5. On the present and future of American poetry

Abstract

“On the present and future of American poetry” argues that the contemporary poets who follow Robert Lowell’s model of blending public and private history often turn against the particular hierarchies that made the Lowell name seem “significant, illustrative, American, etc.” Instead, contemporary poets have taken up the challenge of presenting a new account of American history and culture. They introduce a new set of important names of people and places. The poets of the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, elegize African American victims of police violence. At the same time, their poems add new variations of the two characteristics of American: the perceived need for distinctiveness and its transnationalism.