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Document Type

Essay

Abstract

[First paragraph]

The title of Mary Ann Caws' recent article "Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing It Wants" blithely, but no less accurately, indicates the anarchic condition, both liberatory and destabilizing, of contemporary North American poetry production-particularly in the way it speaks to the recent and controversial trend of conceptual poetry, which eschews the fragmentation and lexical, semantic, and syntactic difficulty that is the heritage of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group in favor of a resolutely anti-literary poetics of plagiarism, appropriation, and the readymade [1]. Indeed, Caws' title highlights the sheer nominating power of the poet: the conceptualist's animating concept takes precedence over the text itself, which, nevertheless, is considered "a poem." Such a development has put both the definition of poetic skill and the criteria for aesthetic evaluation into a severe crisis. How are we to judge poetry now that major strands of contemporary poetry are disavowing-sometimes with a vengeance-the traditional skill set of lyric expressivity, figuration, and metrical ability? What constitutes poetic skill or ability in the twenty-first century? For now, I wish to assert that a new aesthetics of the twenty-first century must surely take into account two interlocking questions: what is the work of poetry within a socio-cultural arena and what kinds of work go into the making and presenting of poetry?

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