If cycles of taste in American poetry didn’t have their own propulsion and life span, neither to be appraised in eras, one would now express a prayer of thanks. But we may not be out of the period of poetry virtue signaling for years, because few of the social conditions that bred this era’s political traits have changed or seem ready to. Since the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014, the feeding on political language in the United States has become extreme, and the political arguments, coarse. As if to underscore these conditions, there’s been an amazing explosion of partisan poetry—never have there been so many political poets, so many poems vying for attention, so many books, so many inflated disputations, and so little sympathy for proportion.…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, September/October 2019