Dreams of a Common Language: Mark Nowak, Anne Boyer, Rodrigo Toscano

Abstract

Several critics have sought to identify the basic tenor of contemporary poets’ engagements with political issues in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Christopher Nealon detects a “slightly camp attitude that creeps into poetic attempts to measure the approach to end-times when the idea of end-times seems itself outmoded”; as they struggle to imagine alternatives to capitalism, poets like Claudia Rankine and Kenneth Davies adopt a “strange, unstable rhetoric” that privileges hybrid forms and citational devices in response to the global spectacle of newspapers, TV, popular movies, and the Internet. Joseph Harrington calls attention to “a flourishing of documentary literary forms” in the past decade, exemplified by poets like Susan M. Schultz, Jena Osman, Gabriel Gudding, and many others. The goal of such “creative nonpoetry” is not simply to reproduce existing textual material but to reframe it artistically and skeptically so that “narrative, conceptual, and emotional connections are left to the reader to draw.... Sometimes the documents don’t even tell a story, buy rather produce lyrical and affective responses to the narratives from which they are drawn.” Brian Reed looks at a variety of creative practices subsumed under the labels “conceptual writing” and “Flarf.”