Abstract link: Terry Lucas article "The Future of American Poetry in the 21st Century

The Future of American Poetry in the Twenty-first Century: Trajectories of Content and Form*

Speculating on where poetry is headed in the twenty-first century reminds me of the dilemma physicists face when attempting to measure sub-atomic particles. If one determines their speed, then their position cannot be precisely determined, remaining somewhere in a cloud of possibilities. If their position is first determined, their speed remains a mystery.

Such it is when speaking of the future of poetry. It is easy to observe, for example, by thumbing through journals published in the final two decades of the twentieth century, that the vast majority of poems were in discrete stanzas, with the line itself serving as the basic syntactical unit. In contrast, as evidenced by anthologies like The Best American Poetry and Best New Poets, a perusal of many journals today reveals a sizeable portion of poems that appear to have been composed by shooting words randomly onto the page from a gun without rifling, making it difficult to determine where lines (often composed of single words) begin or end, and whether the poems are to be read horizontally or vertically.

Other poems may be blocked as paragraphs, the sentence (as in prose) taking precedence over the line. Others still may combine typographical schemes within the poem, taking cues from emails, texts, tweets, quotes, traditional lines of verse, found text reclaimed from novels, creative non-fiction, Wikipedia articles—the list is endless. A few others staunchly remain formal—sonnets, villanelles, and pantoums—some of which push against their boundaries of rhyme schemes and metrical patterns. Still others are left in their traditional trappings, but updated in their content to include a Facebook post gone viral or an episode of the latest reality TV show.

Where all of this is headed is as unknown as the current importance of social media to human endeavors would have been in 1980. Only the speed with which it is changing is evident.

Charles Simic’s quote puts into perspective any attempt to theorize about where poetry will be at the next turn of the century: “Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written” (Best American Poetry 1992, xv). Since the official version of reality in eighty or so years is unknown, how can we know what the wailing against it will sound like? The prospect seems as difficult as predicting the behavior of cats.

Notwithstanding, there are some trajectories already in place that will likely continue for some time, either before their arcs fizzle out from lack of interest, or before they are met with resistance from a new generation of poets—the past generation of poets perennially asserting, as Donald Hall quips, that “Poetry was always in good shape twenty or thirty years ago; now it has always gone to hell” (BAP 1989, xv).

Three recent developments in American poetry that I believe will continue to influence the next generation of poets, either by accretion or by collision are: 1) the blurring of boundaries between genres and forms; 2) the loosening and (occasionally) the tightening of formal strictures; and 3) the bold enactment of content through form and other prosodic devices. There are a plethora of poets whose work illustrates these elements. The poets cited here have already significantly impacted, or soon will impact, the direction of twenty-first century poetry.

In 2002, Jenny Boully’s first book, The Body, not only “poke[d] a hole in the notion of a book” (Greenberg, Jacket 19), it also defied categorization. Portions had been previously anthologized in Best American Poetry 2002 (16-24), as well as in Essay: An Experiment. The work consists of one hundred fifty-eight footnotes beneath blank pages—footnotes comprising quotations of real and imagined texts, definitions, poems, historical accounts, dialogue, notes, diary entries, nursery rhymes, postcard messages, fragments of dreams, references to films, novels, works of art, and characters assumed present in the missing text above them. Only a sketchy narrative and blurry figures can be formulated from them, as in the first-person reactions to the missing body of work’s supposed characters’ actions, embedded in footnotes, such as no. 29:

After my sister and I stared at the magazine, we were, the both of us, afraid

to part our legs or even to pee. For months, we were inseparable in the

bathroom, but then, we became brave and decided to look for our holes, and

if the spider did in fact come out we would kill it (18).

Emotional moments like this one are rare; most entries are strictly informative in nature, normally for the purpose of elucidating text but, in the case of The Body, becoming the only text available with which to construct our own imaginative narrative, characters, and plot:

22a In cinematic terms, “actual sound” refers to sound which comes from a visible or identifiable source* within the film. “Commentative sound” is sound which does not come from an identifiable source within the film but is added for dramatic effect** (14).

Of course, footnotes like this one, and many others, seem to be referring to not only the assumed text, but to the primary prosodic device used in The Body, as well, given the insistence of the themes of absence, ontology, and identity, set against the silent space that fills most of every page, and the omissions within many of the footnotes themselves, notated with a “[fragment ends here].” Some footnotes even approach self-awareness, as in the cases below:

143z  The following excerpt from Robert Kelly’s “Edmund Wilson on Alfred de Musset: The Dream” was pasted above the author’s various beds in the various places she lived: “Dreams themselves are footnotes…” (72).

144 The mastermind of this roller coaster, in an interview, confessed that the goal of his work is to replicate a ride in which participants are scared out of their minds, yet feel the comforting presence of someone there, riding along and watching over them (73).

For all that The Body is and for all that it isn’t, it awakened readers in the first years of the twenty-first century to the possibilities of taking the blank spaces between lines of poetry to their extreme conclusion, and of substituting a paratextual collage as a poetic form to enact themes that had been previously relegated to the body of the work itself.

“Exhume,” the most emblematic collage poem that populates Kimiko Hahn’s The Artist’s Daughter (20) is reminiscent of Boully’s The Body in the number of genres presented. Hahn manages lengthy quotations, case studies, notes, email, charts, telephone transcripts, and journal entries—all within eight pages. Other similarities exist as well: the subterranean nature of the content, and the superlative manner in which that content is enacted in form, for example.

Unlike The Body, however, “Exhume” provides material from which a narrative can be 

(read more at https://abstractmagtv.com/2016/12/04/the-widening-spell-the-future-of-poetry-in-the-21st-century/)