‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American Poetry

Through close analysis of dictionary definition form in the poetry of Robert Pinsky, Mary Kinzie, and Solmaz Sharif, and with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1975), this chapter explores the ways in which the dictionary definition poem celebrates and also questions the dictionary’s authority through the dialogic juxtaposition of different forms, registers, and discourses. The analyses problematise binary distinctions between poem as sound-focused, subjective, and individually constructed, and dictionary definition as textual, objective, and communally constructed. Both the dictionary definition and the poem share an association with word as artefact, with cultural memory and history, preservation and loss. This chapter demonstrates how, by encouraging the reader to ‘dwell in possibility’, the dictionary definition poem offers a fertile space for the discussion and reconfiguration of cultural meaning.

The Reality Based Community

In this essay I argue that increasing blurring of boundaries between representational and the real has been characcteristic of the War on terror. I then argue that has produced a response in contemporary American poetry which attempts to produce a critique by collapsing or undermining these distinctions fictionally in order to draw attention to their collapse in political and military discourse. Looking at several poems which take photography as a theme, I aim to show how a specific genre of photo-ekphrastic poetry has proved partiularly germane to this effort.

Beyond Protest: Voice and Exit in Contemporary American Poetry

In liberal political economy, voice (voting, complaining, etc.) and exit (dissociating, boycotting, etc.) are the two primary feedback mechanisms for improving large organizations. When it comes to the political state, however, exit is off the table: no one leaves the state, so dissenters must articulate their dissatisfaction within systems of representation. For any politics opposed to the state, voice is all one has. This essay reads Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005) and Well Then There Now (2011) and Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem (2006) as exemplars of an impetus in contemporary American poetry to enable exit from the state. However, this project inevitably fails, and the poetics of exit resorts to a renewed voice. Rather than a complaint addressed to authority, these poets’ voiced demand for exit now forms the potential basis of new political collectivities, people joined by a shared desire to leave the state.

Young, Blithe, and Whimsical

This chapter challenges the conceptual model dominating histories of modern American poetry from the 1940s, in which political and aesthetic radicalism are seen as mutually exclusive responses to twentieth-century modernity, by analyzing the avant-gardism of The Masses. It considers how The Masses, together with several other little magazines, enriched the New Verse movement by joining and competing with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as vibrant venues of contemporary American poetry. It explains how The Masses, by putting ideology above artistry, placed itself beyond the pale of true modernism. It argues that the verse published in The Masses was more than just belated sentimentalizing or Marxist sermonizing with no significant role in the emergence of modern poetry. On the contrary, the magazine had a substantial institutional and aesthetic impact upon the New Poetry. The chapter also contends that The Masses's eclectic and iconoclastic poetics of modernity was strongly aligned with the experimental spirit later valorized by historians as modernist.