Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod, eds. <i>The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry</i>

Along with the close-up cover photo of a thickly layered abstract painting by Laura Eve Borenstein, the most immediately striking aspect of the print version of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry is its size: weighing in at 2.5 pounds, with 535 broad, 8 × 10–inch pages, and thirty-eight chapters (each an individual essay or interview), the book is enormous. The sheer scale is, of course, intentional; as editors Craig Svonkin and Steven Gould Axelrod propose in their “Introduction”: “We wanted this Handbook to be a whale of a book, and moreover to be what Melville called a ‘Loose-Fish’—not one with clear labels but one that reflects the slippery nature of poetry, reading, and reality itself” (1). Rather than aim for a master narrative of contemporary American poetry, Svonkin and Axelrod present a polyphony, “slippery” in that no one voice—or type of poetry examined—predominates, yet each intertwines—though does not necessarily blend—with others. But even metaphors are slippery for Svonkin and Axelrod, who generate multiple analogies in the introduction to explain their approach, including discord and the benefit of looking through partial perspectives:Bishop, along with Robert Lowell and John Ashbery, is one of the touchstone twentieth-century poets whom many of the book’s poets and essayists reference. Unwary readers may assume that Svonkin and Axelrod quote here from “The Monument,” a poem that Bishop critics interpret as subverting T. S. Eliot’s claim from “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” Bishop’s “Monument,” warped, cracked, shape-shifting, and only capable of being glimpsed piecemeal, certainly calls into question not only Eliot’s “ideal order” (however modified by the new), but his presumption of ascribing aesthetic monumentality to any work of art, and thus would suit Svonkin’s and Axelrod’s spirited editorial resistance to a “unidirectional” perspective (2). But no, they quote from Bishop’s “Roosters” (“each one an active / displacement in perspective; / each screaming, ‘This is where I live!’”) and thus slyly invoke a spectacle, reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine Woods,” of raucous, strutting roosters as an analogy for today’s poetry scene, crowded with a cacophony of poets all vying for attention. How, then, should readers—whether scholars, poets, or anyone interested in poetry—navigate such a field without feeling overwhelmed by so many voices, a form of “information overload” that risks creating decision fatigue, rather than engagement? Even Marjorie Perloff, in the Handbook’s opening chapter, admits the problem: “today there are so many chapbooks, and so many little handbooks that people do in their own basement . . . today there’s no serious peer review. It’s become too easy, and there are just too many people writing and publishing” (17).Even as they acknowledge the overload (and, indeed, spotlight it as a postmodernist poetic mode by closing the book with Jeffrey Gray’s “Data Dump: Poetry and Information in the Twenty-First Century”), Svonkin and Axelrod are, after all, designing the Handbook as a helpful guide, however sprawling. The strength of their editing—along with commissioning such a lively and informative collection of essays and interviews—lies in their organization. They divide the book into three sections, the first providing historical contexts, the second (appropriately at the heart of the book) offering interviews with poets, and the third presenting views of “The Contemporary Moment,” including timely examinations of eco-poetics, poetry and economics, and the “Data Dump” essay. In sorting the contributions into numbered chapters, Svonkin and Axelrod tie the Handbook together as a book, rather than a loose collection, and create for contemporary American poetry not an “ideal order” but a contingent one: uncertain (because subject to change), yet also (in the root meaning of the word) “touching against,” for the chapter sequence creates thematic through lines and highlights how practices and contexts defining different types of contemporary poetry may overlap even as they diverge. Thus, while the book invites browsing, it rewards serial reading. For example, in “The Contemporary Moment” section, Svonkin and Axelrod follow Brian Reed’s “Poetry Translation and Poet-Translators,” which raises linguistic, cultural, and political questions about blinkered, decontextualized attempts by US poets at translation, with Jessica Lewis Luck’s “Prosthetic Poetics: Contemporary Poetry of Disability,” whose last section discusses ASL performances and explores similar questions about their “translatability,” not only of whether they should “have voice-over or captions in English for hearing audiences” but also howAlthough these chapters would be in conversation with one another regardless of their placement, Svonkin’s and Axelrod’s juxtaposition enriches them both, for it highlights not only the politics of translation but also the Handbook’s aim to “reflect the slippery nature of poetry, reading, and reality itself” and to demonstrate how contemporary poets, in playing with form, language, and