This chapter examines the relationship between poetry and academic institutions in the twenty-first century, an era in which creative writing MFA and PhD programs are an established and durable part of the landscape. The real solidification of poetry’s academic situatedness has given rise to poetry that chooses to interrogate the notions of creative freedom and personal expression. Folding an explicitly hermeneutic practice or process into the poetry itself creates a reflexivity that imagines the speaking subject as an actively, discursively analytical subject – one that sees in these analytical methodologies not a way to stifle creative possibility, but to expand it. The work of Myung Mi Kim, particularly Commons, seeks to reconfigure the personal in service of the more broadly intellectual: the lyric speaker as an active analyst both of “lyric” and of “speaker.” Alongside the work of poets like Claudia Rankine and Nathaniel Mackey, the result is what we might call an academic avant-garde at the crossroads of programs in creative writing and those in literature, history, philosophy, and the other humanities.

The twenty-first-century poets and poems of the nearly Baroque want art that puts excess, invention, and ornament first. Some poets, such as Angie Estes, Robyn Schiff, and Lucie Brock-Broido have pursued a nearly Baroque aesthetic for almost the whole of their careers. Other recent exemplars include Nada Gordon, Ange Mlinko, Kiki Petrosino, Geoffrey Nutter, and Brenda Shaughnessy. Nearly Baroque contemporary poems exhibit elaborate syntax, and self-consciously elaborate sonic patterning, without adopting pre-modernist forms. The nearly Baroque is a femme aesthetic and defends traditionally feminine ideas of beauty and extravagance against the insistence on practicality, on political utility, on conceptual novelty, or on efficiency. At the same time these poets tend to note – they may sound guilty about – the serious effort and energy devoted to making such complicated, luxurious, or apparently useless things as contemporary literary poems. The most recent poets to work in the nearly Baroque idiom take increasing account of the actual bodies and bodily histories that do not fit well with conventional standards of prettiness, ornament, femininity, or beauty. Poets of color who foreground race have sometimes chosen not so much exactly the strategies described here but related ones, ones that benefit from the comparison.

The present state of the locations of contemporary Latina/o poetry is destabilizing. Latina/o literary legacy, tracing the lines from heritage nationalities to anti-US imperialist ancestors to civil rights–era forebears and into the twenty-first century, has always been rooted in place. Latina/o life in the United States, on the cusp of the third decade of this century, is one that accepts the fact that where we are from is more and more an internalized state of being. Bonafide Rojas’s Notes on the Return to the Island reflects a post-transnational diasporic Puerto Rican identity in which contact zones, not nationality, are sovereign. Hugo García Manríquez’s conceptualist book Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement offers radical experimentation in both aesthetics and geopolitics. Valerie Martínez’s Each and Her is rooted in the borderlands of Ciudad Juárez. Francisco Aragón’s “To Madrid” examines the touristic shame of a Latina/o visiting an ancestral place. Aracelis Girmay’s debut collection Teeth (2007) situates further aspects of the complexity of touristic experience into a range of locales. The work of Rodrigo Toscano and Edwin Torres embodies a latinxfuturism speculating on what it will mean to be Latina/o.

Poetry scholars frequently state that form and content are not separable. Yet they continue to read poetry by minority writers primarily as ethnographic reportage. While many avant-garde poets can deftly address language’s imbrication with capitalism and hold forth on issues of class (and, at times, gender), the issue of race and – horrors – racism has too often been deflected by such coded (or not so coded) putdowns as “identity politics,” “autobiographical writing,” or “expressivity.” The “New Formalism” occludes an entire tradition of black thought that has engaged with the problem of form and larger sociopolitical structures. This chapter maps out crucial tasks for twenty-first-century poetry scholars, including archival recovery work; decentering white poets; looking to alternative models of poetics; questioning “neutral” poetics; engaging in concrete acts of anti-racism; decolonizing and desegregating the field.

