By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community. Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Frank O Hara joined Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Andy Warhol to hang out, make films, read poems, fight censorship, end racism, and shut down the Vietnam War. Their personal, political, and artistic collaborations led them to rethink the moving picture and the lyric, resulting in an extraordinary profusion of poetry/film hybrids. Drawing on unpublished correspondences and personal interviews...
By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community. Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robe...
Were the urbane, avant-garde poets of the New York School secretly nature lovers like Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard? In "Urban Pastoral, " Timothy Gray urges us to reconsider our long-held appraisals of Frank O Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and their peers as celebrants of cosmopolitan culture and to think of their more pastoral impulses. As Gray argues, flowers are more beautiful in the New York School s garden of verse because no one expects them to bloom there. Along with the poets whose careers he chronicles, Gray shows us that startlingly new approaches to New York...
Were the urbane, avant-garde poets of the New York School secretly nature lovers like Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, and Annie Dillard? In "Urban Pastor...
In" Hold-Outs," Bill Mohr, long a figure on the Los Angeles poetry scene, reveals the complicated evolution of the literary landscape in a city famous for its production of corporate culture. Mohr s multigenerational account of the role of the poet-editor-publisher in Los Angeles community formation is nothing less than a radiant mosaic of previously little-known details about an important center of American poetry. While explaining the important role of L.A. in contemporary American poetry, Mohr also explores the ideals and perils of the small press movement in the twentieth century,...
In" Hold-Outs," Bill Mohr, long a figure on the Los Angeles poetry scene, reveals the complicated evolution of the literary landscape in a city fam...
In "Racial Things, Racial Forms," Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, in particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets various treatments of "things" (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the...
In "Racial Things, Racial Forms," Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets Theresa Hak Kyung Ch...
In "Reading Duncan Reading," thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan "read "and, perforce, what and how he "wrote." Harold Bloom wrote of the searing anxiety of influence writers experience as they grapple with the burden of being original, but for Duncan this was another matter altogether. Indeed, according to Stephen Collis, No other poet has so openly expressed his admiration for and gratitude toward his predecessors. Part one emphasizes Duncan s acts of reading, tracing a variety of his derivations including Sarah Ehlers s demonstration of...
In "Reading Duncan Reading," thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan "read "and, perforce, what and h...
The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? To answer these questions, poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates--both thematically and formally--the...
The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display...
Philosophers and theorists have long recognized both the subversive and the transformative possibilities of friendship, the intimacy of which can transcend the impersonality of such identity categories as race, class, or gender. Unlike familial relations, friendships are chosen, opening a space of relative freedom in which to create and explore new identities. This process has been particularly valuable to poets marginalized by gender or sexuality since the second half of the twentieth century, as friendship provides both a buffer against and a wedge into predominantly male homosocial poetic...
Philosophers and theorists have long recognized both the subversive and the transformative possibilities of friendship, the intimacy of which can tran...
"Bodies on the Line" offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines a vast archive of audio recordings of several key postwar American poets to explore the social and literary context of the sixties poetry reading, which is characterized by contrasting differing styles of performance: the humanist style and the skeptical strain. The humanist style, made mainstream by the Beats and their imitators, is characterized by faith in the power of presence, emotional communion, and affect. The skeptical strain emphasizes...
"Bodies on the Line" offers the first sustained study of the poetry reading in its most formative period: the 1960s. Raphael Allison closely examines ...
Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus demands multiple critical methods of interpretation. "Reading Project: " A Collaborative Analysis of William Poundstone s" Project for Tachistoscope {Bottomless Pit} "is a collaboration between three scholars combining different interpretive methods of digital literature and poetics in order to think through how critical reading is changingand, indeed, must changeto keep up with the emergence of digital poetics and practices. It weaves together...
Electronic literature is a rapidly growing area of creative production and scholarly interest. It is inherently multimedial and multimodal, and thus d...
From Sylvia Plath s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering bits to AIDS elegies assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed scraps, the condition of being too late is one that haunts post-World War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it...
From Sylvia Plath s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering bits to AIDS elegies assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostl...