The Speed of Poetry

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When I visit the Poetry Publication Showcase, an annual display of the year's new poetry books at Poets House in Manhattan, I feel as if I've been granted a precious audience with Poetry itself. Like the large golden bee in a James Wright poem, "drowning in his own delight" as he burrows into a juicy pear, I gorge, revel, wallow. In this year's version, on view in April in New York and displayed again this month at the American Library Association's annual conference in Chicago, the good, the bad and the trendy of the new millennium strutted their stuff side by side with the fabulous has-beens in the Library of America's two-volume anthology The Twentieth Century. Eccentrically produced micropress chapbooks danced cheek to cheek with the glossy offerings of trade biggies Knopf and Norton. The Language poet and the New Formalist bedded down together, alongside the spoken word artist in slightly muffled print guise (Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry, edited by Zoe Anglesey [Ballantine]). I rediscovered Aleida Rodriguez, whose work I savored years ago in lesbian feminist lit mags, finally out with her first book, Garden of Exile (Sarabande). When I wearied of contemporary riches, I refreshed with a quick dip into The Selected Poems of Po Chu-i (New Directions) or The Selected Poems of Max Jacob (Oberlin).

I first encountered the Poetry Publication Showcase in 1992, the year of its inception, when I covered it for a writers' magazine. Then as now, the display was produced in tandem with a series of panels, readings and other events that offer one of the best available chances to assess the current status and immediate prospects of poetry in the United States. In 1992 the mood was feisty but beleaguered: "We few, we happy few, we band of poets" went the boast. Now there's a sense that poetry's making it, moving rapidly to the center(s) of our cultural life. Poets House executive director Lee Briccetti, who dreamed up the Showcase as a way to bring attention to a severely marginalized literary form, hopes the poetry world is poised to take advantage of what she terms "a moment of cultural readiness."

This moment was created by a range of phenomena by now so familiar in poetry circles that the Academy of American Poets' website matter-of-factly refers to "the 'poetry renaissance' of the 1990's." Among oft-cited indicators of the trend are the proliferation of Internet poetry sites and displays of poetry on public transportation; the rapid success of National Poetry Month, begun in April 1996; television documentaries on poets and poetry by Bill Moyers and Bob Holman; and US poet laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poems Project. With the runaway popularity of slams and other spoken word events, poetry gets anointed as a star of popular culture ("Rap Is Poetry" proclaimed the lead story in the March-April Black Issues …