Contemporary American Poetry

Jorie Graham (© AP Images)

Louise Glück (© AP Images)

Billy Collins (© AP Images)

Robert Pinsky (© AP Images)

Yusef Komunyakaa (© AP Images)

U.S. poetry since 1990 has been in the midst of a kaleidoscopic renaissance. In the latter half of the 20th century, there was, if not a consensus, at least a discernible shape to the poetic field, complete with well-defended positions. Well-defined schools dominated the scene, and critical discussions tended to the binary: formalism versus free verse, academic versus experimental.

Looking back, some have seen the post-World War II years as a heroic age in which American poetry broke free from constraints such as rhyme and meter and flung itself heart-first into new dimensions alongside the abstract expressionists in American painting. Others -- experimentalists, multiethnic and global authors, and feminist writers among them -- recall the era's blindness to issues of race and gender. These writers experience diversity as a present blessing and look forward to freedoms yet unimagined. Their contributions have made the poetry of the present a rich cornucopia with a genuinely popular base.

Among the general public, interest in poetry is at an all-time high. Poetry slams generate competitive camaraderie among beginning writers, informal writing groups provide support and critiques, and reading clubs proliferate. Writing programs flourish at all levels, brisk poetic exchanges zip over the Internet, and universities, magazines, and enterprising authors mount Web sites. American poetry at present is a vast territory of free imagination, a pot on the boil, a dynamic work in progress.

The ferment of American poetry since l990 makes the field decentralized and hard to define. Most anthologies showcase only one dimension of poetry, for example, women's writing -- or groupings of ethnic writers, or poetry with a common inspiration -- jazz poetry, cowboy poetry, Buddhist-influenced poems, hip-hop.

The few anthologists aspiring to represent the whole of contemporary American poetry begin with copious disclaimers and dwell on its disparate impulses: postmodernism, the expansion of the canon, ethnicities, immigration (with special mention of new voices out of South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East), the dawning of global literature, the elaboration of women's continuing contributions, the rise of Internet technology, the influence of specific teachers or writing programs or regional impulses, the ubiquitous media, and the role of the poet as the lone individual voice raised against the din of commercialism and conformity.

Poets themselves struggle to make sense of the flood of poetry. It is possible to envision a continuum, with poetry of the speaking, subjective self on one end, poetry of the world on the other, and a large middle range in which self and world merge.

Poetry of the speaking self tends to focus on vivid expression and exploration of deep, often buried, emotion. It is psychological and intense, and its settings are secondary. In the last half of the 20th century, the most influential poet of this sort was Robert Lowell, whose descents into his own psyche and his disturbed family background inspired confessional writing.

Poetry of the world, on the other hand, tends to build up meaning from narrative drive, detail, and context. It sets careful scenes. One of the most influential poets of the world was Elizabeth Bishop, generally considered the finest American woman poet of later 20th century.

Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were life-long friends; both taught at Harvard University. Like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the 19th century, Lowell and Bishop are presiding generative spirits for later poets. And although they shared a kindred vision, their approaches were polar opposites. Lowell's knotty, subjective, rhetorical poetry wrests meaning from self-presentation and heightened language, while Bishop offers, instead, detailed landscapes in a deceptively simple prosaic style. Only on rereading does her precision and depth make itself felt.

Most poets hover somewhere between the two poles. Ultimately, great poetry -- whether of the self or the world -- overcomes such divisions; the self and the world becoming mirrors of each other. Nevertheless, for purposes of discussion, the two may be provisionally distinguished.

The Poetry of Self

Poetry of self tends toward direct address or monologue. At its most intense, it states a condition of soul. The settings, though present, do not play definitive roles. This poetry may be psychological or spiritual, aspiring to a timeless realm. It may also, however, undercut spiritual certainty by referring all meaning back to language. Within this large grouping, therefore, one may find somewhat romantic, expressive poetry, but also language-based poems that question the very concepts of identity and meaning, seeing these as constructs.

