American Literary Scholarship (2009) doi 10.1215/00659142-1164675 © 2011 by Duke University Press 18 Poetry: Since the 1940s Frank J. Kearful When it comes to poetry since the 1940s, where the action is depends on which band you hear playing. Henry Weinfeld’s Te Music of Tought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk calls the two poets “the fnest among their generation, a generation that came to maturity around the beginning of the Second World War.” Oppen is also well served by Tinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Ten there is Charles Olson, a member of the same generation whom some revere as a tower- ing fgure, but who is given short shrift by most. In “ ‘Man Come by an Intolerable Way’: Charles Olson’s Archaeology of Resistance” Sasha Colby grants that Olson’s poetry is “sometimes perceived as obtuse or hermetic,” but he makes perfectly good sense on Olson’s behalf. Te nearer we approach contemporary poetry, the more marked divisions of taste become. Perhaps the only generalization one can safely make is that women are setting the pace where experimental poetry is currently headed. Tis year’s chapter includes articles on Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Joan Retallack, and essays on several other avant-garde women poets in In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler. Daniel Kane’s We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry concludes with avant- garde poet Lisa Jarnot; Teresa Hak Kyung Cha features prominently in Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian Poetry since 1965; and Daniel Grassian’s Writing the Future of Black America: Lit- erature of the Hip-Hop Generation lauds Alison Joseph. Two books bring together women poets of earlier generations. Brett C. Millier’s Flawed