Contemporary Poetry

This week's reading focuses on contemporary poetry. Authors include Rita Dove, Michael S. Harper, and Adrienne Rich. Having come even after the modernist movement, I expected the poems of these authors to be to most bizarre yet. I expected that they will find new ways to challenge old conventions of poetry and to create a style that did not exist before their time. In some instances, my expectations were met, but I found some of them to be surprisingly ordinary.

Rita Dove's poem "Fox Trot Fridays" is interesting in that the first 8 stanzas have two lines each and the final stanza only has one line. This form lends itself to rhyme with 8 couplets, but there is no rhyme scheme anywhere in the poem. Dove also uses enjambment a lot--most of the time there is no punctuation at the end of her lines, or even at the end of her stanzas. Her stanzas also often begin in lower-case. As for her subject, she seems to delight in the ordinary. In "Banneker" the subject does nothing but "lie under a pear tree," and she says of Parks in "Rosa" that "doing nothing was the doing."

Like Dove, Harper too celebrates African American culture. He wrote a poem for John Coltrane, a famous jazz musician, in which he immortalizes Coltrane's birthplace, music, and instrument. The form of this piece resembles jazz in that there is no overall pattern. It is not governed by rhyme, meter, or rules of grammar. Harper pays tribute to the four black girls killed in a church in Alabama in "American History" and to Martin Luther King Jr. in "Martin's Blues."

Rich is like Harper in that she admires civil rights leaders. Rich herself has struggled with homosexuality and her role as a female in society. Just as the girl in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" is only a family member by default (there is no blood connection), females were not always welcomed in the male-dominated world of the past. She advocates gender equality in "Diving into the Wreck" by giving account of both the mermaid and the merman, also by following with "I am she: I am he." In her final stanza she says, "We are, I am, you are." The idea is that we are all one and the same; gender should not be a discriminating factor. Poems like this make her, in a way, a sort of civil rights activist herself.