Books in the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics series

Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).

This book examines Donald M. Allen¿s crucially influential poetry anthology The New American Poetry, 1945¿1960 from the perspectives of American Cold War nationalism and literary transnationalism, considering how the anthology expresses and challenges Cold War norms, claiming post-war Anglophone poetic innovation for the United States and reflecting the conservative American society of the 1950s. Examining the crossroads of politics, social life, and literature during the Cold War, this book puts Allen¿s anthology into its historical context and reveals how the editor was influenced by the volatile climate of nationalism and politics that pervaded every aspect of American life during the Cold War. Reconsidering the dramatic influence that Allen¿s anthology has had on the way we think about and anthologize American poetry, and recontextualizing The New American Poetry as a document of the Cold War, this study not only helps us come to a more accurate understanding of how the anthology came into being, but also encourages new ways of thinking about all of Anglophone poetry, from the twentieth century and today.

This book is a critical experiment that tracks the literary and poetic uses of musical notation and notational methods in North American long poems from the middle of last century to the contemporary moment.

This collection of essays focuses on the remarkable late writings of Robert Duncan. Although praised by reviewers, Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. Written by a cast of emerging and established scholars, these essays bring together a diverse set of approaches to reading Duncan's writing.

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets.

Tackling topics such as globalization and political activism, this book traces engaged poetics in 20th century American poetry. Spahr provides a comprehensive view of activist poetry, starting with the Great Depression and the Harlem Renaissance and moving to the Beats and contemporary writers such as Amiri Baraka and Mark Nowak.

The first collection of essays dedicated to experimental practice in contemporary British poetry, Modernist Legacies provides an overview of the most notable trends in the past 50 years. Contributors discuss a wide range of poets including Caroline Bergvall and Barry MacSweeney, showing these poets' connections with their Modernist predecessors.

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy.

This book examines the literary impact of famed British poet, Barry MacSweeney, who worked at the forefront of poetic discovery in post-war Britain.

Poetry's relevancy as a tool for social and political change continues to be overlooked in a global context. Looking to writers as diverse as Derek Walcott, Paul Muldoon, and Daljit Nagra, Hena shows that poets throughout the world have reinvigorated older poetic traditions to address political realities and the sweeping pressures of modernity.

Drawing upon archival research and deft close readings of poems, Part Two (1934-1946) delves into the inner-workings of literary history and shows how diverse alliances used four books of poetry about Appalachia to change America s notion of race, region, and pluralism.

The Poetry of Susan Howe provides a comprehensive survey of the major works of one of America's foremost contemporary poets. Addressing lyric, literary history, collage and visual poetics, The Poetry of Susan Howe is a lucid and persuasive investigation of the volatile movements of this extraordinary body of work.

The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.

Analyzing the poets Melvin B. Tolson, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka, this study charts the Afro-Modernist epic. Within the context of Classical epic traditions, early 20th-century American modernist long poems, and the griot traditions of West Africa, Schultz reveals diasporic consciousness in the representation of African American identities.

This collection of essays focuses on the remarkable late writings of Robert Duncan. Although praised by reviewers, Duncan's last two books of poetry have yet to receive the critical attention they merit. Written by a cast of emerging and established scholars, these essays bring together a diverse set of approaches to reading Duncan's writing.

Ranging from conceptual theater to visual poetry the New York School explored the possibilities of collaboration like no other group of American poets. New York School Collaborations gathers essays from a diverse group of scholars on the alliances and artistic co-productions of New York School poets, painters, musicians, and film-makers.

This book examines intersections of poetry and performance during the British Poetry Revival. This book is essential reading for poetry and performance enthusiasts, particularly those interested in innovative British Poetry.

This book explores the political significance of formal experimentation in American poetry written during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It focuses on the use of procedural forms, which involve the invention of rules or methods designed to structure the production of a poem's content.

Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's 'New American Poetry' anthology.

This collection of essays traces the emergence of the Western poem from the standpoint of its collision with "American" otherness, particularly, the Latin American tradition.

Using a critical examination of the collage poetics of Ronald Johnson, this book sets out to understand Johnson's poetry in the context of the "New American" collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond.

Addresses the early twentieth-century intersection of scientific and religious discourse exploring literary modernism through the lens of cultural history, focusing on the works of H.D., Mina Loy, and Jean Toomer. It covers a range of topics such as electromagnetism and sexuality, dance, and theories of spiritual evolution.

This book takes up the utopian desire for a perfect language of words that give direct expression to the real, known in Western thought as Cratylism, and its impact on the social visions and poetic projects of three of the most intellectually ambitious of American writers: Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson.

The sites of inspiration documented in this book range from nineteenth century linguistic theory to postmodern strategies of conceptual writing, encompassing well known instances of modernist poetics (Mallarme, Pound, Olson) alongside obscure but revealing figures like Otto Nebel and Henri-Martin Barzun.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

Examining poetry by Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, and Amiri Baraka, among others, this book shows that leading US poets since 1979 have performed the role of public intellectual through their poetic rhetoric. Gwiazda's argument aims to revitalize the role of poetry and its social value within an era of global politics.

Taking as its starting point Delmore Schwartz's self-appointment as both a 'poet of the Hudson River' and 'laureate of the Atlantic,' this book comprehensively reassesses the poetic achievement of a critically neglected writer. Runchman reads Schwartz's poetry in relation to its national and international perspectives.

In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.

The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely.

Ranging from conceptual theater to visual poetry the New York School explored the possibilities of collaboration like no other group of American poets. New York School Collaborations gathers essays from a diverse group of scholars on the alliances and artistic co-productions of New York School poets, painters, musicians, and film-makers.