Mary Jo Bang (original) (raw)
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Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 380: Twenty-First-Century American Poets, Third Series
2017
This article sheds light on the life and works of Tina Chang (1969- ), a major contemporary Asian American poet and the first woman to be named poet laureate of Brooklyn, New York. Focusing on her two collections Half-Lit Houses (2004) and Of Gods & Strangers (2011), the study shows how the trinity of racism, biculturalism and identity common to most ethnic poets lie at the center of her work and informs the choice of her themes and poetic techniques. The survey of her oeuvre and the analysis of representative poems also shows how Chang succeeds in writing down her migrant female self, tying her gains and losses , particularly this of the father, to textuality in a unique bond with the ultimate end of producing lyrical poetry , which though informed by her personal experience, defies limitational categorization. The study also shows how Chang’s poetic vision and techniques have developed systematically across time , a fact particularly evident in the use of voice and imagery in her second collection.
Book Review: American Poets and Poetry: From the Colonial Era to the Present
Reference & User Services Quarterly, 2015
In many ways American Poets and Poetry: From the Colonial Era to the Present is a condensed version of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (Greenwood, 2006). They have the same editors, many of the same contributors, and there is overlap in the poets and topics covered. The earlier encyclopedia was five volumes and much more comprehensive, but this new work does cover some contemporary poets not found in the previous work, such as Natasha Trethewey, and has more recent information about some of the still living poets.
A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings. Eds. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich, Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT, 2015.
This handbook answers the need for fresh and informative readings of canonical and non-canonical poems. The thirty-one chapters engage revisionary trends in poetry scholarship. They unfold a critical history of American poetry that challenges conventional interpretations and provide insightful new readings of well-known poems and writers as well as introductions to poets and texts that may be more unfamiliar. Each chapter focuses on two poets set into dialogue with each other, presenting paired readings of one representative text from each author. In addition to a number of familiar texts and names that are necessary for students to understand basic developments in American poetry, the handbook offers chapters on multilingual colonial poetry, nineteenth-century Native American poetry, and contemporary experimental poetry. The paired readings of poems in each chapter also invite interconnected lessons that make readers compare, for example, the communal conventions of colonial poetry to the collective poetics of contemporary performance poetry. The handbook encourages readings across and against literary periods, while annotated paired readings and additional reading suggestions should inspire students to analyze poems as particular sites of historical and political meaning. Being both a manual in terms of current theoretical directions in literary studies and a guide to practical criticism, A History of American Poetry helps students to further explore the diversity and multiple poetic traditions that make up American poetry in its intersections with historical contexts and other literatures.
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