As much as a web site can, at least. It’s home to effusive, ambitious, possibly obscure readings of contemporary American poetry. In the 1990s, I read Charles Bernstein’s essay, “State of the Art,” and there was something that felt very right a chaotic American poetry. Like allowing that as the baseline felt like something to be excited for. A space that’s too many different poets writing too many different poetries. Unfortunately, as Bernstein notes, the 1990s didn’t know how to handle it. Alas, says the history of poetry.
By the 2010s and 2020s, however, it seems like American poetry kind of figured it out. Or, as the reviews on this web site would argue, poetry has finally relaxed into many different forms from many different perspectives. Poetry can be loving and hateful. Miniscule and grotesque. It can be monuments to personality and claustrophobic and inimitable. I think Bernstein envisioned a future with all these different poetries. And now that the “poetry wars” are done, we don’t have to shoe-horn them into camps. Poetry exists. And readers exist, too.
This web site is, on one hand, testament to the fact that 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 (regular-sized reviews and microreviews, in the spirit of Boston Review), because I am interested in using a #tag system for describing individual poems and books of poems. My implicit argument: really good books of poetry can carry multiple readings, depending on your angle of vision. Maybe that sounds like what everyone says already. I would prefer more specificity. Rather than saying poetry should be read for both aesthetics and identity, I want to think about which aesthetic. And in the spirit of intersectionality, I would like to think of how readings shift as individual identities come into sharper focus.
To me, the volume and variety of poetry published represent more of what America is. Poets from different backgrounds, different experiences, and different identities. The #tag system is a reasonable approach to synthesize readings, accounting for disparate styles with the disparate people writing.
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.