Balancing these concerns, John Ashbery has said that he is interested in "the experience of experience," or what filters through his consciousness, rather than what actually happened. His "Soonest Mended" (1970) depicts a reality "out there" lying loose and seemingly simple, but lethal as a floor on which wheat and chaff (like human lives, or Walt Whitman's leaves of grass) are winnowed:

...underneath the talk lies
The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose
Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.

The enigmatic, classically trained W.S. Merwin (1927- ) continues to produce volumes of haunting subjective poetry. Merwin's poem "The River of Bees" (1967) ends:

On the door it says what to do to survive
But we were not born to survive
Only to live

The word "only" ironically underscores how difficult it is to live fully as human beings, a nobler pursuit than mere survival. Both Ashbery and Merwin, precursors of the current generation of poets of self, characteristically write monologues detached from explicit contexts or narratives. Merwin's haunting existential lyrics plumb psychological depths, while Ashbery's unexpected use of words from many registers of human endeavor -- psychology, farming, philosophy -- looks forward to the Language School.

Recent poets of self have pushed more deeply into a phenomenological awareness of consciousness played out moment by moment. For Ann Lauterbach (1942- ), the poem is an extension of the mind in action; she has said that her poetry is "an act of self-construction, the voice its threshold." Language poet Lyn Hejinian (1941- ) expresses the movement of consciousness in her autobiographical prose poem My Life (1987), which employs disjunction, surprising leaps, and chance intersections: "I picture an idea at the moment I come to it, our collision." Rae Armantrout (1947- ) uses silences and subtle, oblique associative clusters; the title poem of her volume Necromance (1991) warns that "emphatic / precision / is revealed as / hostility." Another experimental poet, Leslie Scalapino (1947- ), writes poems as an "examination of the mind in the process of whatever it's creating."

Much experimental poetry of self is elliptical, nonlinear, nonnarrative, and nonobjective; at its best, it is, however, not solipsistic but rather circles around an "absent center." Poetry of self often involves a public performance. In the case of women poets, the erasures, notions of silence, and disjunctions are often associated with Julia Kristeva and other French feminist theoreticians. Poet Susan Howe (1937- ), who has developed a complex visual poetics to interweave the historical and personal, has noted the difficulty of tracing back female lines in archives and genealogies and the erasure of women in cultural history. For her, as a woman, "the gaps and silences are where you find yourself."

Jorie Graham (1950- )
One of the most accomplished poets of the subjective self is Jorie Graham. Born in New York, she grew up in Italy and studied at the Sorbonne in France, at New York University (specializing in film, which continues to influence her work), and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she later taught. Since then, she has been a professor at Harvard University.

Graham's work is suffused with cosmopolitan references, and she sees the history of the United States as a part of a larger international engagement over time. The title poem in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994 (1995) addresses this complex and changing history. The poem brings together disparate elements in large-gestured free association -- the poet's walk through the white flecks of a snowstorm to return a friend's black dance leotard, a flock of black starlings (birds that drive out native species), a single black crow (a protagonist of Native-American oral tradition) evoked as "one ink-streak on the early evening snowlit scene."

These sense impressions summon up the poet's childhood memories of Europe and her black-garbed dance teacher, and broaden out into the history of the New World. Christopher Columbus's contact with Native Americans on a white sandy beach is likened to the poet's white snowstorm: "He thought he saw Indians fleeing through the white before the ship," and "In the white swirl, he placed a large cross."

All these elements are subordinated to the moving mind that contains them and that constantly questions itself. This mind, or "unified field" (a set of theories in physics that attempt to relate all forces in the universe), is likened to the snowstorm of the beginning:

Nothing true or false in itself. Just motion. Many strips of
motion. Filaments of falling marked by the tiny certainties of flakes.

Graham focuses on the mind as a portal of meaning and distortion, both a part of the world and a separate vantage point. As in a film's montage, her voice threads together disparate visions and experiences. Swarm (2000) deepens Graham's metaphysical bent, emotional depth, and urgency.

