Creating the Canon of the Present

Assessing a poetic canon, as it is emerging, is probably impossible, but provisional judgements can offer valuable insights and the poetry of the present has important lessons to teach about how canons form. Coming to judgements about the present sheds new light on earlier moments of canonisation. The instability and variability of the contemporary canon can act as a cautionary tale, slowing down our confident glance of retrospection at the past. Our judgements can and should change, as the many case studies in this volume happily attest. Contemporary material, then, which obviously has not settled into anything like a canon,