.

[29] Wang, Thinking Its Presence, 31-32.

[30] Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric.” The Boston Review, May 18 2012: https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/poetry-brink/.

[31] Later in the essay, Perloff does manage to cite a single poem by Natasha Trethewey.

[32] In this instance (Perloff used this strategy often), she is placing her thumb on the scale in favor of conceptual writing. An acute reader will note that I am going out of my way to not talk about conceptualism; I am not eager to reopen that particular can of worms.

[33] Ben Lerner, “The Circuit,” Lana Turner 14: 85-6.

[34] I am indebted here to Frederic Jameson who made similar observations about critical theory all the way back in 1998 (!). See “Persistence of the Dialectic: Three Sites,” Science & Society 62, no. 3 (1998): 365. 

[35] Layli Long Soldier, Whereas. Graywolf Press, 2017. Further citations will be parenthetical by page number in the text. Full disclosure: I was Long Soldier’s student for a semester during my MFA. We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. Nightboat Books, 2020.

[36] The emergence of documentary poetics (and, more broadly, the so-called “project book”) is an important chapter in the story I am telling here. I hope other readers and thinkers will historicize the emergence of such projects in terms of the evolving poetic cultures of the past twenty plus years.

[37] It’s true that such movements have cropped up, here and there, over the past twenty-five years—Flarf comes to mind, as does the New Sincerity and Alt Lit. At this distance, I think we can safely say that—however interesting these practices may (or may not) have been as individual or coterie practices—they failed as movements, that is, they failed to develop the historical gravity or the coherent interpretive projects that characterized the movements of the 20th century. Conceptualism is a more interesting and difficult case, in part because it often functioned as a burlesque of 20th century movements.

[38] We Want It All, 4.

[39] Ibid,3.

[40] Ibid.

[41] M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Traditions. Oxford University Press, 1953: 328. If anything, this seems too late—surely one could say the same of Milton.