Bøker i Contemp North American Poetry-serien

A collection of varied yet interrelated pieces highlighting Nathaniel Mackey's multifaceted work as writer and critic. It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman's interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experimental writing; from Kamau Brathwaite's ""calibanistic"" language practices to Federico Garcia Lorca's flamenco aesthetic of duende.

Makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume's essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.

Examines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time.

Explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism.

The Collaborative Artist's Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist's book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose.

"Poetry FM listens back to the experimental period of FM radio's development from the late 1940s to the 1980s to show how American poetry was shaped by, and shaped in turn, the emergence of a radio counterculture. Like FM radio history, the literary history of American poetry during this period is defined by waves of opposition to the literary and critical establishment by poets and movements who likewise stressed experimentalism, alternative networks of distribution, regionalism, and community. In this study, Lisa Hollenbach focuses on two major radio stations-Pacifica's KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York-to develop an institutionally grounded analysis of how poets' involvement with FM radio contributed to postwar aural imaginaries. While poetry programming on Pacifica Radio has always been capacious, including poetry from the past as well as contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and poetry by unpublished writers, Hollenbach focuses on writers who played important roles at these stations and whose work embraces oral poetics and/or radio and sonic tropes. These especially include poets associated with the New American Poetry-William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, and Amiri Baraka, among others-who brought the oral poetics of the "new" poetry to Pacifica Radio's experiment in FM radio. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the racial, gender, and sexual politics of both the New American Poetry and the FM revolution came under increasing scrutiny and contestation. During these years, poets as different as Spicer, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Audre Lorde responded to this terrain of struggle by creating-in their poetry, performances, and radio work-alternative aural imaginaries, or figurative channels for the transmission of fugitive signals across time and place. This is a book about how radio-the once-dominant mass media form-became an underground medium for and key figure in American poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s"--

"Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks, how do experimental poems "think," and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of (often paralyzing) emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research she draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can, in fact, re-shape the activity of the reader's mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. The book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century"--

"Dissonant Voices: Race, Jazz, and Innovative Poetics in Midcentury America explores the braiding together of racial politics, popular music, and avant-garde poetics in post-war American culture. Ranging from roughly the late-1940s to the early 1970s, this study examines the development of open field poetics, alternately termed projective verse, after Charles Olson's influential essay of the same name. In doing so, it traces projective verse from its creation amidst the crucible of racial integration at Black Mountain College, to its development through a series of interracial friendships explored among writers involved in the Boston, San Francisco, and downtown New York scenes, to its reimagining by African American poets working in Harlem, Los Angeles, and beyond as part of the Black Arts Movement. Because the histories of integration, jazz, and postwar poetics have been studied too often as the subjects of disparate narratives and separate disciplines, this arc of their shared development has also been largely obscured. To remedy this, the present study takes an interdisciplinary approach, with insights from contemporary histories, performance studies, sound studies, critical race theory, and literary criticism informing the mix of literary analysis, musicology, and historical detail that comprises each chapter. Accordingly, the book argues for an integrated approach to the New American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement, one that situates the midcentury poetics of breath and performance in the context of the Civil Rights-era politics and jazz music that informed it. Moreover, it also unearths significant and little understood connections between Black Mountain, the Beats, the Boston Renaissance, the New York scene, and the Black Arts Movement, expanding, thereby, our understandings of each, and, in a more general sense, of contemporary American poetry, politics, and music in the process"--

"Big data, sensor networks, rolling newsfeeds: today we are constantly surrounded by communication technologies mapping and remapping the complexity of our interconnected planet. But one technology has been overlooked: the poem. This book tells the story of how, over the century, authors and readers reinvented poetry as a form of macro-scale imagination, able to capture the speed and scope of global capitalist society when all other media fall short. It also asks what that story tells us today: why have we been so keen to picture poetry as a kind of global information system (a picture I call 'epic reading')? What may have been lost? This story, it turns out, takes us back to the years just before the First World War, when new media and new horizons threatened to leave poetry behind--but also opened up a new space of imaginative possibilities that it turned out poetic technique was uniquely able to navigate. It also takes us back to turn-of-the century France, and more specifically to Paris (the 'capital of the nineteenth century') where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire articulated, more clearly than anyone, the challenges of imaginative scale that the coming twentieth century would bring. The book follows Apollinaire's ideas across the Atlantic, and shows how and why his work became a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of American imperialism and into the present day. Threading together Apollinaire's work in the 1910s with that of three of his American successors--Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley starting in the 1970s--it examines why this specific strand of poetic tradition and method has proved so vital to our cultural ideas, a hundred years later, of what poetry can do and of what one individual can imagine."--