American Literary History

Jed Rasula
From Corset to Podcast: The Question of Poetry Now
American Literary History - Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 660-673

Oxford University Press

Project MUSE - American Literary History - From Corset to Podcast: The Question of Poetry Now Project MUSE Journals American Literary History Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009 From Corset to Podcast: The Question of Poetry Now American Literary History Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2009 E-ISSN: 1468-4365 Print ISSN: 0896-7148 From Corset to Podcast:The Question of Poetry Now Jed Rasula Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, Chris Funkhouser. University of Alabama Press, 2007. One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, Dan Chiasson. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form, by David Caplan. Oxford University Press, 2005. Observing the claims for poetry is a curious pastime. It's like going to the zoo and seeing a preening cockatoo, a slumbering leopard, and a camouflaged toad in successive glimpses. No wonder Marianne Moore's fastidiously poetic temperament was most keenly invested in a menagerie. For all its variety, a zoo remains a selection, an anthology of animal life. Anthologies fitfully persist in the poetry world, of course, but nearing the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century it seems unlikely that anything resembling the "anthology wars" of fifty years ago will erupt again. One reason is demographic. In 1960, when the two anthologies famously duked it out1 -- the American population was 178 million. With the figure now over 300...