FEATURING ESSAYS BY
Shara Lessley
Tomás Q. Morín
Paul Otremba
Rachel Richardson
David Roderick
NOVEMBER 3-7, 2014
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Introduction

By DAVID RODERICK

These essays are the product of a 2014 AWP panel presentation titled “Under-the-Radar Trends in Contemporary American Poetry.” The five participants—Shara Lessley, Tomás Q. Morín, Paul Otremba, Rachel Richardson, and myself—tasked ourselves with reading carefully for developments in recent poetry that, as far as we knew, had not yet received proper notice. We also embarked on this project knowing full well that our panel title contained contentious terms such as “under-the-radar,” “trend,” and “contemporary.” (Come to think of it, why not throw in “American” and “poetry” as well?) Finding our own ways to outline and express these terms was part of the fun. The following written proposal served as our starting point:
What cultural forces are shaping how younger writers compose and imagine their poems? How have recent political events, social dynamics, and technological advances influenced their aesthetic and ethical concerns? While it is impossible to map out the entire landscape of contemporary American poetry, members of this panel will report on current developments that have not yet come to our collective critical attention.
We would be remiss here if we did not acknowledge that this project is loosely modeled on the ongoing critical symposia undertaken by David Baker, Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, Stanley Plumly, and Ann Townsend. At the last several AWP Conferences, these poets have presented their research on a shared topic, and a few years ago assembled those presentations into a vital critical text titled Radiant Lyre (Graywolf). We thank them, as well as the editors of Southern Humanities Review, who were kind enough to publish fleshed-out versions of our presentations here.
Devotions: Coming Out
on Matters of Faith

By SHARA LESSLEY

“Unlike Hopkins, contemporary gay poets—whether inclined toward faith or doubt—openly engage the lyric as a means of entering into dialogue with God, or meditating on matters of faith. Their sexual identity is often an enriching part of the conversation.”
The Prose/Verse Hybrid;
or, The Long Way Home

By TOMÁS Q. MORÍN

“Perhaps what we are witnessing is the slow process of poetry recovering some of the ground it ceded to the novel and the short story long ago. The pathway of proverse is less the suspended highway among the clouds of the traditional lyric and more the slow county road of many stop signs and digressions.”
The Landscape of Ekphrasis in the Contemporary Descriptive-Meditative Lyric

By PAUL OTREMBA

“Whenever I now come across a poet praising work for its subversion of lyric subjectivity, it feels dated. The descriptive-meditative lyric, especially in its ekphrastic iterations, has demonstrated again and again that lyric subjectivity always/already is subverting itself.”
Mommy Poems; or, Writing as The Muse Herself

By RACHEL RICHARDSON

“The only commonality I’ll claim is that what’s most interesting about motherhood poems is not the narrative—not the babies or the birth story or any of that—but the sharpness of perception. Claudia Rankine wrote a phrase that I always think of in relation to this idea: 'what alerts, alters.' It’s lovely because it’s true, but also because alerts and alters are made up of the exact same letters—the alteration enacted in the phrasing itself. I would say that’s what these poems do, or perhaps the inverse: what alters, alerts.”
American Imports:
The Return of the Civic Poet

By DAVID RODERICK

“Perhaps, in addition to shilling our books or trying to become the first American poet with 50,000 Twitter followers, we ought to attempt writing poems that call out to the neighbors and strangers with whom we share buses and grocery lines and church pews. What might we accomplish if we devoted more energy to civic enterprises in our verses and our lives? Or wrote poems using the collective “you” or royal “we” in order to enlighten and enchant a people, to document contemporary life and hold us all accountable for our complicity in communal, even national, events?”