the narcissism of contemporary poetry

"As a result, there’s a good argument to be made that the dominance of the first-person poem has killed off the rich possibilities available to poets. Formal poetry, narrative verse, satirical verse or light verse, dramatic verse—all these options have, with a few exceptions, largely vanished from mainstream poetry. Poems now are almost exclusively concerned with the feelings of a speaker who appears to be, at most, a slightly distanced version of the poet. This predicament becomes more evident when it is multiplied across an entire industry, with thousands of personal lyrics published year after year. That doesn’t make all personal lyric bad; in fact, most (published) contemporary poetry is not characterized by badness at all but rather by a professionalized mediocrity that flattens the language until everyone sounds the same."

Here.