front cover of Acts of Poetry
Acts of Poetry
American Poets' Theater and the Politics of Performance
Heidi R. Bean
University of Michigan Press, 2019

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.

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front cover of Poetry after Cultural Studies
Poetry after Cultural Studies
Heidi R. Bean
University of Iowa Press, 2011

 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.
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