Well I'm going to sort of also talk about some of the things,
some of the other panelists have said because now it's a trend.
I think what Loren said about the phrase
new trends being an oxymoron is absolutely right.
I mean, I think probably the best way
to think about this is as a conversation
as to observations of what's happening.
On the one hand, what's new in contemporary poetry is
that we're new, we're all new.
All of us, each of us individually and irreplaceably.
Another thing that's new is language.
I think last year the word of the year voted by the American
Library Association was metrosexual.
And that would not have come about without Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy or some forms of new media,
as other folks are saying too.
On the other hand, I think that in terms
of how today is in fact an anniversary of the poems not
fit for the White House event, the newest thing is always
the newness of history, the newness of the events that
are happening moment by moment, year by year.
And actually I want to read two quotes
from two of the introductory essays
to the Best American Poetry Anthologies, which
come out yearly.
The first one is Robert Hass which came out in 2001,
but it came out before 9/11.
I mean, he's talking first about younger poets, our generation.
First he talks about how in fact for him, what he's observed
is that the central problem is the self's
relation to language.
And he says, "partly they're"--
we-- "are reacting against what has come to seem effortless
and therefore indulgent in the previous generation.
The poem of incident in plain language, which
aims at a certain sincerity of address and tone, as if life
was exactly the size of the self and consisted
of a set of serial epiphanies.
Some of this echoes the influence
a critical tradition in European philosophy in universities.
Some of it is the ground clearing required
of any oppositional art.
In this case because it's suspicious of subject matter
as such, as I've seen it described
of the aboutness of poetry, it's preoccupied
with issues of style, with the relationship between language
and perception."
But later on in the essay he then says, "that this, in fact,
has become its own convention."
So that's also something to throw out there,
is that right now we're at a moment where language poetry
sort of peaked about 10 years ago.
And so there's no one school that's really predominant.
In fact, we're really lucky to be
in this moment of writing poetry there's no hegemonic school,
so to speak.
The best work is probably always done between schools.
And another quote is by Yusef Komunyakaa from his essay
To the Best American Poetry, 2003
and of course, this is well after 9/11.
This is after that poetry event was canceled
and this is when we were well and away,
we were in war in Iraq.
He says "the folly by the so-called new avant
garde, the so-called experimental poems,
seem like an attempt to undermine
the importance of recent history,
to place tonal and linguistic flux as a center of the poem.
Anything goes because the poet or the poet speaker
doesn't exist.
It's death in language."
So he comes down really hard actually
in terms of the poet's responsibility
to the new events.
And I think in some ways he was he was reacting against some
of the arguments that were going on about it very much in favor
of experimentalism.
But when there's that contact with brutal fact and history
and war, I think that in some ways
the centering of the poem to the exclusion of everything else
really feels inadequate in some ways,
not that there's one or the other.
I think that it really, again, to go back
to the spaces between schools, I think
that's where the most exciting work is done.
And I'd like to end with a quote by Bei Dao.
When we're talking about new trends in contemporary poetry,
we often talk about just American poetry rather than
international poetry.
And the fascinating thing about that
is that the syntax of each language
is particular to each language.
And so when you have a poet like Bei Dao
who writes, "a crack has appeared between night and day
and you did not appear at the time we appointed."
in Chinese.
There's no connecting word.
It could be and he did not appear.
It could be translated as for he did not appear.
And that's why the crack has appeared between day and night.
Or it could be translated as but he did not appear.
So these are issues that would be
very much alive in the English translation of his poem.
But in the original, of course, they're simply juxtaposed
and that space between them is open,
and it's open to my interpretation.