Contemporary American Poetry and Its Public Worlds

But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For that, one really has to to wait for the advent of a new species of philosophers, such as somehow another and converse taste and propensity from those we have known so far--philosophers of the dangerous "maybe" in every sense.

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec 2.)

This will not be one more lament for the sad state of contemporary American poetry. Yet to define some of the basic strengths of new work I have to begin with what seems like a lament. For perhaps the most important invigorating element for contemporaries is a widespread dissatisfaction with what is called romantic lyricism, poetry based on the dramatization of intense subjective states leading to moments of resonant insight or contemplative peace. By now everyone knows the critique of this style posed by Language Writing or radical poetics. Here I will be more interested in quieter but no less substantial critiques carried out by poets who retain commitments to a discursively cogent surface and to traditional lyric effects, even to the possibilities of dramatic closure that has made so much of contemporary work seem labored and self-congratulatory in its projected spaces of surmise and wonder.

At the core of these critiques, both radical and from within traditional lyrical ideals, is a conviction that poetry foregrounding subjective experience has not been sufficiently attentive to both the demands and the possibilities afforded by the public world everywhere impinging on the choices poets make and the audiences available to them.

So I want to explore those demands and possibilities--first by working out a feasible understanding of how poets can engage that public world...

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... must be able to envision this new self not pitiable by the other self he probably might have been. That self after all has all the armor of romantic despair at his disposable. The new self has only these hypotheticals, which the last stanza must show can in fact suffice for the speaker's needs.

Making that demonstration risks even more bathos and more nostalgia than the old self cultivated. But facing up to the risk makes it possible to envision how reason may help contain those temptations and put them to work opening a future. So Dennis poses himself the most extreme possibility: had he listened to reason in his old life, the "I" in the present might now be living another life because he would have actively pursued the woman. So even as he tries to embrace reason, the speaker remains drawn to imagining better lives and still wanting any structure that would have