Robert Pinsky, elaborating Alexis de Tocqueville, suggested that
“[p]oetry and our ideas about it…offer ways to inspect characteristic dramas of our national life.” To test Pinsky’s assertion, we're reading the work of six contemporary American poets, paying particular attention to the work’s engagement with social and political issues in America. We’ll probe how the lyric’s often enclosed, private manners may expand into public life; we’ll also investigate the ways our public, popular world engages with and conceives lyric endeavors.
The six contemporary poets we're focussing on are: Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche, Caroline Knox, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Louise Gluck, and Robert Pinsky.
All are working today, and all question or reject outright the New Critical mandate that the lyric poem must function, at least in part, as a self-contained autotelic artifact. As we consider these particular contemporary authors, though, we’ll also dip into works by other authors, live ones and dead ones, to continue to assess our sense of the tradition and the dimensions of the issue. And as we study the poets’ works, we’ll read: 1) reviews of the work in popular print media, and 2) essays by the likes of Richard Ohmann and Frank Kermode— writers who don’t comment on the poets we’re reading but, rather, who address the problematics of Art in the public sphere, and in the marketplace— techniques of indirection (i.e. literary work/poetry) brought to bear on matters of direct action.
Also, as the intersection of poetry and the "public" is part of our topic, we're developing part of our writing and discussion in this public forum, the "blog."
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