1971-Present

New Narrative is a literary and aesthetic movement that originated in San Francisco in the late 1970s with writers and novelists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone. Influenced by Language poetry and feminist poetry of the period, New Narrative moved toward a hybrid aesthetic that emphasized, according to Glück, “the ways language conveys silence, chaos, undifferentiated existence, and erects countless horizons of meaning.” The movement was also informed by San Francisco gay culture and the AIDS crisis and aimed to rewrite theories of sex, sexuality, and individual authorship. In aiming to elaborate on narration itself, New Narrative offers the frame text-metatext, a story that constantly relates to and comments on itself from the present.

Well-known writers associated with this movement include Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and Judy Grahn. New Narrative’s second wave of writers included Rob Halpern, Renee Gladman, Douglas A. Martin, and Heriberto Yépez.Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy edited the anthology, Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017), in which they gathered classic and supplemental New Narrative texts, essays, and interviews.

A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points. Slam is a composite genre that combines elements of poetry, theater, performance, and storytelling. The genre’s origins can be traced to Chicago in the early 1980s. Since then, groups of volunteers have organized slams in venues across the world. The first National Poetry Slam was held in 1990, and has become an annual event in which teams from cities across the United States compete at events in a host city. For more on poetry slams, see Jeremy Richards’s series “Performing the Academy”. See also poets Tyehimba Jess, Bob Holman, and Patricia Smith. See also spoken word poetry.

An umbrella term for writing that ranges from the constraint-based practices of OuLiPo to Concrete poetry’s visual poetics. Nonreferential and interested in the materiality of language, conceptual poetry often relies on some organizing principle or information that is external to the text and can cross genres into visual or theoretical modes. Generally interested in blurring genres, conceptual poetry takes advantage of innovations in technology to question received notions of what it means to be “poetic” or to express a “self” in poetry. The ideas and practices of conceptual poetry are associated with a variety of writers including Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Vanessa Place. Poetry magazine published a special section devoted to conceptual poetry in its July/August 2009 issue, guest-edited by Kenneth Goldsmith.