Politics and contemporary poetry

Abstract

The paper is a Meditation (variant on the manner of Aurelius and Descartes) concerning the immediate situation, in the United States, of poetry as a discourse of political engagement. As such, the paper is a highly personal one. It means to offer an account of the peculiar limits within which contemporary poetry in the United States is forced to get carried on, as well as an explanation of the context in which those limits were defined. It also suggests possible ways to exploit the special resources of contemporary poetry (formally and socially conceived) for political discourse and social critique. The paper is most centrally concerned to illuminate the special kinds of critical reflection which contemporary poetry, by virtue of its marginal position, makes available. The paper's two main sections involve the author's own reflexive analysis of his encounters with certain texts by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Theodor Adorno, and Carolyn Forche.