Emo-etry … PoMo-etry … PoCo-etry … So-so-etry

Adorno may have claimed that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, but he need not worry. For writing poetry — good poetry — seems nearly impossible these days, if Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century is any indication, especially when it comes to practitioners who belong to my own generation.

I used Legitimate Dangers recently in a literary analysis course I'm teaching. My assumption was that, because poetry grows an ever more specialized and obscure mode of literary expression, the only thing which could offset such a drift toward irrelevance was to teach poetry written by my students' near contemporaries in the hope that at least the often racy and timely subject matter would capture their attention.

The results were uneven, because the anthology itself is terribly uneven. Something I should've expected, I guess, since the contributors are, as the anthology's subtitle indicates, "poets of the new century." I'm not suggesting that ce jeune siècle is without matter to be poetically treated; it's just that the poetry in this anthology tends to be ... well ... a bit predictable, and, in many cases, more than a bit puerile. Much of it seems workshopped to death, membra disjecta of some MFA program that have had all the expressive marrow sucked from them, leaving only the hollow bones of contrived formal novelty — evidence of possibilities lost as opposed to opportunities seized. And others seem a bit too precious and shallow for my taste: identity–political catechisms of an annoyingly petit bourgeois sort, as if the guilty poets deliberately set out to confirm my suspicion that poetry has become a boutique industry, a playground of the mind for New–Urbanist bohos as they absently wipe lattè foam from their iBooks and survey their not-as-remarkable-as-they'd-have-us-believe psychic panoramas.

Not all the poetry is bad, though. I recommend Dave Berman's contributions (truth be told, I'm a Silver Jews fan), as well as Mark Bibbins "Slutty" and Jeffrey McDaniel's "The Archipelago of Kisses." There are a few others that stand as nimbly executed exercises in PoMo self-consciousness. But, all in all, the "poets of the new century" represented in Legitimate Dangers suggest to me the only real danger is the creeping decline of poetry itself