The Poetry of Voice

At its furthest extreme, poetry of self obliterates the self if it lacks a counterbalancing sensibility. The next stage may be a poetry of various voices or fictive selves, breaking the monolithic idea of self into fragments and characters. The dramatic monologues of Robert Browning are 19th-century antecedents. The fictive "I" feels solid but does not involve the actual author, whose self remains offstage.

This strain of poetry often takes subjects from myth and popular culture, typically seeing modern relationships as redefinitions or versions of older patterns. Among contemporary poets of voice or monologue are Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Alberto Rios, and the Canadian poet Margaret Atwood.

Usually, the poetry of voice is written in the first person, but the third person can make a similar impact if the viewpoint is clearly that of the characters, as in Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah. In this volume, Dove intertwines biography and history to dramatize her grandparents' lives. Like many African Americans in the early 20th century, they fled poverty and racism in the rural South for work in the urban North. Dove endows their humble lives with dignity. Thomas's first job, as a laborer on the third shift, requires him to live in a barracks and share a mattress with two men he never meets. His work is "a narrow grief," but music lifts his spirits like a beautiful woman (forecasting Beulah, whom he has not yet met). When Thomas sings

he closes his eyes.
He never knows when she'll be coming
but when she leaves, he always
tips his hat.

Louise Glck (1943- )
One of the most impressive poets of voice is Louise Glck. Born in New York City, Glck, the U.S. poet laureate for 2003-2004, grew up with an abiding sense of guilt due to the death of a sister born before her. At Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, she studied with poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz, and she has attributed her psychic survival to psychoanalysis and her studies in poetry. Much of her poetry deals with tragic loss.

Each of Glck's books attempts new techniques, making it difficult to summarize her work. Her early volumes, such as The House on Marshland (l975) and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), handle autobiographical material at a psychic distance, while in later books she is more direct. Meadowlands (1996) employs comic wit and references to the Odyssey to depict a failing marriage.

In Glck's memorable The Wild Iris (1992), different kinds of flowers utter short metaphysical monologues. The book's title poem, an exploration of resurrection, could be an epigraph for Glck's work as a whole. The wild iris, a gorgeous deep blue flower growing from a bulb that lies dormant all winter, says: "It is terrible to survive / as consciousness / buried in the dark earth." Like Jorie Graham's vision of the self merged in the snowstorm, Glck's poem ends with a vision of world and self merged -- this time in the water of life, blue on blue:

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice;
 
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Like Graham, Glck merges the self into the world through a fluid imagery of water. While Graham's frozen water -- snow -- resembles sand, the earth ground up at the sea's edge, Glck's blue fresh water -- signifying her heart -- merges with the salt sea of the world.

The Poetry of Place

A number of poets -- these are not groups, but nationwide tendencies -- find deep inspiration in specific landscapes. Instances are Robert Hass's lyrical evocations of Northern California, Mark Jarman's Southern California coastlines and memories of surfing, Tess Gallagher's poems set in the Pacific Northwest, and Simon Ortiz's and Jimmy Santiago Baca's poems emanating from southwestern landscapes. Each subregion has inspired poetry: C.D. (Carolyn) Wright's hardscrabble upper South is far from Yusef Komunyakaa's humid Louisiana Gulf.

Poetry of place is not based on landscape description; rather, the land, and its history, is a generative force implicated in the way its people, including the poet, live and think. The land is felt as what D.H. Lawrence called a "spirit of place."

Charles Wright (1935- )
One of the most moving poets of place is Charles Wright. Raised in Tennessee, Wright is a cosmopolitan southerner. He draws on Italian and ancient Chinese poetry, and infuses his work with southern themes such as the burden of a tragic past, seen in his poetic series "Appalachian Book of the Dead," which is based on the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. His works include Country Music: Selected Early Poems (l982); Chickamauga (1995); and Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000).

