American poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.

Including those of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarell, Allen Tate, John Ciardi, and Robert Penn Warren, R.S. Gwynn has returned to print many of the pivotal essays written by America's most influential poet-critics in the last fifty years.

In this bestselling companion to her pioneering study, Invisible Poets, Joan Sherman continues to make new generations aware of the "invisible" legacy of nineteenth-century black American poetry. The 171 poems here, by thirty-five men and women, have been transcribed
from first editions and are annotated in detail.
 

In this deft analysis, Vernon Shetley shows how writers and readers of poetry, operating under very different conventions and expectations, have drifted apart, stranding the once-vital poetic enterprise on the distant margins of contemporary culture. Along with a clear understanding of where American poetry stands and how it got there, After the Death of Poetry offers a compelling set of prescriptions for its future, prescriptions that might enable the art to regain its lost stature in our intellectual life.
In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets—Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery—try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.

The aftermath of death leaves many of us dumbstruck—turned inward and inarticulate. Having lost both parents, poet Rusty Morrison attempts to find in that shocked silence a language scored by the intimacy of that aloneness with death. Each poem-series in this book of multi-part sequences evolves a new form, stretching every sentence past expectation so as to disrupt the truisms of grief and find affinities in the shifting flux that death discloses. Readers are offered what the poet experienced in the writing process, not relief but a heightened intensity. Beyond elegy, Morrison’s new work embodies the volatility of death in life, which mourning allows us to experience.

Lisa Hiton’s Afterfeast begins by considering philosophical questions arising from the experience of desire and intimacy: What does love reveal about — and make possible within — the individual? Can we ever truly understand another person’s experience of the world around them? To what extent is the other ultimately inaccessible, a world unto herself? Pillared by massive, ambitious poems in the tradition of Modernism, these lyrics imbue landscapes as varied as Greece and America with new tension, new significance, as the speaker searches for answers to these provocative questions of love and inheritance. Through her graceful curation of imagery and enviable command of narrative, Hiton ultimately transforms our understanding of history and desire.

Alan Michael Parker’s latest collection, The Age of Discovery, is a work of enduring beauty, filled with his signature tenderness and surprise. Parker’s interests range from the Psalms to the Internet, from a woman stepping out her window to die to two men trying to learn how to live as they argue in a row-boat. With an eye on some of the greatest love poets (Amichai, Mistral, Neruda), Parker delivers a collection deep in empathy, rigorously attentive, and formally inventive.

This anthology of poems about Elvis invites readers to experience the connection between the historical and mythical status of The King, on the one hand, and the poetic imagery of him on the other. All Shook Up! combines history and myth and art—in the words of some of our most well–known poets and in the elegant and revealing photographs of Jon Hughes.

William Logan has been called the most dangerous poetry critic since Randall Jarrell. All the Rage collects his early critical works, including reviews and verse chronicles, a long essay on Auden's imagery, an unpublished essay on "The Prejudice of Aesthetics," as well as a recent interview. A critic of uncompromising passions, his readings of modern poetry are irritating, intimate, severe, and luminous. Banned by some publications, his criticism has violently opposed the etiquette of praise that has silenced strong opinion among poetry circles.
Logan was among the first critics to review a generation of poets now in creative maturity, and his comments on the early works of Jorie Graham, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and the late Amy Clampitt show the enthusiasm of fresh discovery. But he is no respecter of old reputation, as his reviews of John Ashbery and Robert Penn Warren demonstrate. In total, his criticism considers virtues with their defects and always speaks its author's mind. Some contemporary poetry has had few better friends, and some few greater enemies, than William Logan.
William Logan is the author of Sad-Faced Men, Difficulty, Sullen Weedy Lakes, and Vain Empires. He is Alumni/ae Professor of English, University of Florida.

Diaspora constitutes a powerful descriptor for the modern condition of the contemporary poet, the spokesperson for the psyche of America. The poems in American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement focus on the struggles and pleasures of creating a home-physical and mental-out of displacement, exile, migration, and alienation.

To fully explore the concept of diaspora, the editors have broadened the scope of their definition to include not only the physical act of moving and immigration but also the spiritual and emotional dislocations that can occur-as for Emily Dickinson and other poets-even in a life spent entirely in one location.

