We all know what
contemporary poetry is: brief free verse about your experiences,
feelings, ideas, and so on. It still exhibits literary techniques
such as metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and assonance.
Technically, if you are a poet in the 20th century and beyond, you are considered a contemporary poet even if you strictly write sestinas.
There are four different types of poets today in 'contemporary poetry.' These are:
- Traditional: characterized by fixed verse
- Modern: non-metrical verse infused with diction and rhythm
- Post-modern: deals with culturally relevant topics
- Contemporary: some mixture of all the above but usually is without rhyme or meter. It is written in a language easily associated with its time period, laced with images employing all senses, and invites the reader to interpret the poem as they wish.
Because of this last point, 'invites the reader to interpret the poem as they wish,' there has been a lot of criticism over the years about contemporary poetry's lack of structure and meaning. Often, it appears to be an unfinished piece of prose. However, many people still rely on structure as a type of meaning in itself.
Compare this philosophy of 'meaning in structure' with the rift between generations in the information age today. By emphasizing raw emotion rather than structure, large groups of people have become susceptible to their own biases and tunnel-vision filtering of information on the internet; projecting your meaning into a contemporary poem is essentially the same as reading/sharing articles that cater to your own biases or aesthetics as opposed to checking whether the source is reliable.
A fixed verse poet today is like the individual who checks a mainstream news site and accepts its meaning given it is consistent with the form itself, and the contemporary poet is the individual who likes what an article says regardless of who or where it is being said.
What's happening is that with the rise of emotion-based information, people get to explore themselves, but eventually, they will have to learn structure, form, and the way the world works. Poetry will then create or revive its structural aspect by fixed verse once trends of emotions embed themselves in a form. Whether this pattern is unsettling or comforting largely depends on which generation you're from.
Both Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers generally still feel that structure works (since it has worked for them); whereas Millennials feel disillusioned with the systems in place and need the freedom of expression.
It is no wonder that this specific criticism of contemporary poetry exists today due to societal influence in media and vice versa. It will be useful to note in the future whether more connections can be made or perhaps, branch out into new forms of expression.
