Causes, Movements, Theory: Between Language Poetry and New Narrative

Abstract

This chapter begins with the roughly decade-long consensus that poets were best performing the role of poets when they lent their craft to grassroots movements and socio-political causes. For the champions of poetics, the locus of literary politics shifts from organized action to intricate manifestoes about the power to disrupt and re-imagine life on the terrain where it is constructed, that is, in language. The chapter is selectively organized around the two movements of Language poetry and New Narrative. The writers of New Narrative were also at times decisive players. Their writing, heterogeneous to an extreme, revels in a have-it-both-ways ebullience that combines gay liberation with an avantgarde pedigree. The conflicting, often-adversarial views of political writing that consolidated since the mid1970s helped to propel the scattered trajectory of Language poets, New Narrative writers, and other factions of Left poets.

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