genre, revel in such slipperiness. Indeed, “saying something somewhat different in each language at the same time” can serve as yet another analogy for the divergent discourses of contemporary poetry.Nevertheless, despite the editors’ insistence on not imposing a master narrative, it’s hard to come away from reading the book cover-to-cover without a sense of unity in the midst of diversity, at least in regard to two defining features of contemporary poetry. First, whereas in the mid to late twentieth century, there was much posturing and many pitched battles among poets over the question of poetic form (free verse versus formal verse? Lineated poetry versus prose poetry? Language poetry versus lyric poetry?), form as a crux of poetry seems barely contested at this point. Considering how often “experimental poetry” is validated in the Handbook through being featured in chapters such as Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s “Experimental Asian American Poetry,” Michel Delville’s “Undisciplined Writing: Postwar Prose Poetry,” James McCorkle’s “Ecopoetics: In and Against the American Grain,” Maria Lauret’s “Multilingual American Poetry and Poetics,” Jeffrey Gray’s “Data Dump,” and interviews with Rae Armantrout, Geof Huth, and Cristoso Apache, the approach is now, though still challenging and far from standardized, closer to a poetic norm rather than a contested outlier. More significantly, especially in regard to how the Handbook implicitly answers the question “what is poetry?”—or, better, “what is poetry now?”—a baseline assumption of many of the poets featured in the essays and interviews is that poetry is a vehicle for asserting, exploring, and advocating for identity.While many of the Handbook’s strongest chapters are notable for their analysis (including close readings of example poems), contextualization, and historicity in defining how a particular poetry of identity is unique, there is little question among the contributors, or the poets discussed and interviewed, that poetry’s main purpose is to chart a poet’s identity. Although, as Svonkin and Axelrod argue, each poet’s view is partial given that it arises from distinctive cultural, historical, linguistic, ethnic, gender, and sexual perspectives, identity is the ground base common to the Handbook’s polyphony, as even a small sampling of chapter titles from the third section suggests: “Claiming their Place: Contemporary Arab American Poetry and Poetics,” “The Rise of Award-Winning Black Poets,” “The Fourth Wave in Native American Poetics,” “Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry,” and “What is the Queer Confessional?” While some of these chapters look back at how twentieth-century poets lay the foundation for a contemporary group’s current poetry of identity, much of that literary history is established in the first section, “Roots and Branches of the Contemporary.” Taken together, the chapters in this section highlight how post–World War II schools of poetry—Feminist, Beat, New York, Confessional, Jewish-American, Queer, Asian-American Experimentalist—invite twenty-first-century US poets to envision poetry as a venue for identity exploration and linguistic experimentation.The most intriguing chapters in “Roots and Branches,” aim to rewrite literary history retrospectively. Steven Axelrod, for example, proposes that Confessionalism be reimagined by including the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, who was crossing genre boundaries and writing poetry that we would now call “confessional” in her autobiographical Annie Allen (1949) and prose work Maud-Martha (1953) long before Robert Lowell published Life Studies (1959). Two essays debate the politics of canonization. In “Binding Nation-States: Poetry Anthologies of Hawai’i, 1966–2018,” Stanley Orr, arguing that “the literary anthology has often been associated with the exercise of political power,” surveys how “the anthology has indeed proved a site of contest with respect to the poetries of Hawai’i,” from exclusion by continental editors to increasing self-definition in the hands of Indigenous editors. Similarly, Bill Mohr, in “The National Anthology Wars and West Coast Anthologies,” challenges the by-now conventional narrative of “anthology wars” as a path through which mid- and late twentieth-century anthologies (and the poets they represent) came to be canonized. As one of the few chapters in the Handbook to examine where (and why) poets get published, and also the role MFA programs play in canon crafting and the professionalization of poetry, Mohr raises crucial questions about editing criteria, especially for mainstream East Coast anthologies, such as The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985), which, he argues, unlike the radical, small press West Coast anthologies he champions, “shimmered with identity flourishes, as it coordinated the personal characteristics of its poets in a manner that clearly emphasized class and cultural capital,” with back-cover copy trumpeting “the poets’ identities, revealing them as implicitly middle- to upper-class (‘suburban parents,’ ‘one or more graduate degrees in literature and writing,’) and heteronormative” (157). In contrast, West Coast anthologies, such as Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree, Mohr’s