Wright's intense poetry offers moments of spiritual insight rescued, or rather constructed, from the ravages of time and circumstance. A purposeful awkwardness -- seen in his unexpected turns of colloquial phrase and preference for long, broken lines with odd numbers of syllables -- endows his poems with a burnished grace, like that of gnarled old farm tools polished with the wear of hands. This hand-made, earned, sometimes wry quality makes Wright's poems feel contemporary and prevents them from seeming pretentious.

The disparity between transcendent vision and human frailty lies at the heart of Wright's vision. He is drawn to grand themes -- stars, constellations, history -- on the one hand, and to tiny tactile elements -- fingers, hairs -- on the other. His title poem "Chickamauga" relies on the reader's knowledge: Chickamauga, Georgia, on September 19 and 20, 1862, was the scene of a decisive battle in the U.S. Civil War between the North and the South. The South failed to destroy the Union (northern) army and opened a way for the North's scorched-earth invasion of the South via Atlanta, Georgia.

"Chickamauga" can be read as a meditation on landscape, but it is also an elegiac lament and the poet's ars poetica. It begins with a simple observation: "Dove-twirl in the tall grass." This seeming idyll is the moment just before a hunter shoots; the slain soldiers, never mentioned in the poem, have been forgotten, mowed down like doves or grass. The "conked magnolia tree" undercuts the romantic "midnight and magnolia" stereotype of the antebellum-plantation South. The poem merges present and past in a powerful epitaph for lost worlds and ideals.

Dove-twirl in the tall grass.
                 End-of-summer glaze next door
On the gloves and split ends of the conked magnolia tree.
Work sounds: truck back-up-beep, wood tin-hammer, cicada, fire horn.
              _____
History handles our past like spoiled fruit.
Mid-morning, late-century light
                 calicoed under the peach trees.
Fingers us here. Fingers us here and here.
              ______
The poem is a code with no message:
The point of the mask is not the mask but the face underneath,
Absolute, incommunicado,
                 unhoused and peregrine.
              _____
The gill net of history will pluck us soon enough
From the cold waters of self-contentment we drift in
One by one
                 into its suffocating light and air.
              _____
Structure becomes an element of belief, syntax
And grammar a catechist,
Their words what the beads say,
                 words thumbed to our discontent.

The poem sees history as a construct, a "code with no message." Each individual exists in itself, unknowable outside its own terms and time, "not the mask but the face underneath." Death is inevitable for us as for the fallen soldiers, the Old South, and the caught fish. Nevertheless, poetry offers a partial consolation: Our articulated discontent may yield a measure of immortality.

The Poetry of Family

An even more grounded strain of poetry locates the poetic subject in a matrix of belonging -- to family, community, and changing traditions. Often the traditions called into play are ethnic or international.

A few poets, such as Sharon Olds (1942- ), expose their own unhealed wounds, resorting to the confessional mode, but most contemporary poets write with an affection that, however rueful, is nonetheless genuine. Stephen Dunn (1939- ) is an example: In his poems, relationships are a means of knowing. In some poets, respect for family and community carries with it a sense of affirmation, if not an explicitly devotional sensibility. This is not a conservative poetry; often it confronts change, loss, and struggle with the powers of ethnic or non-Western literary tradition.

Lucille Clifton (1936- ) finds solace in the black community. Her colloquial language and strong faith are a potent combination. The moving elegies to his mother of Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) draw on a dazzling array of classical Middle Eastern poetic forms, intertwining his mother's life with the suffering of his family's native Kashmir.

Malaysian-Chinese American Shirley Geok-lin Lim (1944- ) powerfully contrasts her difficult family in Malaysia with her new family in California. Chicana poet Lorna Dee Cervantes memorializes her harsh, impoverished family life in California; Louise Erdrich brings her unpredictable, tragicomic Native-American family members to vital life.

