The introduction provides a theoretical and critical framework for this study, situating the book’s argument alongside recent critical studies of the everyday in literature. The chapter traces the evolution of the poetics of everyday life, especially the intensification of avant-garde interest in the quotidian following World War II. It argues that poetry has come to be defined as a form of attention, and it explores how gender, class, and political and cultural forces inflect the representation and experience of everyday life. Contrasting different approaches to the everyday in American poetry, the introduction identifies skeptical or experimental realism as an influential mode, which finds expression in experimental strategies and forms, including the long poem, constraint-based projects, appropriation, fragmentation, collage, resistance to epiphany, and radical mimesis.