own Poetry Loves Poetry, and Philip Levine and Juan Felipe Herrera’s Down at the Depot: 20 Fresno Poets, along with Bay Area anthologies representing Berkeley and San Francisco Renaissance poets, were much more diverse (in terms of ethnicity, sexuality, and poetic form), and therefore more accurate harbingers of twenty-first-century-US poetry today than doorstopper, “career-making” collections like the Morrow Anthology.Concluding his essay, Mohr lauds West Coast anthologies for their anti-institutionalist stance, which is, ironically, one exception to the otherwise forward-looking perspective that made them forerunners of poetry today. As Ann Keniston argues in her astute chapter on “Contemporary Poetry and the Marketplace,” although “the economic and cultural situation of poetry has generally come to be understood as bleak,” poetry “can be exchanged, critics note, for academic promotions, as well as fellowships and awards that are often directly translatable into or manifest in monetary terms” (324). Contemporary poetry, as featured in the Handbook, although wonderfully diverse, is also resoundingly academic. All the book’s contributors, including the poets interviewed, teach or have taught at universities, with the exception of JonArno Lawson, a Canadian children’s poet, and visual poet Geof Huth. And, despite the variety and vitality of poetry on display in the Handbook, acknowledgment that poetry can give pleasure, or move readers emotionally, surfaces infrequently—more often in the interviews than in the chapters. The Handbook opens with Marjorie Perloff and her interviewers’ nuanced discussion of emotion in poetry (and her preference for the down-to-earth, tongue-in-cheek attitude of Frank O’Hara) and closes, disquietingly, with Jeffery Gray’s proposal in “Data Dump” that the affectless catalogues and objected-oriented anomie of the data-driven poetry he examines not only accurately encompass contemporary experience, but herald the poetry of the future: “if one had to predict where first-world poetry on the pages (as distinct from spoken word) will go, for better or worse, this, like the data stream in which we swim, may well be the mainstream” (484).Between these poles, the contributors who advocate for the importance of emotion in poetry are few enough to be memorable. In “Jewish Poetry and the Late Twentieth-Century Literary Canon” and “Recent Trends in Jewish American Poetry,” Hilene Flanzbaum and Norman Finkelstein, respectively, invoke emotional evocation, including humor, as distinctive to Jewish identity and thus crucial to Jewish American poetry, especially as an antidote to what Flanzbaum denigrates as mainstream, Anglo-Saxon, poetics of impersonality (104). For Erika T. Wurth, whether the Native American poets she discusses write experimental prose poems or more conventional narrative or lyric forms (all of which derive, she claims, from “White Academia”), the distinguishing features of the “fourth wave” of Native American poetry arise from emotion and the lived details of experience (412–13). Wurth, along with Perloff, is one of the few contributors who risks invoking beauty as a criterion for poetry. As Svonkin and Axelrod assert in the “Introduction,” “we agree that one cannot disengage aesthetic judgement from historical and cultural power dynamics” (2). While justifiable, such caution may lead to critics and poets not only reluctant to discuss emotion or beauty as components of poetry but also to find them inherently suspect, which risks reinforcing the general culture’s dismissal of poetry. As avant-garde poet Geof Huth bluntly observes, “Our society commonly deprecates the term poetry when it refers to poetry itself and gives it the sense of ‘a thing of exalted beauty’ only when employing the term to describe anything not actually a poem” (256). Likewise, many of the book’s contributors (although not the interviewees) also seem reluctant to voice the idea that poetry should give pleasure to readers, especially as a reason why non-academic people would engage with it. Correspondingly, with the exception of the chapter on “Contemporary Children’s Poetry: A Colloquy,” which brims with the participants’ joy in the delights offered by the genre, including the pleasures of nonsense poetry, the Handbook gives little attention to US poets who flourish outside the academy, such as popular poets Amanda Gorman and current Poet Laureate Ada Limón (neither of them merit mention in any of the book’s chapters). Nor does the Handbook attend to non-academic spaces where readers enthusiastically generate, exchange, make memes from, or perform poems. Stephanie Burt, to her credit, acknowledges in her interview “a new generation of poets coming out of performance, out of a youth spent with YouTube, a generation that heard contemporary poems before reading them” (301). Given the on-going crisis in the Humanities, and the corresponding decline in English majors (and of English Departments as havens for poets and poetry scholars), this new generation may portend the future of poetry in the United States. In the meantime, we are fortunate to have Svonkin’s and Axelrod’s Handbook as an engaging, and bountiful, guide.

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