The Atlantic's Take on a New Generation of Poets

Jesse Lichtenstein writes for the September issue of The Atlantic about the young generation of poets blowing the door off its hinges: "Emerging poets of this digital-native generation are ready to work at getting their words and their names out there." To continue:

Poets a little older may grumble at the networking and exposure, but their juniors respect the hustle, convinced that poems, with the right push, can “enter the jet stream of the ongoing national discourse,” as Jones has put it. They are onto something: A recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts revealed that poetry readership doubled among 18-to-34-year-olds over the past five years.

The energy on display is about more than savvy marketing or niche appeal. “From what I’m seeing,” says Jeff Shotts, the executive editor of Graywolf Press, who edited three of the 10 collections that made it onto the long list for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry, “this is a renaissance.” And most striking among the many forces propelling that renaissance is a resurgence of the first-person lyric—just what the “language poets” of the late 1970s declared obsolete. Too narrowly experiential, too sentimental, too accessible, inadequate to the task of engaging with a postmodern, media-saturated culture—this was the verdict of a previous avant-garde that abandoned “the speaker” in favor of a recondite poetics that appealed to an ever more exclusive audience. But the rising generation—while embracing avant-garde techniques (the use of radical disjunction and collage, the potpourri of “high” and “low” cultural references)—hasn’t bought the message. Having come of age in the heyday of identity politics, the diverse poets now in the spotlight are reclaiming “the democratic ‘I,’ ” in the words of the poet Edward Hirsch.