The Real Work: Inhabiting the Ground (original) (raw)

Poetry is Not a Country Club: Reflecting on "The Change"

Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, 2017

In recent years, Black poets and other poets of color have increasingly won many of the most prestigious prizes and awards within the majority and historically white field of US poetry. This article traces the interventions (writing, activism, and institution building) that have resulted in this "change." Rather than understanding the racial politics of poetry as an endlessly revolving door of scandals, or simply as a contest over prizes and economies of prestige, this article attends to the relationship between the world of poetry and the history of social movements, an exchange often mediated through the work of writers’ collectives. In particular, this article delineates how the interventions of Black poets and other poets of color (both individually and collectively) have shifted the world of poetry, while at the same time mirroring, connecting with, and speaking back to broader movements that seek to transform the world writ large.

Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry Front Matter

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry comprises original essays by nineteen distinguished scholars. It offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, archival resources, and critical reception that define modern American poetry. The Companion stretches the narrow term of “literary modernism,” which encompasses works published from approximately 1890 to 1945, to include a more capacious and usable account of American poetry’s evolution from the twentieth century to the present. The essays collected here seek to account for modern American verse against the contexts of broad political, social, and cultural fields and forces. This volume gathers together major voices that represent the best in contemporary critical approaches and methods. Walter Kalaidjian is professor and chair of the department of English at Emory University. He is the author of The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past and editor of The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism . CONTENTS Introduction xv Walter Kalaidjian 1 The Emergence of “The New Poetry” 11 John Timberman Newcomb 2 Modern American Archives and Scrapbook Modernism 23 Bartholomew Brinkman 3 Experimental Modernisms 37 Alan Golding 4 The Legacy of New York 50 Cary Nelson 5 The Modern American Long Poem 65 Anne Day Dewey 6 American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance 77 James Smethurst 7 Objectivist Poetry and Poetics 89 Rachel Blau DuPlessis 8 American Poetry and the Popular Front 102 Alan Wald 9 Tracking the Fugitive Poets 116 Kieran Quinlan 10 Mid-Century Modernism 128 Stephen Burt 11 Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry 143 Michael Thurston 12 Black Mountain Poetry 155 Kaplan Harris 13 Beat Poetry: HeavenHell USA, 1946–1965 167 Maria Damon 14 The Black Arts Movement and Black Aesthetics 180 Evie Shockley 15 New York School and American Surrealist Poetics 196 Edward Brunner 16 Land, Place, and Nation: Toward an Indigenous American Poetics 209 Janet McAdams 17 Transpacific and Asian American Counterpoetics 223 Yunte Huang 18 Language Writing 234 Barrett Watten 19 Poet-Critics and Bureaucratic Administration 248 Evan Kindley Guide to Further Reading 259 Index 271

The Politics of Form and Poetics of Identity in Postwar American Poetry

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, 2018

Scholarship on postwar poetry in the US has been deeply structured by a taxonomic distinction between what has been deemed an “expressive” poetics of racial, sexual, and gender identity and an avant-garde or experimental discourse of formal innovation, autonomy, or difficulty. Distinct formal strategies have been tied, in turn, to specific social groups and to a New Left and post-New Left division between antiracist and anticapitalist politics in particular. The recoding of this division as a generic distinction between divergent formal strategies, we argue, reinforces an artificial separation between poetic engagements with race and class as contested social locations in contemporary US poetry. We turn to the work of Audre Lorde, and reread one of Lorde’s most widely anthologized poems, “Coal,” for how it complicates the antinomic opposition between “expressive” and experimental writing that has governed the study of postwar US poetics. At the same time the poem offers a potential model to help us rethink the race/class problematic more broadly. How the poem imagines integral and comparative processes of racial, gender, and class formation, we contend, anticipates contemporary debates over intersectional and Marxist feminist social reproduction theory and opens onto critical horizons beyond the antinomies of postwar US poetics.

Beyond the Norton: Anthologizing Innovation in Contemporary Black Poetics

Journal of Modern Literature, 2016

Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey’s anthology _What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America_ seeks to expand the contours of contemporary American and African American poetry by collecting the work of twenty-nine experimental black poets published since the late 1970s. Placing well-known innovators like Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankine alongside many younger poets, the anthology presents an impressive array of formal experimentation in order to dispel canon-centric notions of aesthetic conservatism in post-war African American poetry. By privileging poetries that use conceptual, philosophical, visual, and appropriative techniques, the collection also implicitly challenges current views of contemporary avant-garde poetry as an overwhelmingly white endeavor. Seeking to re-map the inheritance of an interracial, cross-arts modernism, What I Say makes a crucial contribution to contemporary poetry and poetics by emphasizing the wide range of forms and content present in innovative black poetries.

Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry

2021

Experimental Forms and Identity Politics in 21st Century American Poetry” explores the function of form in American poetry and its proximity to whiteness. Through an analysis of experimental and nontraditional forms I argue that poets Fatimah Asghar, Jericho Brown, Franny Choi, Natalie Diaz, Ilya Kaminsky, and Danez Smith challenge traditional notions of what a poem is; these authors use graphics and co-opt familiar text objects to challenge larger assumptions about gender identity, ableism, and the immigrant experience. These experimental forms are grounded in a larger poetic tradition that alters traditional forms, such as the sonnet, to disrupt and further dialogue related to oppressive tactics in American poetry. They also signal an intentional departure from strict forms associated with colonialism and mark a shift in contemporary American poetry. For educators, including nontraditional and experimental form poems in the curriculum encourages students to engage poetry as a livi...