Li-Young Lee (1957- )
Tragic history arches over Li-Young Lee, whose Chinese-born father, at one time a physician to Mao Tse-tung, was later imprisoned in Indonesia. Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, Lee lived the life of a refugee, moving with his family to Hong Kong, Macao, and Japan before finding refuge in the United States, where his father became a Protestant minister in Pennsylvania. Lee won acclaim for his books Rose (1986) and The City in Which I Love You (1990).

Lee is sensuous, filial -- he movingly depicts his family and his father's decline -- and outspoken in his commitment to the spiritual dimensions of poetry. His most influential poem, "Persimmons" (1986), from his book Rose, evokes his Asian background through the persimmon, a fruit little known in the United States. Fruits and flowers are traditional subjects of Chinese art and poetry, but unusual in the West. The poem contains a pointed yet humorous critique of a provincial schoolteacher Lee encountered in the United States who presumes to understand persimmons and language.

Lee's poem "Irises" (1986), from the same volume, suggests that we drift through a "dream of life" but, like the iris, "waken dying--violet becoming blue, growing / black, black." The poem and its handling of color resonate with Glck's wild iris.

The title poem of The City in Which I Love You announces Lee's affirmative entrance into a larger community of poetry. It ends:

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter
 
the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

The Poetry of the Beautiful

Yet another strain of intensely lyrical, image-driven poetry celebrates beauty despite, or in the midst of, modern life in all its suffering and confusion. Many poets could be included here -- Joy Harjo (1951- ), Sandra McPherson (1943- ), Henri Cole (1965- ) -- as the strains of poetry are overlapping, not mutually exclusive.

Some of the finest contemporary poets use imagery not as decoration, but to explore new subjects and terrain. Harjo imagines horses as a way of retrieving her Native-American heritage, while McPherson and Cole create images that seem to come alive.

Mark Doty (l953- )
Since the late l980s, Mark Doty has been publishing supple, beautiful poetic meditations on art and relationships -- with lovers, friends, and a host of communities. His vivid, exact, sensory imagery is often a mode of knowing, feeling, and reaching out. Through images, Doty makes us feel a kinship with animals, strangers, and the work of artistic creation, which for him involves a way of seeing.

It is possible to enjoy Doty by following his evolving ideas of community. In "A Little Rabbit Dead in the Grass" from Source (2001), a dead rabbit provokes a philosophical meditation. This particular rabbit, like a poem, is important in itself and as a text, an "artfully crafted thing" on whose brow "some trace / of thought seems written." The next poem in Source, "Fish R Us," likens the human community to a bag of fish in a pet store tank, "each fry / about the size of this line." Like people, or ideas, the fish want freedom: They "want to swim forward," but for now they "pulse in their golden ball." The sense of a shared organic connection with others is carried throughout the volume. The third poem, "At the Gym," envisions the imprint of sweaty heads on exercise equipment as "some halo / the living made together."

Doty finds in Walt Whitman a personal and poetic guide. Doty has also written memorably of the tragic AIDS epidemic. His works include My Alexandria (l993), Atlantis (l995), and his vivid memoir Firebird (1999). Still Life With Oysters and Lemon (2001) is a recent collection.

Doty's poems are both reflexive (referencing themselves as art) and responsive to the outer world. He sees the imperfect yet vital body, especially the skin, as the margin -- a kind of text -- where internal and external meet, as in his short poem, also from Source, about getting a tattoo, "To the Engraver of My Skin."

I understand the pact is mortal,
agree to bear this permanence.
 
I contract with limitation; I say
no and no then yes to you, and sign
 
--here, on the dotted line--
for whatever comes, I do: our time,
 
our outline, the filling-in of our details
(it's density that hurts, always,
 
not the original scheme). I'm here
for revision, discoloration; here to fade
 
and last, ineradicable, blue. Write me!
This ink lasts longer than I do.

