Poetry and Work offers a timely and much-needed re-examination of the relationship between work and poetry. The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely. The book interrogates whether poetry and avant-garde and experimental writing can provide models for work that is less alienated and more free. In this major new collection, sixteen scholars and poets draw on a...

The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes traces a tradition of revolutionary self-mythologising in the lives and works of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. This book tracks the transmission of the poem as charm, the poet as charmer, and the reinstitution of troubadour erotics as a kind of social poetics. Starting with Orpheus, the book refreshes the...

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here—“Indigeneities”; “Political Landscapes”; “Space, Place, Materiality”; “Revising an Australian Mythos”—models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject...

The Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form. The book’s overarching claim is that “local tongues” in...

Poetry, Architecture, and the New York School: Something Like a Liveable Space examines the relationship between poetics and architecture in the work of the first generation New York School poets, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler. Reappraising the much-debated New York School label, Mae Losasso shows how these writers constructed poetic spaces, structures, surfaces, and apertures, and sought to figure themselves and their readers in relation to these architextual sites. In doing so, Losasso reveals how the built environment shapes the poetic...

This monograph identifies and investigates the 'other-conscious' ethics in black avant-garde poetry since the 1980s. Drawing on a long tradition in the African Diaspora of ethical writings that put the Other first, this work shows how black poets writing in an avant garde or experimental vein in the United States push language to its limits to reveal how poetry can address and exemplify ethical postures towards other people. This other-centered vantage allows the poets to incisively comment on some of this period's most pressing ethical issues, including postcolonial and racialized...