The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry offers a historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost argues that this alternative lineage distinguishes itself by its feminism and its ambivalence toward existing avant-garde projects; she also thoroughly explores feminist avant-garde poets' debts and contributions to their male counterparts.
Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site.
Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations—to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyder in his back-to-the-land familial compound, Kitkitdizze; Amiri Baraka in a black nationalist community in Newark; Robert Creeley and the poets of Bolinas, California, in the capacious “now” of their poet-run town. Turning to the work of Robert Smithson—who called one of his essays an “appendix to Paterson,” and who in turn has exerted a major influence on poets since the 1970s—Shaw then traces the emergence of site-specific art in relation both to the poetics of place and to the larger linguistic turn in the humanities, considering poets including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Lisa Robertson.
By putting the poetics of place into dialog with site-specificity in art, Shaw demonstrates how poets and artists became experimental explicators not just of concrete locations and their histories, but of the discourses used to interpret sites more broadly. It is this dual sense of fieldwork that organizes Shaw’s groundbreaking history of site-specific poetry.
From Outlaw to Classic presents a sweeping history of the forces that have shaped, and continue to shape, the American poetry canon. Students, scholars, critics, and poets will welcome this enlightening and impressively documented book.
Recent writings by critics and theorists on literary canons have dealt almost exclusively with prose; Alan Golding shows that, like all canons, those of American poetry are characterized by conflict. Choosing a series of varied but representative instances, he analyzes battles and contentions among poets, anthologists, poetry magazine editors, and schools of thought in university English departments. The chapters:
• present a history of American poetry anthologies
• compare competing models of canon-formation, the aesthetic (poet-centered) and the institutional (critic-centered)
• discuss the influence of the New Critics, emphasizing their status as practicing poets, their anti-nationalist reading of American poetry, and the landmark textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
• examine the canonizing effects of an experimental “little magazine,” Origin
• trace how the Language poets address, in both their theory and their method, the canonizing institutions and canonical assumptions of the age.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press