American Poetry Today
The contemporary American poetry has developed around the last 30 years and according to the experts it has experienced the emergence of numerous schools, trends and groups. The importance of these groups and trends or schools of thought on the long term is still to be proven and here you can find more about some of them.
Starting with the beginning of the contemporary American poetry, meaning the 1970s, there have been several poets whose names should be recalled. Some of them are Andrei Codrescu, Maxine Chernoff and Russell Edson, all of them being representatives of the contemporary surrealism. At the same time the performance poetry had been revived by prominent poets such as David Antin, along with a general embracement of multiculturalism in poetry. Moreover, important African American names have appeared on the poetry scene and they were particularly names of talented women such as Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni and Maya Angelou.
The American poetry today also includes the school of thought called Language and which was named after the magazine in which these poetries were published. The Language school focused on extending the Objectivist and Modernist schools developed in the 1930s. Some of the most prominent names include Ron Silliman and Bob Perelman. It is important to point out that a great number of poets adhering to this school was made out of women. At the same time, the popularity of the traditional poetry, in its most classical sense, had declined in the contemporary American poetry, its place being taken by more experimental and creative writing. Yet, the traditional classical American poetry was kept alive through the works of James Merrill, the one who wrote ‘The Changing Light at Sandover’ in the 1980s and Thom Gunn as well as Richard Wilbur. There were some other schools and groups that were developed throughout this time but their impact on the American poetry today is still to be assessed.