Bloom's Contemporary Poets and Kukulin's "Documentalist Strategies in Contemporary Russian Poetry"

Abstracts of 21^st Century Poetry books/articles

Bloom, Harold. Contemporary Poets. New York: Infobase, 2009. Print.

                Harold Bloom’s Contemporary Poets explores the advent of contemporary poetry based on the teleological progression of all poetry. He traces all contemporary American poetry back to eight major American poets – Frost, Stevens, Pound, Williams, H.D., Moore, Eliot and Crane. Further, he traces those poets back to Whitman and Dickinson, and further back into British poetry. The collected essays within the book – from various prestigious experts in the field - explore the various ways in which contemporary poets have been influenced by past poets and how they influence each other. Each essay focuses on a particular poet or a particular aspect of contemporary poetry: for example, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Jorie Graham’s epistemological approach to poetry, and another on how modernism has yet to leave contemporary criticism of poetry. At the end of the book is a chronology of the births and deaths of famous contemporary poets, which embodies Contemporary Poets teleological approach to contemporary poetry, and traces the influences of poets and poetry over time. Bloom commands authority with his reputation as Yale professor, Shakespeare expert, and through his 20+ books of literary criticism which he has published. He is arguably the most famous literary critic alive today. This book is incredibly informative in its historical approach to the formation of the phenomenon of contemporary poetry, and gives a hint at where it may develop from here.

Kukulin, Ilya. "Documentalist Strategies In Contemporary Russian Poetry." Russian Review 69.4 (2010): 585-614. Academic Search Premier. Web. 9 Apr. 2012.

In “Documentalist Strategies in Contemporary Russian Poetry,” Ilya Kukulin shows the associations between the Russian totalitarian regime and Russian poetry from the 1990s. He argues that documentalist poetry – that is, poetry which records factual events or history – does so not necessarily for political reasons, but more for the philosophical ramifications of poetry. He argues that under the threat of destruction due to censorship, poets were forced to operate through and against repression to create a sort of subtlety unseen in world poetry free of totalitarian regimes. Kukulin shows how this repression manifested itself as paradox in Nekrasov, Urbanism in Bruisov, journalistic bend in Maiakovskii, and a parody of propaganda in poets like Voznesenskii and Evtushenko. These poets, Kukulin argues, use poetry as a sort of aesthetic polemic in response to real world stimuli such as the influence of Western television, the September 11, 2001 attacks, Russia’s war with Georgia (the country, not the state), and so forth.  This aesthetic polemic is compared to the Romantic era in Russia, and defines contemporary Russian poetry as “Post-Romantic” in that its aesthetic is towards fragmentation and paradox rather than wholeness and unity. Kukulin is a poet, literary critic, and linguistic scholar who has published multiple poems and is a professor at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute of the Humanities and of the Higher School of Economics.