Results by title

A critical analysis of the poetic representations and legacies of five landmark blues artists

The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry focuses on five key blues musicians and singers—Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Robert Johnson, and Lead Belly—and traces the ways in which these artists and their personas have been invoked and developed throughout American poetry. This study spans nearly one hundred years of literary and musical history, from the New Negro Renaissance to the present.

Emily Ruth Rutter not only examines blues musicians as literary touchstones or poetic devices, but also investigates the relationship between poetic constructions of blues icons and shifting discourses of race and gender. Rutter’s nuanced analysis is clear, compelling, and rich in critical assessments of these writers’ portraits of the musical artists, attending to their strategies and oversights.
 

A searing exploration of young womanhood in a culture of being seen

Inspired by an exhibit of vintage photographs by Francesca Woodman, whose work is often shocking in its exploration of a woman’s relationship with her body in a misogynistic culture, The Body Taken combines the confessional, the ekphrastic, and the erasure of women’s artistry. In a New York City gallery, Lisa Beech Hartz finds herself completely captivated and especially moved by how much the photographer’s self-portraits resemble a sort of mash-up of the poet and her dearest friend in their late teens, writing: “Mirrored in girlhood / recollection / and all our fables — / all the frazzled strands / of stories / I can never braid / complete / for lack of you.”

These poems grieve the poet’s deep youthful bond while also reflecting on each girl’s family life and their shared experiences: adventurous trips into the New York of the late seventies from their suburban town; encounters with distant, heavy-drinking parents; various medical and emotional challenges; and navigating the rampant and casual misogyny of the time. Memories are punctuated with examinations and interpretations of Francesca Woodman's photographs, attempting to decipher what the artist captured about her experience of being a young woman and what it meant to live inside a young woman’s body: “Francesca crouches / in her dotted dress seam- / split and gaping. Fingers / splayed across her face / she calculates her escape.” 

The collection also includes erasures of critical responses to Woodman’s work which are sometimes respectful, even reverential, and other times reinforce the fascination with her suicide and her sexuality. Using provocative imagery, this collection serves as a love letter to lost girlhood, exploring themes of identity, loss, and the female body in the world. 

Crisis, breakdown, rejuvenation: this is the territory of poetry that Rudman takes readers into with this set of essays. Constructed as a series of character studies, the essays are rooted in autobiographical material with biographical counterpoints, tying the poets distinctly to places. Even as they are placed, however, they are displaced: Rudman's subjects, from D.H. Lawrence to Czeslaw Milosz to T. S. Eliot, are almost all exiles, either geographically or within themselves. This exile spins anger into energy, transmuting emotion into imagination the same way that Passaic Falls, known to William Carlos Williams, turns water into power.

The mosaic style of the essays touches on nerve after nerve, avoiding the snags of academic jargon to ease towards an illuminating truth about the artists' shifting work and worlds. Some of the Samuels—Beckett and Fuller—were able to navigate these shifts, while others--Coleridge and Johnson--are shown to be less able to transmute their energy into motion.

The Book of the Play is a collection of essays that examines early modern drama in the context of book history. Focusing on the publication, marketing, and readership of plays opens fresh perspectives on the relationship between the cultures of print and performance and more broadly between drama and the public sphere. Marta Straznicky's introduction offers a survey of approaches to the history of play reading in this period, and the collection as a whole consolidates recent work in textual, bibliographic, and cultural studies of printed drama.

Individually, the essays advance our understanding of play reading as a practice with distinct material forms, discourses, social settings, and institutional affiliation. Part One, “Real and Imagined Communities,” includes four essays on play-reading communities and the terms in which they are distinguished from the reading public at large. Cyndia Clegg surveys the construction of readers in prefaces to published plays; Lucy Munro traces three separate readings of a single play, Edward Sharpham's The Fleer; Marta Straznicky studies women as readers of printed drama; and Elizabeth Sauer describes how play reading was mobilized for political purposes in the period of the Civil War. 

In Part Two, “Play Reading and the Book Trade,” five essays consider the impact of play reading on the public sphere through the lens of publishing practices. Zachary Lesser offers a revisionist account of black-letter typeface and the extent to which it may be understood as an index of popular culture; Alan Farmer examines how the emerging news trade of the 1620s and 1630s affected the marketing of printed drama; Peter Berek traces the use of generic terms on title pages of plays to reveal their intersection with the broader culture of reading; Lauren Shohet demonstrates that the Stuart masque had a parallel existence in the culture of print; and Douglas Brooks traces the impact print had on eclipsing performance as the medium in which the dramatist could legitimately lay claim to having authored his text.

The individual essays focus on selected communities of readers, publication histories, and ideologies and practices of reading; the collection as a whole demonstrates the importance of textual production and reception to understanding the place of drama in the early modern public sphere.

Stanley Burnshaw began to publish poems in the 1920s and founded his own verse journal in 1925. After serving as coeditor and drama critic of the New Masses weekly (1934-1936), he entered book publishing, directing the Dryden Press until 1958, when he joined Henry Holt. The first of his nineteen earlier works, André Spire and His Poetry, appeared in 1934 and the last in 1990, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader, with an introduction by Denis Donoghue.

The present volume—the definitive Burnshaw collection—offers all the poems he wishes to preserve and a full representation of his prose, including My Friend, My Father in its entirety. The Collected Poems and Selected Prose is vital reading for anyone wishing to be fully acquainted with the man whom Karl Shapiro called "one of the best-respected men of letters of our time."