Abstract: “Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness: The tribes of contemporary poetry”

“Recognition, Vertigo, and Passionate Worldliness: The tribes of contemporary poetry”
by Tony Hoagland
Poetry vol. 196.5

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239968

In this essay, Tony Hoagland attempts to establish a sort of ‘working definition’ for how to categorize and talk about contemporary poetry. He begins by delineating poets into two ‘tribes’. The first draws from Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”. The second type takes after the Wallace Stevens lines: “The poem must resist intelligence / Almost successfully.” Hoagland’s essay is centered on this second type, the first being easily recognizable and understood. Those of the second tribe, often labeled at ‘experimental’ or ‘elliptical’, are harder to understand – that being precisely the point. Hoagland argues that the two tribes are, in fact, more similar than often thought, that in both the ‘what’ has remained the same, only the ‘how’ has significantly changed. Hoagland argues that the ‘what’ is the contemporary poet’s vertiginous experience of the modern world. The Wordsworthian poets try to find a stable ground, if only for the instant of the lyric, to offer a view of this dizzying world. The elliptical Stevensian poets attempt to use language to recreate that experience of vertigo in their reader, not to explain or comment on it, just to say ‘this is’. Hoagland uses other oppositions to help clarify this binary: the poetry of perspective vs. entanglement, of recognition vs. disorientation. The elliptical poets of entanglement and disorientation aim to recreate in the reader the experience of existing in the modern world and celebrate the universe of imperfect meanings. These poets use declarative non-sequiturs to evade ever emphasizing anything that could then be understood as a coherent narrative from which to understand our incomprehensible existence, to show the fallibility of perspective. Hoagland concludes by reminding us that, despite the disorienting effort and affect, there is something to mean, but those meanings are not meant to be conclusive, finished. It is enough to know that everyone’s world is spinning like a dervish, not just yours, and there is meaning in that.