Any effort to characterize, much less comment critically upon, the literary production of a century of which less than a quarter has elapsed is a task that is more than usually humbling for the literary critic. The scholar cannot rely on established canons (or counter-canons) of major authors, or on a broad consensus about the era’s characteristic aesthetic trends or styles that might become visible with greater historical distance. The events, debates, and controversies that consume the attention of writers and critics today may well be forgotten tomorrow, while writers and issues that might have seemed marginal at the time may come to seem to later readers like the most significant developments of that era.

Poetry emerging under the sign of the Anthropocene must, like all cultural work, contend with the terminal horizon of climate change. New levels of social and environmental complexity open up the possibility for, and the necessity of, uncommon forms of solidarity, in resistance movements run through with insurmountable difference. Poetry that resonates with the chants of protests and, provoked by the indeterminate cloud architecture of digital networks, attempts to weave what cannot be woven, convokes these forms of solidarity while exposing the seams of difference. One important seam is a temporal difference between those for whom the Anthropocene harbors an imminent collective future and those for whom it names a long and already too present collective experience of oppression. In many respects, place rather than identity, site rather than form or figure, determine the trajectories of this writing. Discussing poetry by Juliana Spahr, Danez Smith, Stephen Collis, and Layli Long Soldier, this chapter sounds some of the key differences activating the uncommon solidarities of North American poetry in the emergent awareness of the Anthropocene.

American poets increasingly began to bring disability into their poetry in a more direct way in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with their embodied experiences living with disability, the work of many of these poets represents their involvement in the disability rights movement and disability culture and puts disability at the center of the poetry by writing primarily for disabled (rather than nondisabled) readers. I call the twenty-first-century poets who continue this tradition of disability culture poetry “crip poetry.” Examples discussed include Meg Day, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, Petra Kuppers, Neil Marcus, Constance Merritt, and Molly McCully Brown. In contrast, I call the twenty-first-century poets who develop disability poetics that are not written primarily for disabled audiences, and that are often based in other aesthetic movements and/or identities, “disability poetry.” Examples discussed include Bettina Judd, Airea Matthews, David Wolach, and Brian Teare.

This chapter traces the movement of slam and spoken-word poetry from a subjugated and lesser art form to an established and valid one in the early twenty-first century, while suggesting that these institutionalizing forces and desires can be caught up in anti-Blackness. The emergence of HBO’s Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry Jam in 2002 offered a highly produced and stylized televisual marker of contemporary spoken word and slam success, centering the young Black poetic voice in way that popularized a particular defiant Black aesthetic and had the general cultural consciousness assuming that slam was indeed a Black thing. The emergence of a new “quiet style” in locations such as the Minneapolis/St. Paul literary scene and the multimedia company Button Poetry can be seen, in contrast, as advancing the ideal of the disembodied performer who, through the rejection of theatrics, focuses on the “real” art of poetry.

A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.

Contemporary Native American and Indigenous poetry is disrupting, crossing, and transgressing boundaries set up by settler states. Poetic possibilities reflect the movement and motions toward seriously engaging trans-Indigenous possibilities: coming to the table already knowing that we have had ways of speaking to and with each other since time immemorial, while also remaining attuned to the cultural specificity reflected in past craftmanship of earlier published poets. Sovereign poetics are a means of enacting and expressing a self-determined justice. Janet Rogers’s Peace in Duress offers a sovereign poetics that asserts the ancestral power of creation against state policies that seeks to normalize and erase Indigenous bodies. Qwo-Li Driskill’s “Map of the Americas” creates a map in relation to body parts, affirming Indigenous embodiments that belie the conventional map we have come to recognize. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas rethinks the settler practice of telling history and then providing an insincere apology. Other poets discussed include Heid E. Erdrich and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

In twentieth-century US poetry, we can recognize avant-garde work for its disavowal of historic forms and genres, inclusion of nonliterary texts and materials, and centering proceduralism over craft. As we move into the twenty-first century, we can see how these practices have helped bring to light artists from marginalized communities who use these strategies to address the historic traumas and ongoing harms their people experience. However, such work has illuminated deep tensions within contemporary writing communities regarding how avant-garde practices and practitioners are received. This chapter begins with a brief study of a series of events that broke out between 2013 and 2015 around Kenneth Goldsmith’s work, in which the tensions between avant-garde practices, cultural trauma, and appropriate authorship spilled into public view. Next, it examines Douglas Kearney's and Dawn Lundy Martin’s work in the context of black pain and the excess of black signification. It closes with a discussion of how South Asian diaspora writers Bhanu Kapil and Divya Victor inventively appropriate and redefine whiteness through a process of “compositional witness.”