The Poetry of Spirit

A spiritual focus permeates another strand of contemporary American poetry. In this work, the deepest relationship is that between the individual and a timeless essence beyond -- though linked with -- artistic beauty. Older poets who heralded a spiritual consciousness include Gary Snyder, who helped introduce Zen to American poetry, and poet-translator Robert Bly, who brought an awareness of Latin American surrealism to U.S. poetry. In recent times, Coleman Barks has translated many books of the 13th-century mystic poet Rumi.

Spiritually attuned contemporary U.S. poets include Arthur Sze (1950- ), who is said to have a Zen-like sensibility. His poems offer literal and seemingly simple observations that are also meditations, such as these lines from "Throwing Salt on a Path" (1987): "Shrimp smoking over a fire. Ah, / the light of a star never stops, but travels." Shoveling snow, he notes: "The salt now clears a path in the snow, expands the edges of the universe."

Jane Hirshfield (l953- )
Jane Hirshfield makes almost no explicit references to Buddhism in her poems, yet they breathe the spirit of her many years of Zen meditation and her translations from the ancient court poetry of two Japanese women, Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. Hirshfield has edited an anthology, Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (l994).

Hirshfield's poetry manifests what she calls the "mind of indirection" in her book about writing poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997). This orientation draws on a reverence for nature, an economy of language, and a Buddhist sense of impermanence. Her own "poetry of indirection" works by nuance, association (often to seasons and weathers, evocative of world views and moods), and natural imagery.

Hirshfield's poem "Mule Heart," from her poetry collection The Lives of the Heart (1997), vividly evokes a mule without ever mentioning it. Hirshfield drew on her memory of a mule used to carry loads up steep hills on the Greek island of Santorini to write this poem, which she has called a kind of recipe for getting through a difficult time. The poem conjures the reader to take heart. This humble mule has its own beauty (bridle bells) and strength.

On the days when the rest
have failed you,
let this much be yours--
flies, dust, an unnameable odor,
the two waiting baskets:
one for the lemons and passion,
the other for all you have lost.
Both empty,
it will come to your shoulder,
breathe slowly against your bare arm.
If you offer it hay, it will eat.
Offered nothing,
it will stand as long as you ask.
The little bells of the bridle will hang
beside you quietly,
in the heat and the tree's thin shade.
Do not let its sparse mane deceive you,
or the way the left ear swivels into dream.
This too is a gift of the gods,
calm and complete.

The Poetry of Nature

The New World riveted the attention of Americans during the revolutionary era of the late 1700s, when Philip Freneau made a point of celebrating flora and fauna native to the Americas as a way of forging an American identity. Transcendentalism and agrarianism focused on America's relation to nature in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Today environmental concerns inform a powerful strain of ecologically oriented U.S. poetry. The late A.R. Ammons was one recent progenitor, and Native-American poets, such as the late James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko, never lost a reverence for nature. Contemporary poets rooted in a natural vision include Pattiann Rogers (1940- ) and Maxine Kumin (1925- ). Rogers brings natural history into focus, while Kumin writes feelingly of her personal life on a farm and her raising of horses.

Mary Oliver (1935- )
One of the most celebrated poets of nature is Mary Oliver. A stunning, accessible poet, Oliver evokes plants and animals with visionary intensity. Oliver was born in Ohio but has lived in New England for years, and her poems, like those of Robert Frost, draw on its varied landscape and changing seasons. Oliver finds meaning in encounters with nature, continuing in the Transcendental tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her work has a strong ethical dimension. Oliver's works include American Primitive (1983), New and Selected Poems (l992), White Pine (1994), Blue Pastures (1995), and the essays in The Leaf and the Cloud (2000).

For Oliver, no natural fact is too humble to afford insights, or what Emerson called "spiritual facts," as in her poem "The Black Snake" (1979). Though the speaker, as a driver of an automobile, is implicated in the snake's demise, she stops and removes the snake's body from the road -- an act of respect. She recognizes the often vilified snake, with its negative associations with the biblical book of Genesis and death, as a "dead brother," and she appreciates his gleaming beauty. The snake teaches her death, but also a new genesis and delight in life, and she drives on, thinking about the "light at the center of every cell" that entices all created life "forward / happily all spring" -- always unaware of where we will meet our end. This carpe diem is an invitation to a more rooted, celebratory awareness.