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The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism.Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today.Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History presents a series of case studies that shows how poets perceived the new technology of cinema as a rival threatening to their prestige, but also as a sister art deserving of encouragement. Each chapter places a key poem at the center and takes up the issues arising from the engagement of these two art forms, such as the poets' mixed feelings about living in a national culture dominated by visual media. Whether it is Hart Crane writing on Chaplin, Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe, Frank O'Hara on James Dean, or Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, poets have made sense of their own time by reference to film icons and values shared by all Americans thanks to the dream factory, Hollywood.
As an increasingly popular genre of modern poetry, and one that permits a unique view of this century's dominant art form, the movie poem has needed an explanatory book like this one. As cinema and television continue to wield extraordinary influence over the lives of all Americans, the efforts of poets to understand the visual culture will come to be appreciated as central to the task of modern and postmodern literature. This critical history is an important and timely contribution to the study of American literature and American institutions.
"One of the impressive things about the book is that while pursuing the seemingly narrow category of poems-about-movies, Goldstein is able to raise and illuminate virtually all the key issues surrounding the poetry of the period." - Roger Gilbert, Cornell University
". . . a discerning book, combining criticism and social history. It satisfies scholarly standards while appealing to general readers." - Philip French, coeditor of the Faber Book of Movie Verse
"In this work, [Goldstein] provides a new way of looking at American poets, both familiar and neglected. The approach is chronological and thematic, and films are seen from black, gay, Jewish, and feminist as well as middle-class white perspectives." Library Journal
Laurence Goldstein is editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and Professor of English, University of Michigan.

Explores the ways American poetry engages with visual art, music, fiction, spirituality, and performance art

Many people think of poetry as a hermetic art, as though poets wrote only about themselves or as if the subject of poetry were finally only poetry—its forms and traditions. Indeed much of what constitutes poetry in the lyric tradition depends on a stringently controlled point of view and aims for a timeless, intransitive utterance. Stephen Fredman’s study proposes a different perspective.

American Poetry as Transactional Art explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms—its existential interactions with the outside world. Poetry operating in this vein draws together images, ideas, practices, rituals, and verbal techniques from around the globe, and across time—not to equate them, but to establish dialogue, to invite as many guests as possible to the World Party, which Robert Duncan has called the “symposium of the whole.”

Fredman invites new readers into contemporary poetry by providing lucid and nuanced analyses of specific poems and specific interchanges between poets and their surroundings. He explores such topics as poetry’s transactions with spiritual traditions and practices over the course of the twentieth century; the impact of World War II on the poetry of Charles Olson and George Oppen; exchanges between poetry and other art forms including sculpture, performance art, and ambient music; the battle between poetry and prose in the early work of Paul Auster and in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. The epilogue looks briefly at another crucial transactional occasion: teaching American poetry in the classroom in a way that demonstrates that it is at the center of the arts and at the heart of American culture.

2006 Iowa Poetry Prize winner

“If everyone decided to call themselves a girl / that word would stop.” In this award-winning volume of authoritative and assertive poems, Sarah Vap embarks on an emotional journey to the land of America’s female children. Questioning, contradicting, radically and restlessly demanding acceptance, she searches for a way to move from serious girlhood to womanly love. Demonstrating the seriousness of female childhood—which is as dangerous and profound as war, economics, and history, that is, as manhood, in her view—Vap reveals the extremes of self-doubt and self-righteousness inherent in being a contemporary American girl.
“When we’re overcome / by everything we think we love—then by morning / we’re adults.” Just as the oil of American spikenard may provide relief from childhood, so does Sarah Vap provide the kind of holy and extravagant love and honor that can relieve the growing pains of “everyone’s little girl.”

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.

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 communities.

Among Friends presents a richly theorized evocation of friendship as a fluid, critical social space, one that offers a vantage point from which to explore the gendering of poetic institutions and practices from the postwar period to the present. With friendship as an optic, the essays in this volume offer important new insights into the gender politics of the poetic avant-garde, since poetry as an institution has continued to be transformed by dramatic changes wrought by second-wave feminism, sexual liberation, and gay rights. These essays reveal the intimate social negotiations that fight, fracture, and queer the conventions of authority and community that have long constrained women poets and the gendering of poetic subjectivities.

Contributors: Maria Damon, Andrew Epstein, Ross Hair, Duriel E. Harris, Daniel Kane, Dawn Lundy Martin, Peter Middleton, Linda Russo, Lytle Shaw, Ann Vickery, Barrett Watten, Ronaldo V. Wilson

Winner of the 2010 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University

Gathers the best work of flourishing but often-neglected avant-garde southern poets

Another South is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness, represents the direction of a new breed of southern writing that is at once universal in its appeal and regional in its flavor.

