Ideas of Order in Contemporary American Poetry

This collection of essays examines the increasing experimentation with ideas of order in American poetry from the 1980s until the present. The last two decades comprise a significant period in American poetcraft. On the one hand, vibrant alternatives in the theory and practice of poetic texts have risen out of the movement known as “Language Poetry.” On the other hand, the 1980s were also a period of transition in American versemaking, presumably the return of metrical form and narration in “New Formalist” poems. In contrast to earlier scholarly focus on avant-garde trends prevailing in contemporary American poetic culture, this collection of essays addresses traditional and non-traditional practices of poetry that reveal the numerous phenomena and spectra of order in recent writing of poetic works. In doing so, the essays included in this volume call attention to language, form, and the ways of making mean-ing American poets employ to see order within disorder while engaging contemporary subject matter.