Twenty-first-century poetry by women demonstrates a multiplicity of perspectives, connection and loss, and continuing revolutions across gender and genre. At the outset of the twenty-first century, “gurlesque” poets such as Arielle Greenberg stress artifice and performance in a heightened, ironic attention to the gendered body on display. While gurlesque focuses on the artifice of gender performance, hip-hop and performance poetries focus on authenticity and forms of truth-telling, engaging the politics of fourth-wave feminism. After 9/11, a sense of precarity would be heightened in the new millennium through manmade crises and natural disasters. A rise in decolonizing poetics has given particular attention to the subjection of the female body of color and modes of resilience. The new millennium is perhaps best characterized by writing that is linguistically innovative and embodied, known variously as post-Language poetics, a new lyricism, or hybrid poetry. Digital technologies brought paradigmatic shifts to the ways in how poetry circulated and who could write it.

If African American poets have achieved a new kind of freedom in the twenty-first century, they have also pursued multiple styles through their modes of introspection. This broader inward-turning is continuous with the defining priorities of the Black Arts Movement, a principle that might be more aptly named self-determination. Contemporary African American poets have embraced black culture as a historical and cultural landscape to be mapped into new frontiers in order to make the individual black self and then to develop terms for the liberation of that self. These pursuits of self-examination and self-determination comprise at least four broad and overlapping realms of practice: apolitical introspection; a rethinking of African American history and heritage beyond the terms of simple affirmation; a personalized mode of collectivist protest in line with Black Arts Movement practices; and a black literary collective action enacted by the numerous African American writers collectives and workshops that have arisen since the 1960s. Poets discussed include Gregory Pardlo, Natasha Trethewey, Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Nathaniel Mackey, alongside groups such as Cave Canem and movements like #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

This chapter examines the emergence of an emphatically anti-capitalist poetry in the decade since the global financial crash of 2008. There is a turn away from private, meditative poetry to a lyric speech that is public and willing to tackle rifts in the social body. It explores links among kinds of violence (racial, sexual, economic) and depredation (colonial, environmental) that liberal political language has tended to grasp in parallel rather than as part of a totality. Jasmine Gibson’s “Black Mass” coordinates the anguish of racial violence with on-the-ground relations between bosses and workers, sexuality, and geopolitics. Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human parallels contemporary police violence against black people with torture under Pinochet in Chile, making clear that the basis for the parallel is the global reach of capitalist accumulation. Allison Cobb’s After We All Died shows a willingness to let go of matter itself, in order to see how it de- and re-composes under conditions of capitalist crisis. Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction depicts the loss of the “fictions,” including beloved ones, through which we live under capitalism.

The central purpose of this chapter is to account for a poetry of war resistance that directly engages the clandestine activities of the national security state. How do poets help us to see anew a highly mediated form of warfare that nonetheless conceals itself in the black ops, redacted docs, dark money, and classified landscapes comprising the secretive theaters of “low visibility” twenty-first-century violence? War writing has come from numerous camps of American verse over the past seventeen years; I will argue, however, its most sustained treatment appears in three overlapping communities: Middle Eastern American poetries, documentary poetics (or “docpo”), and left communist circles. Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Blues, and Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville are exemplary, as are works by Lawrence Joseph, Craig Santos Perez, Ara Shirinyan, Etel Adnan, Joshua Clover, Hilary Plum, Hayan Charara, Allison Cobb, Samuel Hazo, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Judith Goldman, and Jena Osman, among others.