Literary debates today are no longer about literary taste: classic versus modern, high versus low, or original versus formulaic. They are no longer about the question whether this or that text or author is “good” or “bad” (unless one decides to put literature in a purely social and political perspective). They foreground now other and more radical issues. Certainly, in the case of poetry, the telltale laboratory of literature in general, most contemporary interrogations refer to the institutional framework that draws the line between literature and non-literature as well as the criteria that help us to include certain practices in the literary field or not. In other words, and vaguely paraphrasing Nelson Goodman, it is more about “when is literature” than “where is literature” (which is already quite a radical question itself).
Problems and inquiries like these may sound vague if not meaningless to mainstream readers and writers, yet they...