If only because it matches my own opinion, this is a strong summary of the 90's as I remember them. If you feel this statement is inaccurate or has changes significantly in the last ten years or so, I'd like to hear your take.
I wish this was a bit more positive as I like a lot of this stuff, but it is I think accurate.Still, certain younger poets show some affinities to the schools of the older generation, and it may be useful to discuss briefly these poetic lines of descent. The Academic poets of the 1950s -- Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander -- who produced a rhymed, metrical poetry of wit and linguistic precision, are often seen as the forebears of today's New Formalists -- Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Brad Leithauser, Charles Martin, Molly Peacock, Mary Beth Salter, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and Timothy Steele. While there is still no canonical anthology representing this group, the activities and occasional polemics of its members have garnered quite a bit of critical attention and no small amount of controversy. Perhaps because they stand somewhat outside the mainstream of contemporary American poetry, the New Formalists seem to represent an orchestrated conspiracy in the eyes of some hostile critics, even though there is relatively little that connects them beyond a dedication -- itself anything but hidebound -- to writing metrical verse. While they have been accused, in the pages of the AWP Chronicle, the official organ of the Associated Writing Programs, of writing a reactionary type of "yuppie poetry," they actually represent diverse lifestyles and political points of view. They have little in common as far as subject matter is concerned, and critic Robert McPhillips has pointed out that they also do not share much, other than their commitment to rhyme and meter, with the older Academic poets. According to McPhillips, they break with their elders in their preference for popular, demotic forms of culture -- this is, after all, the Woodstock generation -- and, in general, their idiom and cultural frame of reference strike the reader as somewhat less rarified than those of the Academics, who more often than not specialized in what critic Robert Peters once called the "Guggenheim-year-abroad poem" (McPhillips 200-02).
Yeah, this stuff is still a curiosity as far as I can tell.Concretism garnered some public exposure in the news magazines a decade or so ago, but it has remained, for the most part, a literary curiosity. An aesthetic that uses words as visual icons formed into interesting shapes on the page is not likely to elicit much serious critical response, and, indeed, many of the productions of concrete poets are perhaps more suitable for hanging (the poems, that is, not the poets) than reading. E. E. Cummings is the paterfamilias of the Concretists, but Cummings's admirers tend to forgive him his silliest typographical experiments and instead focus on the linguistic brilliance that characterizes his best poems. If the Concretists have any heirs in the present scene, they are the poets of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group (named after a magazine in which the work of many of them first appeared). According to critic Marjorie Perloff, the avant garde poets of 1950s proclaimed that "'Form is never more than an extension of content.' For the Language poet, this aphorism becomes: 'Theory is never more than the extension of practice'" (Holden 46). Indeed, much of the work of these poets seems tailor-made for analysis by the deconstructionists, post-structuralists, and new historicists who have dominated American graduate programs for the last two decades.
This is the dominant form for sites such as this one and many, many others.The Confessional poets of the 1960s -- Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass -- remain one of the chief influences on the poets of this generation, though the effects of novelty, in an age of "trash-talk" television, have certainly worn off poets' attempts to shock with the explicitness of their personal revelations. When Robert Lowell, scion of Boston gentility and winner of American poetry's most coveted awards, revealed, in Life Studies (1959), that "my mind's not right" in poems detailing family dysfunction, marital woes, alcoholism, mental illness, and psychotherapy, the reading public, perhaps feeling that such candor from a major poet was long overdue, was fascinated. Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963 caused her posthumous collection Ariel (1965) to be valued all the more highly by women who heard, in its bitterest moments, a cry that could have issued from their own lips. Anne Sexton, the middle-class housewife who went, in less than a decade, from suburbia to the slopes of Parnassus, inspired a whole generation of women who came of age on the cusp of the feminist era. Some twenty years ago, in The Confessional Poets (1973), Robert Phillips described the typical confessional poem, stressing its therapeutic, personal, and alienated qualities. Most younger American poets have at one time or another written poems in this vein. Indeed, the autobiographical narrative/lyric -- sometimes naked, sometimes partially clad -- has become a staple of our poetic diet, especially when it deals with formerly taboo sexual topics. Bruce Weigl's "The Man Who Made Me Love Him" describes an incident of sexual abuse to a child, presumably the poet himself; "Kalaloch" by Carolyn Forché presents, without apology, a graphic first-person account of same-sex lovemaking; Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove's "After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed" describes how the poet and her daughter compare their sexual organs. These are typical reflections of the extent to which contemporary poets of the mainstream feel free to use their most private moments (and parts) for subject matter. Other poets with ties to the Confessional tradition include Sharon Olds, Alfred Corn, T.R. Hummer, Ira Sadoff, and John Balaban, though it would be safe enough to add that almost every poet writing today has learned from and at times imitated the type of poem popularized by Lowell, Plath, and company.
There's a lot more to talk about here, but I'll start with these three points.
