If you’re going to call your essay “Poetry Slam” and gripe about the lack of politics in contemporary verse, then what about slam poetry, a nephew of Baraka’s own Black Arts poetry? Certainly the most popular current form of poetry (don’t see Merwin getting on HBO any time soon), you may not find it often here at Wag’s, but it’s certainly overtly political and talking directly about the conditions of contemporary living. Edmundson writes: “To the “War Against America” and the “War on Terror” and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and Syria, I look for something like the creative reaction that Whitman had to the Civil War and Ginsberg had to Vietnam.” Five minutes at a Poetry Slam might have avoided that particular slam on contemporary poetry.
And then he mentions the title of Tony Hoagland’s recent volume, “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty,” a clear example that the very things he’s looking for are happening all the time in contemporary American poetry. This instance, however, doesn’t deter Mr. Edmundson from carrying on with his point, as if it were the only book on the shelves to have anything to say about corporate capitalism.
The fact is, though not everyone says it as directly and literally as Hoagland does in a poem like “Food Court” (“If you want to talk about America, why not just mention / Jimmy’s Wok and Roll American-Chinese Gourmet Emporium?”), there are entire branches of contemporary poetry that speak very pointedly to the condition of 21st-century living. Just a few examples from our own pages: Flarf poetry like K. Silem Mohammed’s “Crap Bitches.” Conceptual poetry, like works by Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place. Mathias Svalina’s narrative poem built out of Google search suggestions. Ranjit Bhatnagar’s “Pentametron,” which scans Twitter for lines of iambic pentameter and creates perfect Elizabethan sonnets from them. Lenka Clayton’s “Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet,” a video poem built from a chopped-up George W. Bush State of the Union.
Notice a trend? Young poets, diverse in gender and background, unsurprisingly swimming in the contemporary world and with a hell of a lot of interesting critical things to say about it.