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A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day.
Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries.
Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.
MARY MCALEER BALKUN is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include early American literature and culture, the American gothic and grotesque, and digital humanities. She is the author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, as well as articles on early American literature, digital humanities, and pedagogy. She is co-editor of several anthologies, including Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and Transformative Digital Humanities.
JEFFREY GRAY is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry and of many articles on American and Latin American literature. He is the editor and co-editor of several anthologies, including The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry and The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement.
PAUL JAUSSEN is Associate Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University, where he co-directs the “Humanity+Technology” lecture series. His teaching and research focus is on poetry and poetics, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. He is the author of Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital. His essays and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Comparative Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and ASAP/J, among others.
1 Introduction 1
Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen
Section 1: Poetry before “American Poetry” 5
2 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women:
The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton 7
Tamara Harvey
3 Before Poetry: Revival Verse and Sermonic Address in Eighteenth-Century America 18
Wendy Raphael Roberts
4 The Inca in the Nineteenth-Century US Poetic Imaginary 28
Adam Bradford
5 African American Spirituals and Their Legacy 39
Lauri Scheyer
Section 2: Poetry and The Transcendent 51
6 Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists 53
Wendy Martin and Camille Meder
7 Artificers of the World: Transcendentalism and Its Poetic Legacies 68
Bruce Ronda
8 “Do Not Be Content with an Imaginary God”: Modern Poetry, Spirituality, and the Problem of Belief 82
Norman Finkelstein
9 Enduring Epiphany: The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Poetry 95
Nikki Skillman
Section 3: Experimentalisms, Early and Late 107
10 The New in Hindsight: Modernist Poetry and Poetics in the Classroom 109
Bob Perelman
11 Philosophy, Poetry, and the Principle of Charity 120
Johanna Winant
12 ‘‘Making a Way”: The Black Mountain Review and Mid-Twentieth Century Communities 133
Joshua Hoeynck
13 Causes, Movements, Theory: Between Language Poetry and New Narrative 146
Kaplan Harris
14 Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora 157
Tyrone Williams
15 Wearables and Modernist Poetry’s Prototypes 166
Margaret Konkol
16 Reading the Unreadable in Modern American Poetry 184
Steven Gould Axelrod
Section 4: Poetry and Identity 199
17 The Black Quatrain and America’s Racialized Poetics 201
Ben Glaser
18 Queer Poetics: Voices of the Subaltern in American Poetry 216
Daniel Enrique Pérez
19 Trans Poetry and Poetics 230
Trace Peterson
Section 5: Transnational Poetry 243
20 Ezhi-aawechigaazhangwaa: Indigenous American Comparisons 245
Margaret Noodin
21 Trans-Pacific Poetics: Eastern Influences on American Poetry in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 257
Susan M Schultz
22 “Audience Distant Relative”: Fugitive Transnationality and Poetic Form 269
Mayumo Inoue
23 “A Little Room in a House Set Aflame”: American Poetry and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century 283
Walt Hunter
24 Rethinking Transnationalism in American Poetry 294
Sarah Dowling
Section 6: Poetry and the Arts 303
25 “Sketch of a Man on a Platform”: The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem 305
Andrew Epstein
26 Poetry in the Public Square 320
Stephen Cushman
27 Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment 332
Avery Slater
28 “Compared to What”: Past and Future Paths in Rap Poetics 344
Andrew DuBois
29 American Poetry Goes to the Movies 354
Susan Cooke Weeber
Section 7: Nature and After 367
30 Reading God’s Book of the World 369
Robert Daly
31 “Sharing with the Ants”: American Ecopoetry from Lydia Sigourney to Ross Gay 379
Christoph Irmscher
32 Post-Natural Modernism 390
Mark C Long
33 Rethinking the Anthropocene: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Epochal Imaginings 402
Margaret Ronda
Section 8: Poetry of Engagement 415
34 American War Poetry 417
Cary Nelson
35 Lynch Fragments 431
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
36 Indigenous Docupoetry: “‘Last Indian War’ in Verse” 442
Kimberly Blaeser
37 “It’s Been a While”: Latinx Poetries and the Empire of Borders 455
Michael Dowdy
38 The Politics of American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century 469
David Lau
Index 484
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