PERMANENT newness in contemporary poetry resides in its stylistic delivery of information about the world; its various peoples, individuals, geographies, societies, lifestyles. Readers or listeners enlarge their knowledge and tolerance on a personal or intimate level via the specific tone and perceptive skill of such poetry. This offers a far more sensitively human viewpoint and experience of the world than informative reports or studies in prose.
Nevertheless, one of the major new qualities of the best poetry written since the mid-19th Century is its inclusion of prose’s lengthy observational focus. This made such poetry achieve the sustained detail of novels while still free to jump from one topic and location to the next in a line or two.
The greatest master of this style was, of course, Walt Whitman, whose novella-like poetic work, ‘Leaves Of Grass’ tells and shows us more about all types of Americans and America more than any other 19th Century American work of creative literature.
T.S Eliot, the famous American expatriate poet, who wanted to become and became an English conservative, never really liked Whitman that much, and never admitted Whitman’s structural and linguistic late influence on him, but continued Whitman’s use of prose’s narrative scope in long poems like ‘Ash Wednesday’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, and ‘The Four Quartets’.
Eliot did not possess Whitman’s brilliant observant eye or positive egalitarian and gregarious love of humans, and, subsequently, is only half as great a poet as Whitman. However, Eliot helped immensely in furthering Whitman’s influence by translating into English one of Saint John Perse’s long prose-poems, and it is poets like Perse, of French Caribbean birth, who proved, by some of the most astonishing humanitarian prose-poetry ever written, the importance of experiencing the world and vividly describing it in verse.

Neglected American Poets

In order to really know and comprehend the achievement and possibilities of poetry now, one has to also know Whitman’s amazing individual short poems, as well as the poetic works of those essential innovative 20th Century American poets like Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, and Karl Shapiro, all badly neglected today.
It seems obvious that the abundance of wishy-washy introverted puzzle-poems of the Anglo world today have resulted from a new generation losing touch with such poets, often more ‘modern’ than themselves, and even more pleasurable due to their precise descriptive narrative tone. Without such poetic qualities offered to readers, interest will automatically wane, or certainly not increase, and poets will write for themselves and secular academic circles. But it is precisely the continuation of these pleasurable informative qualities which has nurtured the firm reputations and popularity of later American poets like Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsburg, James Merrill, Gary Snyder, Dave Smith, Mark Strand (Canadian born), Jorie Graham, Dianne Wakoski, Rita Dove, or Billy Collins.
If we look at just two recent Anglo poets of justified popularity, the American Billy Collins, and Irishman Mathew Sweeney, their ingenuity of poetic approach and tone grabs us instantly. Billy Collins attracted attention and gained a massive readership because, once the reader entered his poems, a journey of experiences and surprises occurred which both involved the poet and his reader, so that what is actually quite personal becomes through his poetic style quite socially relevant to any receptive mind.
One of his poems a few years back, ‘Old Man Eating Alone in a Chinese Restaurant’ illustrates this well. It begins: 
‘I’m glad I resisted the temptation,/if it was a temptation when I was young,/ to write a poem about an old man/ eating alone at a corner table in a Chinese restaurant./ I would have gotten it all wrong/ thinking: The poor bastard, not a friend in the world/ and with only a book for a companion./ He’ll probably pay the bill out of a change purse.’
What Collins attempts to show is how the hasty, silly judgment of his poetic youth towards others observed would have been unable to foresee HIMSELF becoming the very character he wanted to belittle, since the poem comes full circle, and the poet is revealed to be the same old man waiting to be served by a sexy waitress in a Chinese restaurant!
There is also whole suggestive pun in the poem’s scenario! One of Collins’ tricks involves incorporating the narrative surprise endings of short stories by Maupassant, Chekhov, or modern prose writers like Cortazar, Garcia Marquez and Carpentier, or styles from the French New Novelists into poetry. It works because such poetry is not clever esoteric puzzles, but linguistic descriptive solutions as gripping as those in a high-quality novel.
The ‘black humour’ and gregarious bohemian pleasures of the fabulous contemporary Irish poet, Mathew Sweeney is another poetic novelty. Each Sweeney poem, not long but precise and anecdotal, is like a short, highly active scene from a film unveiling crazy incidents, and pouring scorn on modern social violence.
His poem, ‘Sanctuary’ ,begins:
‘Stay awhile. Don’t go just yet/ The sirens are roaming the streets / The stabbing youths are out in packs/ There’s mayhem in the tea leaves / You’re much better off staying here / I have a Bordeaux you’ll like / Let’s open it. (I’ve got a second bottle too.)’
The poem was no doubt referring to the horrible social violence in Ireland some years back. Sweeney’s trick is to address some specific character, like an actor in a role, in many of his poems, while the reader listens in, feels, and responds. Sweeney’s romantic lovers, or couples, are the world’s pleasurable goal — often hilariously lost — along with food, drink, partying, and travelling.
In fact, his poems often speak about the writers’ life.  ‘A Scriptwriter’s Discipline’ begins:
‘The last week in March the rains come./ I move indoors with two brown bags / of freezer fodder, a bottle of malt / a score of beers, half a dozen Clarets / and a new ribbon for my typewriter./ I use the wet to get things done.’
For poets like Collins and Sweeney, poetry should be surprising, offhand, practical, and enjoyable as food, drink, or sex.