1987 in poetry

Overview of the events of 1987 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France).

April – First issue of o•blék: a journal of language arts (pronounced "oblique") is published in the United States, founded by Peter Gizzi who co edits it with Connell McGrath. The magazine stops publishing in 1993. August 30 – Poets Paul Muldoon and Jean Hanff Korelitz marry. October 16 – Charles Bukowski, fictionalised as alter ego Henry Chinaski, becomes the subject of the film Barfly starring Mickey Rourke released today. October – Tony Harrison's poem "V" is broadcast in a filmed version on Channel 4 television in the United Kingdom. Joseph Brodsky, a Russian exile who has become a United States citizen, resigns his membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in protest over the honorary membership of the Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko, regarded by Brodsky as a Soviet "yes man". Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, an elegy about suffering of Soviet people under the Great Purge, composed 1935–61 and first published in the West in 1963, is first openly published complete in book form in the Soviet Union. In his 'Notes on the New Formalism', Dana Gioia writes: "the real issues presented by American poetry in the Eighties will become clearer: the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem. The revival of traditional forms will be seen then as only one response to this troubling situation." The Dolmen Press in Portlaoise, Ireland, founded in 1951 to provide a publishing outlet for Irish poetry, ceases operations after the death of founder Liam Miller.