ABOUT THIS BOOK

Poetry after Cultural Studies elucidates the potential of poetry scholarship when joined with cultural studies. In eight searching essays covering an astonishing range of poetic practices, geographical regions, and methodological approaches, this volume reflects on what poetry can accomplish in the broadest social and cultural contexts. From Depression-era Iowa to the postcolonial landscape of French-speaking Martinique, whether appearing in newspapers, correspondences, birders’ field guides, cross-stitches, or television and the internet, the poetry under consideration here is rarely a private, lyrical endeavor. For a great number of people writing, reading, publishing, and using poetry over the past 150 years, verse has not been a retreat from modern life, but a way of engaging with, and even changing, it.

Whether the subject is post cards, talk shows, or verse from places as different as academia and MySpace, as cultural production and as literary trickery, the material examined in this volume demonstrates the central role of poetry as an active cultural presence. By bringing together cultural studies, poetics, and formalist reading without antagonism, Poetry after Cultural Studies looks toward a poetry criticism that does not merely “do” cultural studies but, rather, employs the resources of that discipline to examine an increasingly legible and audible record of poetic practice.

Exploring a wide range of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present, Poetryafter Cultural Studies showcases the unexpectedly rich intersection of cultural studies theory and current poetry scholarship. These essays show forcefully that cultural studies and poetics—once thought incommensurable—in fact are mutually informative and richer for the effort.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Heidi R. Bean is an assistant professor of English at Bridgewater State University. Mike Chasar is an assistant professor of English at Willamette University.

REVIEWS

"Why did American poems, a hundred years ago, seem so important to people who wanted to halt the trade in feathers and preserve American birds? Why, from time to time, do Americans want to read poems by very young children? What does the poetry of Sylvia Plath have to do with popular ideas about electricity? How do poets turn apparent nonsense into aggressive political signs? Poetry after Cultural Studies will answer those questions and others; it should become an important part of debates about what poets do, what their poems are good for."—Stephen Burt, author, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction: Poetry after Cultural Studies

Writing Another Kind of Poetry: James Norman Hall as Fern Gravelin Oh Millersville!

Sylvia Plath and Electracy

Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetries in Out-of-the-Way Places

Poetic, Popular, or Political? Chartism and the Fate of Political Poetry

Only Death Can Part Us: Messages on Wartime Cards

Édouard Glissant: A Poetics of the Entour

The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860–1918

On the Advantages of Negativity: Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music, and the Cultural Turn

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

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