Object lessons of recent American poetry

By Harriet Staff

Stephen Burt posits a “turn among poets to reference, to concrete, real things” in the Boston Review:

Almost all literary movements and moments expire in a crowd of imitators: what Hoagland called, disparagingly, “the skittery poem of our moment” may be about to slip into just that crowd. Yet Hoagland’s nominee for its replacement—what he calls “narrative,” especially the autobiographical sort—seems an unlikely successor. What will come next instead?

…

The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world. They follow Williams’s “demand,” as the critic Douglas Mao put it, “both that poetry be faithful to the thing represented and that it be a thing in itself.” They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing.

Tags: Boston Review, future of poetry, Stephen Burt, the New Thing
Posted in Uncategorized on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 by Harriet Staff.