As much as a web site can, at least. If you’re looking for effusive, ambitious, possibly obscure readings of contemporary American poetry, you should check out these reviews. If you read Charles Bernstein’s 1990s essay, “State of the Art,” and you thought that he got poetry right. It is chaotic. It is too many different poets writing too many different poetries. And the 1990s didn’t know how to handle it (sorry, history of poetry).
But by the 2010s and 2020s, American poetry kind of figured it out. Or, as the reviews on this web site would argue, poetry finally relaxed into many different forms from many different perspectives. It found ways to be loving and hateful. Miniscule and grotesque. Monumental and inimitable. It’s like Bernstein envisioned a future with all these different poetries. And rather than shoe-horning them into camps, they could just exist. And readers could exist.
I don’t know what people say about poetry these days. I don’t know where people go to talk about poetry. I’m posting book reviews here, because I am interested in using a tag system for describing individual books. My implicit argument: really good books of poetry can carry multiple readings, depending on your angle of vision. It suits the American poetry that has emerged in the last ten years to represent more of what America is. Poets from different backgrounds, different experiences, and different identities. The challenge is finding reasonable approaches to these disparate styles of poetry.
In Harryette Mullen’s “Poetry and Identity,” she describes the conflict readers experienced with her poetry. Was she an African American poet? Or was she a “formally innovative” one. That was 1996. The tag system used in these reviews argues she should be read under both headings (of course!). But she should also be read in the distinct ways each of these lenses would offer. The tags I propose are admittedly subjective. But I hope they also speak to the variety of concerns and intentions that can inform any single book of poems.
A handful of reviews that I’ve recently written or updated. A more complete set is accessible from the Reviews page.
On a technical side, I’ve also moved my site from Wordpress to Notion Sites. Because I’m an avid Notion user. This site is closely attached to a note structure I keep for myself. I mention this, because I am as enthusiastic about the Notion app as I am American poetry.