This chapter approaches genre both as a name for historically variable groupings of recurring patterns within poems and as an interpretive device that serves as a frame for engaging with individual poems. Examining Ezra Pound's translations of classical Chinese poetry, recent work by Marilyn Chin, and the anonymous body of verses in Chinese known collectively as “the Angel Island poems,” composed between 1910 and 1940 by detainees at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, the chapter explores how genres acquire new features or traits as they travel across and take root in different languages and literary traditions. In this way, the chapter demonstrates how genres generate expectations and other affective attachments among readers. At the same time, the chapter argues, individual poems may partake of, depart from, and otherwise play with the conventions of multiple genres simultaneously.

This chapter discusses how contemporary poets are influenced and inspired by the rise of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, which unleashed a broad surge of poetry by women who began to write openly about their lives and to use their work to directly critique sexism and patriarchy. The chapter examines debates and tensions within women’s poetry of the period, including fraught questions about how poetry might best address female experience, gender roles, race and intersectionality, the relation between poetry and politics, and the tension between more mainstream lyric approaches and more avant-garde experimental feminist poetry. The chapter focuses on a range of representative poets, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Marilyn Chin, and Kathleen Fraser.