Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, More Meet the Canon for Vulture
Vulture brought together a panel of critics in an attempt to canonize our century in literature, though editor Boris Kachka acknowledges that "so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux" and any "project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception." There's also dissent here, but only with regard to which book best represents its author. And yes, poets have made the list! Beneath the grouping "The 12 New Classics" is:
The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (May 5, 2015) | 5 votes
Around the time it was published, Maggie Nelson read aloud the opening of this book — an extremely graphic and surprising sex scene, awkwardly lighting up that New York room and clanging a bell that people had just not heard before. Her 21st-century classic is structurally just that kind of awoke re-shuffling. It’s not that you don’t know about anal sex, childbirth, or even about a partner’s transition or a parent dying, but Nelson puts each next to the other in a manner that changes our perception of each and all. I’m always glad to have never had a baby, yet Maggie has writ birthing so deeply that I’m grateful to say I’ve missed nothing in this life, thanks to this uncanny saint of a book. —Eileen MylesLeaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner (August 23, 2011) | 3 votes
When our alien overlords want to know what was new in the novel in the first quarter of the 21st century, give them Atocha Station. Some will contend that Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, is a more mature work, but this one is leaner and shapelier, and more directly explores the disconnect between our hopes for art and our actual experience of it. The narrator, a self-loathing stoner American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, is a privileged jackass trying to appear deep. The trick, of course, is that he’s brilliant, and his anxious stream of thought is philosophically rich. What is the average person’s role in history? How can we live with our own fraudulence? Why should we make art, and what kind of art can we make now? To all these questions Atocha Station is an answer. —Christine Smallwood
And under "The High Canon":
Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine (October 7, 2014)
Rankine’s compilation of lyric poems, micro-essays, snatches of cultural commentary, and startlingly direct descriptions of her everyday experiences as a black woman became the essential literary complement to Black Lives Matter and probably the most important work of American poetry in the 21st century. Fiercely eccentric, refusing any easy resolutions, Citizen’s success represents a redefinition of the conventions of American literature. —Jess Rowconsent not to be a single being, by Fred Moten (2017–2018)
At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten’s trilogy has reinvented both. Reading hip-hop and jazz musicians through and against philosophers and visual artists, he interrogates aesthetic, political, and social phenomena through analyses of blackness. He offers a profusion of arguments and deconstructions to create a coherence that nonetheless remains open to active reading and interpretation. In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten’s beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art. —Lidija Haas
Consensus for what was granted "The Best Book of the Century (for Now)" was seven out of 31. Check that out, and the remaining worthy reads of these 18 years, at Vulture.