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve --
death, that is how it happens.
 
Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.
 
He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves
 
and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under
 
reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!
 
It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

Oliver's poems find countless ways to celebrate the simple yet transcendent fact of being alive. In "Hummingbird Pauses at the Trumpet Vine" (1992), she reminds us that most of existence is "waiting or remembering," since most of the world's time we are "not here, / not born yet, or died." An intensity reminiscent of the late poet James Wright burns through many of Oliver's poems, such as "Poppies" (1991-1992). This poem begins with a description of the "orange flares; swaying / in the wind, their congregations are a levitation." It ends with a taunt at death: "what can you do / about it -- deep, blue night?"

The Poetry of Wit

On the spectrum from poetry of self to poetry of the world, wit -- including humor, a sense of the incongruous, and flights of fancy -- lies close to world. Wit depends on the intersection of two or more frames of reference and on acute discrimination; this is a worldly poetry.

Poetry of wit locates the poetic occasion in everyday life raised to a humorous, surrealistic, or allegorical pitch. Usually the language is colloquial so that the fantastic situations have the heft of reality. Older masters of this vein are Charles Simic and Mark Strand; among younger poets, its practitioners include Stephen Dobyns and Mark Halliday.

The everyday language, humor, surprising action, and exaggeration of this poetry makes it unusually accessible, though the best of this work only gives up its secrets on repeated rereading.

Billy Collins (1941- )
The most influential of the poets of wit today is Billy Collins. Collins, who was the U.S. poet laureate for 2001-2003, is refreshing and exhilarating, as was Frank O'Hara a generation earlier. Like O'Hara, Collins uses everyday language to record the myriad details of everyday life, freely mixing quotidian events (eating, doing chores, writing) with cultural references. His humor and originality have brought him a wide audience. Though some have faulted Collins for being too accessible, his unpredictable flights of fancy open out into mystery.

Collins's is a domesticated form of surrealism. His best poems, too long to reproduce here, quickly propel the imagination up a stairway of increasingly surrealistic situations, at the end offering an emotional landing, a mood one can rest on, if temporarily, like a final modulation in music. The short poem "The Dead," from Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), gives some sense of Collins's fanciful flight and gentle settling down, as if a bird had come to rest.

The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
 
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
 
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

The Poetry of History

Poetry inspired by history is in some ways the most difficult and ambitious of all. In this vein, poets venture into the world with a lower-case "i," open to all that has shaped them. The faith of these poets is in experience.

An older poet working in this vein is Michael S. Harper, who interweaves African-American history with his family's experiences in a form of montage. Frank Bidart has similarly merged political events such as the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy with personal life. Ed Hirsch, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Rita Dove imbue some of their finest poems with similarly irreducible memories of their personal pasts, centering on touchstone moments.

Robert Pinsky (1940- )
Among the most accomplished of the poets of history is Robert Pinsky. U.S. poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, Pinsky links colloquial speech to technical virtuosity. He is insistently local and personal, but his poems extend into historical and national contexts. Like the works of Elizabeth Bishop, his conversational poetry wields seeming artlessness with subtle art.

Pinsky's influential book of criticism, The Situation of Poetry (l976), recommended a poetry with the virtues of prose, and he carried out that mandate in his book-length poem An Explanation of America (l979) and in History of My Heart (l984), though later books, including The Want Bone (l990), unleash a lyricism also seen in his impressive collected poems entitled The Figured Wheel (1996).

The title poem from The Figured Wheel is among Pinsky's finest works, but it is difficult to excerpt. The brief poem "The Want Bone," suggested by the jaw of a shark seen on a friend's mantel, displays Pinsky's technical brilliance (internal rhymes like "limber grin," slant rhymes as in "together" and "pleasure," and polysyllables pattering lightly against a drum-firm iambic line). The poem begins by describing the shark as the "tongue of the waves" and ends with its singing -- from the realm of the dead -- a paean of endless desire. The ego or self may be critiqued here: It is a pointless hunger, an O or zero, and its satisfaction a hopeless illusion.

