Trying to Define Contemporary Poetry

James F. Lewis IV
ENGL 550
April 1st, 2007
Essay: What is Contemporary Poetry?/Nature in Poetry: A Reconstituting of the Term


“The Newest of the New”: Trying to Define “Contemporary” Poetry

When, exactly, does it begin? The shift in an artistic period? In fact, though dates are determined and assigned for textbooks, there are no distinct “lines in the sand,” no division drawn capable of being delineated by dates; similar to shifts in other artistic forms of expression, what can be defined as “contemporary poetry” has gradually emerged, establishing its identity though the voice of a broad range of poets throughout the later half of the twentieth century. Familiar voices, such as those of Theodore Roethke, Silvia Plath, Jim Harrison and Mary Oliver, occupy an esteemed position of notoriety within the milieu of contemporary poetry, their names conjuring up literary remembrances of confession, depression, and redemption through a reconstituted understanding of nature, and sensibilities that shatter the banality of our overly-codified contemporary existence, revealing to us a life mysterious and, in this understanding of mystery, a sense of healing, an exhalation to arrive at an essential connection with our own existence. Therefore, implicit in contemporary poetry is a letting go of, even a rebellion to, abstract theoretical constructs of postmodernism which leave us groundless and disconnected from a complex and profound existence.
It is in arriving at this sense of being that contemporary poets deconstruct previously held positions on Nature, jettisoning romantic ideas perceiving “Nature” as a sacred and exotic “Other” into which we travel for redemption, escape, and purification and reconstituting the concept as a dynamic and essential manifestation of existence of which human beings are–intrinsically and inescapably–a part.
Along with freshly conceived understandings of nature, contemporary poetry seems to establish and, correspondingly, define itself by means of that by which contemporary poets struggle in a healing process which is, itself, unstructured, more of an adjustment and a coming to terms with what is rather than an idealization and subsequent attainment of what should be. It is this transformation (which really isn’t a transformation so much as a coming into awareness of what already is), that is, essentially, natural.
Nature, therefore, and what we experience as human beings is not transcendent, as in the notion of the term established by the American transcendentalists of the 19th century (e.g. Thoreau and Emerson), rather it is who and what we are. In fact, there really is no “essential” component to it, as for there to be something essential there must be that which is artificial or superfluous. In other words, our “essential” self, it seems to be suggested in much of the work of contemporary poets, is just our complete self, us as we exist. It may even be argued that our abstract and theoretical notions of reality, though overly intellectualized and alienating, are natural in and of themselves (the act of thinking being as natural to a human being as swimming is to an amoeba).
And, so, you might say that a hallmark of contemporary poetry is a moving away from am emphasis upon highly glossed alienating structural forms familiar to the high-brow work of a modernist poet like T.S. Eliot towards a heightened importance placed upon the experiential element of life manifesting itself in both joy and depression, understanding and confusion, mystery and profundity, feeling and sensation.