Avant Folk Small Press Poetry Networks From 1950 To The Present

This is a critical study of the intersection of folk and avant-garde poetics in transatlantic small press poetry networks from the 1950s up to the present.

A critical study of the intersection of folk and avant-garde poetics in transatlantic small press poetry networks from the 1950s up to the present.

This is a book about contemporary literary and artistic entanglements: word and image, media and materiality, inscription and illustration. It proposes a vulnerable, fugitive mode of reading poetry, which defies disciplinary categorisations, embracing the open-endedness and provisionality of forms. This manifests itself interactively in the six case studies, which have been chosen for their distinctness and diversity across the long twentieth century: the book begins with the early twentieth-century work of writer and artist Djuna Barnes, exploring her re-animation of sculptural and dramatic sources. It then turns to the late modernist artist and poet David Jones considering his use of the graphic and plastic arts in The Anathemata, and next, to the underappreciated mid-century poet F.T. Prince, whose work uncannily re-activates Michelangelo's poetry and sculpture. The second half of the book explores the collaborations of the canonical poet Ted Hughes with the publisher and artist Leonard Baskin during the 1970s; the innovative late twentieth-century poetry of Denise Riley who uses page space and embodied sound as a form of address; and, finally, the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon who has collaborated with photographers and artists, as well as ventriloquising nonhuman phenomena. The resulting unique study offers contemporary writers and readers a new understanding of literary, artistic, and nonhuman practices and shows the cultural importance of engaging with their messy co-dependencies. The book challenges critical methodologies that make a sharp division between the textual work and the extra-literary, and raises urgent questions about the status and autonomy of art and its social role.

Furnishing a novel take on the poetry of the 1930s within the context of the cultural history of the Depression, this book argues that the period's economic and cultural crisis was accompanied by an epistemological crisis in which cultural producers increasingly cast doubt on language in its ability to represent society.

BLAST at 100: A Modernist Magazine Reconsidered provides an original and rich re-contextualisation of a major modernist magazine and some of its most influential contributors.

Reconsiders the lyrical norm that predominates in Anglophone accounts of poetry through a multilingual and transnational lensA bold project that departs from a tradition heavily dominated by the lyric to question the very nature of what counts as poetry.A visually exciting text that draws on poetry and art from a wide array of late twentieth and early twenty-first century practitioners.An interdisciplinary approach to poetry and poetics that opens new avenues for understanding how poetry intersects with philosophies of the object, media theory, and visual studies.A transnational frame that responds to a growing scholarly push to situate American studies within the broader context of the American hemisphere.This book examines poets and artists in the Americas during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to show how they worked to make language into material objects and material objects into language. It builds a theory of 'material poetics' that provides an alternative account of poetry in hemispheric America. Rebecca Kosick argues that by reframing American poetry to prominently include object-oriented practices within and beyond the United States, material poetry can be seen as representing a significant branch of the American poetic tradition.

A ground-breaking analysis of the short form lineage in twentieth-century American poetry Proposes a new genealogy of 20th century and contemporary American verse Contains in-depth discussion of key American poets and movements Will appeal to graduates and scholars in both the modernist and contemporary fieldsReading a century of American poetry through the prism of short form, this book analyses the centrality of an aesthetic of brevity to American modernist verse. It begins with Imagism and devotes chapters to William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier and Rae Armantrout. Montgomery combines his larger argument, which takes issue with epic-driven narratives of Modernist poetry, with sensitive and original readings of numerous short and short-lined poems. Suggesting a reappraisal of key movements as objectivism, Black Mountain poetry and Language Writing, he opens new lines of discussion around the major poets of the period

The Collaborative Artist’s Book offers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from 1945 to the present, and highlights how the artist’s book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alexandra Gold provides a broad overview of the artist’s book form and the many ongoing debates and challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. Gold presents five case studies and details not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Taking several of these books out of special collections libraries and museum archives and making them available to a broad readership, Gold brings to light a whole genre that has been largely forgotten or neglected.