Focusing on poets currently residing in the South, the anthology includes both emerging and established voices in the national and international literary world. From the invocations of Andy Young’s “Vodou Headwashing Ceremony” to the blues-informed poems of Lorenzo Thomas and Honorée Jeffers, from the different voicings of John Lowther and Kalamu ya Salaam to the visual, multi-genre art of Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts, and Bob Grumman, the poetry in Another South is rich in variety and enthusiastic in its explorations of new ways to embody place and time. These writers have made the South lush with a poetic avant-garde all its own, not only redefining southern identity and voice but also offering new models of what is possible universally through the medium of poetry.

Hank Lazer’s introductory essay about “Kudzu textuality” contextualizes the work by these contemporary innovators. Like the uncontrollable runaway vine that entwines the southern landscape, their poems are hyperfertile, stretching their roots and shoots relentlessly, at once destructive and regenerative. In making a radical departure from nostalgic southern literary voices, these poems of polyvocal abundance are closer in spirit to "speaking in tongues" or apocalyptic southern folk art—primitive, astonishing, and mystic.
 

In the 1930s African Americans faced three distinct historical crises that impacted the lives of African Americans directly—the Great Depression, the existential-identity crisis, and the Italo-Ethiopian War, with its threat of a race war. A sizeable body of black poetry was produced in this decade, which captured the new modes of autonomy through which black Americans resisted these social calamities. Much of it, however, including the most influential protest poems, was dismissed as “romantic” by major, leftist critics and anthologists.

 

Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants: Recovering the African American Poetry of the 1930s, by Jon Woodson, uses social philology to unveil social discourse, self fashioning, and debates in poems gathered from anthologies, magazines, newspapers, and individual collections. The first chapter examines three long poems, finding overarching jeremiadic discourse that inaugurated a militant, politically aware agent. Chapter two examines self-fashioning in the numerous sonnets that responded to the new media of radio, newsreels, movies, and photo-magazines. The third chapter shows how new subjectivities were generated by poetry addressed to the threat of race war in which the white race was exterminated.

 

The black intellectuals who dominated the interpretative discourses of the 1930s fostered exteriority, while black culture as a whole plunged into interiority. Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants delineates the struggle between these inner and outer worlds, a study made difficult by a contemporary intellectual culture which recoils from a belief in a consistent, integrated self.

 

In this timely and reflective anthology, the generation that sought to stay forever young reveals that midlife should mean more than jokes about thinning hair, creaking joints, and thickening waistlines. Midlife's insights—whether they be physical, spiritual, or emotional—are indeed startling, and who better than poets to deliver them?

Poet and translator Daniel Simko emigrated with his parents to the U.S.A. and lived here until his death, aged 45, in 2004. Steeped in the traditions of European art, Simko remained reticent about publishing. Thanks to his literary executor, Carolyn Forché, this first collection, in the language Simko grew up into, showcases his gift for the unexpected, exact phrase. The Arrival maps a haunting choreography of travel, memory, and the body so gently you will feel you have been carrying this book around with you all along.

In 1987 poet and physician Jon Mukand published Sutured Words, a volume of contemporary poems to help patients, their families and friends, and all health care professionals embrace the complexity of healing, illness, and death. Robert Coles called the collection “a wonderful source of inspiration and instruction for any of us who are trying to figure out what our work means”; Norman Cousins was impressed by the “discernment and high quality of the selections.” Now, in Articulations, Mukand adds more than a hundred new poems to the strongest poems from Sutured Words to give us a lyrical, enlightened understanding of the human dimensions of suffering and illness

From popular culture to politics to classic novels, quintessentially American texts take their inspiration from the idea of infinity. In the extraordinary literary century inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the lyric too seemed to encounter possibilities as limitless as the U.S. imagination. This raises the question: What happens when boundlessness is more than just a figure of speech? Exploring new horizons is one thing, but actually looking at the horizon itself is something altogether different. In this carefully crafted analysis, James von der Heydt shines a new light on the lyric craft of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill and considers how their seascape-vision redefines poetry's purpose.

Emerson famously freed U.S. literature from its past and opened it up to vastness; in the following century, a succession of brilliant, rigorous poets took the philosophical challenges of such freedom all too seriously. Facing the unmarked horizon, Emersonian poets capture—and are captured by—a stark, astringent version of human beauty. Their uncompromising visions of limitlessness reclaim infinity's proper legacy—and give American poetry its edge. Von der Heydt's book recovers the mystery of their world.