The American Poetry Wax Museum

Drawing upon literary criticism, cultural studies, and social history, this book examines the canonizing assumptions (and compulsions) that have fabricated an image of American poetry since World War II, foremost of which is the enshrinement of the self-expressive subject. The tone of the book oscillates between documentary and polemic in an attempt to preserve the tensions that underlie the field of American poetry and which are typically subdued by anthologists and glossed over by commentators. The first chapter offers a theoretical scaffolding intended to contextualize following chapters and to invite other poets and critics to consider what it means to assemble and police a national canon of poetry. Subsequent chapters examine scholarship on contemporary American poetry; the cultural politics of publication and reviewing (which excludes, women, people of color, and gays and lesbians from many poetry anthologies); and poetry in the academy and the role of the poetry workshop. Ten appendixes list American poetry anthologies, most anthologized poets, number of anthology appearances, poets by birthdate, first anthology appearances, anthologies in translation, prizes and awards, results of a search of the MLA bibliography on CD-ROM, critical discussions of American poets, and interviews/collections of poets' essays. (RS).

This book helps readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics since 1900.

With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: · Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry – from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community – from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms – including digital, visual, documentary and children's poetry · Central critical themes – economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.

The ideal introduction to the current generation of American poets

The American Poet Laureate shows how the state has been the silent center of poetic production in the United States since World War II. It is the first history of the national poetry office, the U.S. poet laureate, highlighting the careers of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Joy Harjo at the nation’s Capitol. It is also a history of how these state poets participated in national arts programming during the Cold War. Drawing on previously unexplored archival materials at the Library of Congress and materials at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Amy Paeth describes the interactions of federal bodies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with literary organizations and with private patrons, including “Prozac heiress” Ruth Lilly. The consolidation of public and private interests is crucial to the development of state verse culture, recognizable at the first National Poetry Festival in 1962, which followed Robert Frost’s “Mission to Moscow,” and which became dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The American Poet Laureate contributes to a growing body of institutional and sociological approaches to U.S. literary production in the postwar era and demonstrates how poetry has played a uniquely important, and largely underacknowledged, role in the cultural front of the Cold War.

The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later is a collection of critical essays on Donald Allen’s 1960 seminal anthology, The New American Poetry, an anthology that Marjorie Perloff once called “the fountainhead of radical American poetics.” The New American Poetry is referred to in every literary history of post-World War II American poetry. Allen’s anthology has reached its fiftieth anniversary, providing a unique time for reflection and reevaluation of this preeminent collection. As we know, Allen’s anthology was groundbreaking—it was the first to distribute widely the poetry and theoretical positions of poets such as Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, and it was the first to categorize these poets by the schools (Black Mountain, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats) by which they are known today. Over the course of fifty years, this categorization of poets into schools has become one of the major, if not only way, that The New American Poetry is remembered or valued; one certain goal of this volume, as one reviewer invites, is to “pry The New American Poetry out from the hoary platitudes that have encrusted it.” To this point critics mostly have examined The New American Poetry as an anthology; former treatments of The New American Poetry look at it intently as a whole. Though the almost singularly-focused study of its construction and, less often, reception has lent a great deal of documented, highly visible and debated material in which to consider, we have been left with certain notions about its relevance that have become imbued ultimately in the collective critical consciousness of postmodernity. This volume, however, goes beyond the analysis of construction and reception and achieves something distinctive, extendingthose former treatments by treading on the paths they create. This volume aims to discover another sense of “radical” that Perloff articulated—rather than a radical that departs markedly from the usual, we invite consideration of The New American Poetry that isradical in the sense of root, of harboring something fundamental, something inherent, as we uncover and trace further elements correlated with its widespread influence over the last fifty years.

Written by a leading authority on William Carlos Williams, this book provides a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to twentieth-century American poetry. A wide-ranging and stimulating critical guide to twentieth-century American poetry. Written by a leading authority on the innovative modernist poet, William Carlos Williams. Explores the material, historical and social contexts in which twentieth-century American poetry was produced. Includes a biographical dictionary of major writers with extended entries on poets ranging from Robert Frost to Adrienne Rich. Contains a section on key texts considering major works, such as ‘The Waste Land’, ‘North & South’, ‘Howl’ and ‘Ariel’. The final section draws out key themes, such as American poetry, politics and war, and the process of anthologizing at the end of the century.

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry explores how American poets of the last hundred years have used laughter to create communities of readers and writers. For poets slightly outside of the literary or social mainstream, humor encourages mutual understanding and empathic insight among artist, audience, and subject. As a result, laughter helps poets reframe and reject literary, political, and discursive hierarchies—whether to overturn those hierarchies, or to place themselves at the top. While theorists like Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols and maintains the boundary between in-group and out-group, this volume shows how laughter helps us cross or re-draw those boundaries. Poets who practice such constructive humor promote a more democratic approach to laughter. Humor reveals their beliefs about their audiences and their attitudes toward the Romantic notion that poets are exceptional figures. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they suggest that poetry's ethical function is tied to its structure: empathy, humor, and poetry identify shared patterns among apparently disparate objects. This book explores a broad range of serious approaches to laughter: the inclusive, community-building humor of W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore; the self-aggrandizing humor of Ezra Pound; the self-critical humor of T. S. Eliot; Sterling Brown's antihierarchical comedy; Elizabeth Bishop's attempts to balance mockery with sympathy; and the comic epistemologies of Lucille Clifton, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and other contemporary poets. It charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how humor can be deployed to embrace, to exclude, and to transform.