Contemporary Poetry in English The Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Volume 3 Number 2 September, 2011

Contemporary poetry, almost all over the world, faces extinction chiefly because people have lost their earlier reading habits. Human culture has undergone a massive transformation. Considered stochastically the print media might be actually receding; normal custom of reading books at bed-time tends to get replaced by the more relaxed activity of watching television. There is also some issue with form, more noticeable among others being the surreal obscurity of verse, the veneer of disjointed post-modernism, the lack of metre. It is however encouraging to note that there are poets who belong to the archaic and ever vanishing community of ritual man. Judith Wright, Frederick Turner, Mary Freeman, Cynthia Zarin have contributed to English poetry even in times as ours. I shall excerpt a few poems and let them speak for a slice of life. But they symbolize the spirit of a millennium that hosts human grief, joy, fear, or self-exhorcising creation in its lines.