Poetry: The 1950s to the Present

Thankful to my predecessor, Jim Cocola, for (among other things) his category “Poetry and Its Others,” I begin this review with works that suggest new contexts and resulting ways of reading. I hope that they may also suggest new pathways through postwar U.S. poetry and the last century in general as well as construct bridges between existing trajectories, especially the continued difficulty integrating and relating white male and increasingly female canons, ethnic literatures, and competing canons of modernism, midcentury, and postmodernism versus a long modernist avant-garde.