The tongue of the waves tolled in the earth's bell.
Blue rippled and soaked in the fire of blue.
The dried mouthbones of a shark in the hot swale
Gaped on nothing but sand on either side.
 
The bone tasted of nothing and smelled of nothing,
A scalded toothless harp, uncrushed, unstrung.
The joined arcs made the shape of birth and craving
And the welded-open shape kept mouthing O.
 
Ossified cords held the corners together
In groined spirals pleated like a summer dress.
But where was the limber grin, the gash of pleasure?
Infinitesimal mouths bore it away,
 
The beach scrubbed and etched and pickled it clean.
But O I love you it sings, my little my country
My food my parent my child I want you my own
My flower my fin my life my lightness my O.

The Poetry of the World

On the furthest extreme of the poetic spectrum lies poetry of the world, presided over by the spirit of Elizabeth Bishop. This is a downbeat, or outcast, poetry that at first reading seems anti-poetical. It may seem too prosaic, too caught up with mere incidentals, to count for anything lasting. The hesitant delivery is the opposite of oracular, and the subject at first seems lost or merely descriptive. Nevertheless, the best of this poetry cuts through multiple perspectives, questions the very notion of personal identity, and understands suffering from an ethical perspective.

Older poets writing in this manner are Richard Hugo, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Phil Levine. Contemporary voices such as Ellen Bryant Voigt and Yusef Komunyakaa have been influenced by their almost naturalistic vision, and they are drawn to violence and its far-reaching shadow.

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )
Louisiana-raised Yusef Komunyakaa, born James Willie Brown, Jr., served in Vietnam directly after graduation from secondary school, winning a Bronze Star. He was a reporter for the military newspaper Southern Cross, and has written vivid poems set in the war. Often, as in "Camouflaging the Chimera" (1988), there is an element of suspense, danger, and ambush. Komunyakaa has spoken of the need for poetry to afford a "series of surprises." Like the poet Michael S. Harper, he often uses jazz methods, and he has written of the poetry's need for free improvisation and openness to other voices, as in a musicians' "jam session." He has co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991, 1996) and published a volume of essays entitled Blue Notes (2000), while he first gained recognition with Neon Vernacular (1993).

One of Komunyakaa's enduring themes concerns identity. His poem "Facing It" (1988), set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., begins with a riff that merges his own face with memories and reflected faces:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Cyber-Poetry

At the extreme end of the poetic spectrum, cyber-poetry is a new worldly poetry. For many young American adults, the book is secondary to the computer monitor, and reading a spoken human language comes after exposure to binary codes.

Computer-based literature has taken shape since the early 1990s; with the advent of the World Wide Web, some experimental poetry has shifted its focus to a paperless, virtual, global realm.

Recurring motifs in cyber-poetry include self-reflexive critiques of technologically driven work; computer icons, graphics, and hypertext links festoon vast webs of relationships, while dimensional layers -- animation, sonics, hyperlinked texts -- proliferate in multiple directions, sometimes created by multiple and unknown authors.

Outlets for this work come and go; they have included the CD-ROM poetry magazines The Little Magazine, Cyberpoetry, Java Poetry, New River, Parallel, and many others. Writing From the New Coast: Technique (1993), an influential gathering of poetic statements accompanied by a collection of poems edited by Juliana Spahr and Peter Gizzi, helped catalyze experimental poetry in the electronic age. It celebrates irreducible multiplicity and the primacy of historical context, attacking the very notions of identity and universality as repressive bourgeois constructs.

Jorie Graham and other experimental poets of self have arrived at similar viewpoints, coming from opposite directions. Ultimate or contingent, poems exist at the intersection of word and world.