The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry

Over at The Millions, the poet/critic/editor/teacher Jeff Alessandrelli wrote an essay titled "The Nu-Audacity School of Poetry." In this piece, Alessandrelli coins the moniker "Nu-Audacity" for a group of contemporary poets. Here's the essay's overarching premise:

In such a spirit of exclusionary inclusion, then, I’d propose conglomerating a group of writers I’d call the Nu-Audacists, ones whose central tenets, as I see them, are as brazen and arguably repugnant as they are nuanced or refined. For the poets of the Nu-Audacity do not believe in Poetry or at least not in the way that many of their contemporaries seem to believe in it. Their work displays an innate awareness to the shrill absurdity of modern life — but they are nevertheless not inured to such absurdity or hardened by it. The Nu-Audacists are largely uninterested in academia or assistant professor, tenure-track academic life. They are post-Internet, meaning that although they often utilize the World Wide Web’s myriad lurings they rarely feel the need to comment on that reality; e-poetry is poetry is Twitter. Broadly and luridly, they believe sex exists. Further, their work is not funny or whimsical; they do not affect poetic “poses” like “sincere” or “confessional” beyond those that they are seemingly unconscious of or uncaring about. For mothers the Nu-Audacity school has Eileen Myles, Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman; for fathers Bill Knott, C.A. Conrad, and John Wieners. Their great-uncles are Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch on Saturday night, talking excitedly after the movie before O’Hara goes to the bar and Koch goes home to his wife; their great-grandparents Antonin Artaud and Mina Loy. Finally and most importantly, many of the writers in the Nu-Audacity school would no doubt protest their inclusion in the group. To varying degrees, most are willful outsiders. They neither want nor need my or anyone else’s collectivist-inspired help. And that’s the point — by refusing to conform in a way that so much of contemporary poetry insists on, they stake their own defiant place in the game. And for the Nu-Audacists poetry is very much a game

Alessandrelli invokes Unwanted Invented / Vargtimmen as emblematic of Nu-Audacity's concerns and occupations. While I can't say that I agree with everything he has to say in the essay, it's an interesting read for its length and articulates some trends in poetry during the twenty-first century.

Other authors that Alessandrelli references include: Chelsea Minnis, Laura Solomon, Jenny Zhang, Mira Gonzalez, and Steve Roggenbuck.