From Corset to Podcast: The Question of Poetry Now

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 million, you would expect it would take at least four anthologies (with no overlap of contents) to begin to replicate that distant moment when the Beats and other outsiders clamored at the gates of official verse culture. But such a simple numerical calculation is misleading: one would also have to factor in the vast increase in the percentage of the collage educated population, and within that educated portion, one would have to take into account the graduates of creative writing programs (of which there are now over four hundred in the US, nearly all established in the past forty years). There are other reasons that make a return of the anthology wars unlikely. Demographic proliferation of poets has been accompanied by a corresponding proliferation of constituencies. The old paradigm of insiders and outsiders, establishment figures and renegades, makes little sense now. Finally, we should bear in mind the hugely transformative advent of the Internet. It may not yet be the first place we turn to find poetry, but the validity of this sentence has an expiration date looming up rapidly. Three recent publications help bring the poetry zoo into focus, if not always for the reasons they intend.

Among the virtues of David Caplan's Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (2005) is his concern to debunk the malignant view that aesthetic conservatism is politically retrograde. In a specious formula, the whalebone corset was abandoned even before flappers made the scene, yet sonnets continue to be written. Citing Marilyn Hacker's "belief that 'traditional' forms need not advance reactionary politics" (72), Caplan makes a convincing case that "During the last two decades, gay and lesbian poets have dominated the art of the love sonnet" (62). Caplan is aware, of course, that "gay and lesbian" are code words in academia generally for progressive, so his profile of metrics in the gay community pointedly complicates the picture by including sado-masochism as a formal prerogative. "My soul-animal prefers the choke-chain," in Henri Cole's memorable line (qtd in Caplan 78). Caplan's profile of metrical aids to sexual politics make this particular chapter stand out (a high point being his discussion of Rafael Campo's sonnet "Safe Sex"), but this is nicely integrated into the book as a whole, which offers a useful assessment of the delicate balance poets face when confronting volatile, disturbing, and otherwise complex subjects in the late twentieth century, a time when the reigning ideology of self-expression maligned formalism as an impediment to authenticity, and free verse was embraced as the golden road to well-being.

As Caplan documents, poets choose forms for many reasons: to stimulate the verbal imagination (like Scrabble or crossword puzzles), as a pact of solidarity with predecessors, as a strategic means of disabling habits and the lazy solutions, and even just for the hell of it (Elizabeth Bishop called the sestina "a sort of stunt" [qtd in Caplan 21]). But Questions of Possibility is most interested in possibility as socio-cultural reckoning; one cannot help but sense Caplan's entire...