The goal of this collection is to construct a representative English language history of recent North American ways in which one or another idea of the lyric poem has figured in, or been conceived as standing against, the effort to realize a more “open” poetic form. While the writers whose work is gathered here acknowledge the existence of something like a late twentieth-century battle of the books waged between practitioners and proponents of avant-gardist and of more traditional poetries, our emphasis is on what has actually been done in this 1963–2008 period to reconceive, reframe, or (in some cases)...

This essay concerns some points of contact between long poems/experimentalist poems and lyric poetries, something that has interested me over the years as a writer of a long poem who has claimed polemically to “resist the lyric.”¹ Already I feel double, duplicitous, and I haven’t even begun. My essay presents a peculiar proposition (wary of being a thesis), and one I might also abjure under pressure, as it is an odd or quirky finding. The proposition may also have a use-by date: it seems to emerge at our mid-century and be operable currently, thus also susceptible to other further shifts....

Many now believe there is a difference in kind between so-called conventional lyric poetry, or what Marjorie Perloff calls “straight lyric” (or just plain lyric poetry), and work labeled avant-garde (or experimental). Although no good reader would deny that there are in fact distinctions to be made – say between a poem by Mina Loy, a poem by Wallace Stevens, and a poem by Ezra Pound or, in our current context, between a poem by Steve McCaffery, a poem by Susan Howe, and a poem by P.K. Page – a number of critics have come to see in these differences...

In the East Village of New York City, in August 1972, the experimental poet Hannah Weiner began seeing words – hallucinations appearing on surfaces around her, including her own forehead, which she could “read” from within. She believed she was clairvoyantly receiving directions and commentary from unseen guiding spirits. She had been seeing “images and energy fields” for over a year, and she had been writing about what she saw, carefully recording it all, certain that she was the addressee.¹ When she sees the first word Weiner is thrilled – despite the fact that the word is “wrong.” She believes...

O cadoiro is, literally, the place where falling is made. In Galician, cadoiro is one word for waterfall. Cataract, perhaps. Thus, the fall. This to me is the place of poetry. For whoever writes poetry must be prepared, ever, to fall down.

And in 2004 I did fall. Having already fallen into Galician and then Portuguese, I had barely stood up again when I fell – or leapt – into one of the founts of lyric in Western Europe, the troubadour poetry of the medieval Galician-Portuguese songbooks, the cancioneiros. These songbooks hold what remains to us of the two hundred...

There’s a certain irony that emerges when the author of what are often understood to be the greatest examples of twentieth-century aleatoric poetry is himself the victim of the cruel indifferences of chance. In June 1968, while at work on the final stages of his latest volume, 22 Light Poems, which was forthcoming from Black Sparrow Press, Jackson Mac Low wrote of delays to publisher John Martin, explaining that he’d been unable to complete his afterward to the volume because the ceiling of his study had fallen in, covering his materials and workspace in plaster, and forcing him to relocate...

In early March of 2008, two environmental activists, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie, sequestered themselves in a Toronto apartment for four days in order to perform an unusual experiment. They deliberately exposed themselves through daily activities to a variety of common household substances, such as personal-care products, plastic food containers, and furniture treated with stain repellent. In addition to taking regular blood and urine samples, they passed the time watching cable news and playing “Guitar Hero.” The purpose of this unorthodox experiment, which the authors likened to a science fair project, was to measure levels of common pollutants in their...

In an annunciative essay of 1973, Harold Bloom set the work of his friend A.R. Ammons squarely in Emerson’s line.¹ Those with something to say about the poet since have generally taken the Emerson-derived quality to be perfectly self-evident. In an essay published some thirty years later, for instance, Marjorie Perloff in one stroke summons and dismisses the side of Ammons’s work she considers tired and trite: “[the] willed air, as if to say, yes, I am an Emersonian poet and should therefore talk of the mysterious ‘radiance, that does not withhold itself …’ I should present the epiphany that...

Let me start at a mid-peak in the Language moment, at Ron Silliman’s buoyant proclamation of innovative fecundity in “The Practice of Art,” his 1994 afterword to The Art of Practice, the poetry anthology edited by Dennis Barone and Peter Gannick to supplement the acknowledged lacunae in Silliman’s own In the American Tree. That in excess of 160 North American poets, he claims, “are actively and usefully involved in the avant-garde tradition of writing is itself a stunning thought … [W]e in North America are living in a poetic renaissance unparalleled in our history.”¹ I wish to discuss against this...