Referentially speaking, generating meaning(s) in contemporary North American poetry

Abstract

Traditional critics of current North American poetic writing often accuse it of having no meaning. The project of this essay is to provide a basis for showing that meaning not only can be located in such poetry, but permeates the open and diverse texts. Through an exploration of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories on the 'novel' and the 'polyphonic,' of various critics' conceptions of the long poem's narrative strategies, and of Michel Foucault's application of 'archaeology' as a method for discerning meaning, this essay traces three possible structures for generating meaning in contemporary poems as well as applying the theories to three book-long poems: Robert Kroetsch's The Ledger, Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T and Roberta Rees's Eyes Like Pigeons.