Post-War American Poetry:An Environmental Perspective

This essay describes the connections between the important groups of innovative,avant-garde,and experimental poetry and poetics emerging in the United States since the Vietnam War:language writing,Flarf,conceptualism,identity poetries,and environmental poetry.The method shows an example of how to look at writing through both close reading and from a distance.Understanding the variety of schools of the United States poetry since the Vietnam War to reveal their similarities,connections,and differences can only be accomplished if we take multiple points of view.No single perspective is sufficient to define the field.This essay first uses a third person description of the innovative poetry schools of the period.Next,it shows the changes in style that took place using the author’s first-person perspective as an editor,publisher,and writer of poetry and poetics.Then the essay shows the comparative position of those United States schools related to Chinese poetry of the same period as revealed in an experimental poetry translation anthology-The Reciprocal Translation Project.Finally,a graphical view of the United States schools shows their sequence.Since there is a wide range of viewpoints in poetry styles and poets who vary in age,styles,and aesthetics,it is difficult to judge an individual poem based solely on close reading.Adding to close reading,reading at a distance includes elucidation,clarification,social structure,and interactions among individuals to assist readers in reading poetry.This network of poetry establishes both a method for poetics and an example of how to reduce distorted analyses of poetry/poetics from a single critic.

Shakespeare and Experimental American Poetry

Why the particular emphasis proposed in my title on Shakespeare’s importance for experimental or avant-garde American poetry?We can take Shakespeare’s significance for American poetry generally,as for most writers in the English language,as a given.One can certainly trace Shakespeare’s presence in a wide range of more mainstream twentieth-century poetry,from John Berryman to Anthony Hecht to Sylvia Plath,and anthologies of poetic responses to Shakespeare abound.But the use of the ultimate canonical Anglophone writer by experimental poets dedicated to changing the context of writing and reception in their own time raises some interesting questions not just about Shakespeare’s universal accessibility,availability,and usefulness but about later experimental poets’senses of rupture and continuity.I’m interested in Shakespeare less as a site of continuity and tradition and more one of productive conflict and difference,in what Shakespeare has meant for experimental American poets not just as writer but as symbolic figure,as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s“representative men.”My goal,then,is not merely to point to the multiple American poetic uses of Shakespeare,but more specifically to suggest how some American poets(from Emerson and Williams to such contemporaries as Susan Howe,Harryette Mullen,Jen Bervin,and K.Silem Mohammad)have used or identified with Shakespeare to buttress what is often a particularly American version of avant-garde poetics.

Review Essay: The Black Arts Movement and the Aesthetic Framing of 21st Century Anthologies of African American Poetry

When considering anthologies of African American poetry in the 21 st century,it is noteworthy how much the legacy of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s both positively and negatively shapes their aesthetic politics,framing,and reception.This essay considers how these anthologies use the Black Arts Movement to frame their version of Black poetry and the way they come at questions of literary and cultural lineage,the relationship of Black poetry to African American experience,and formal tradition and innovation.

Continuities of Racial Fascism:Louis Till and Black Marxism in the Pisan Cantos

In Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos,Pound mourns the unjust execution of Louis Till,Emmett Till's father.This essay argues that the unusually sympathetic representation of Till in the poem was made possible by Pound's engagement with the ideas of activists for black liberation like Nancy Cunard and Langston Hughes;hence Pound,an avowed fascist,ultimately voices a critique of the“racial fascism”of the United States typical of discourses of black anti-imperialism.The essay concludes with exploring the antinomical racial logic of the Pisan Cantos,for which black political radicalism-the“Black Leninism”of Langston Hughes in particular-is revealed to be a constitutive,but repressed,ideological interlocutor.

NOISY SOUNDS! It's a Listening Affair:Jazz Aesthetic, Improvisation, and Womanism in M. NourbeSe Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

Black writers adapted jazz music to“say the unsayable”or employed the“jazz aesthetic,”which includes improvisation,citation,and variation as a stylistic device to distance their literature from European forms of narration.These elements can also be found in M.NourbeSe Philipp poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue,Her Silence Sofily Breaks(1988)which rigorously challenges the way language and words are perceived.Philip denounces the Western ideology of non-ambiguity,dichotomies,and narration altogether by engaging the reader as jazz musicians engage their audience.What role did music play in the Black resistance?What is the“jazz aesthetic”and how is it incorporated into Black diasporic literature?How does jazz music create community and how did Black female musicians speak up in a rather hypermasculine jazz universe?How does Philip incorporate the jazz aesthetic,improvisation,and womanist thoughts in her poems?And what is the intention of noise,dissonance,and(musical)violence?