Networks of the Real in Contemporary Poetry & Poetics: Peter Middleton, Susan Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop

In a review of three books on contemporary poetry and poetics, Mossin emphasizes the connections between formal concerns (especially those related to avant-garde practices) and the audiences, readers and varying communities that give poetic texts their meaning. In so doing, this review suggests how the close interrelation between poetic theory, formal experimentation and interpretation profoundly influences the meanings we derive from poems. Finally, Mossin argues that the postmodern attention to alternative poetic forms and to language as the material basis of poetic meaning serves as the work's political and ethical stance.