ENGL 2506: Introduction to Poetry

In her reassessment of Amy Lowell as a major figure in the modern American poetry movement, Melissa Bradshaw uses theories of the diva and female celebrity to account for Lowell's extraordinary literary influence in the early twentieth century and her equally extraordinary disappearance from American letters after her death. Recognizing Amy Lowell as a literary diva, Bradshaw shows, accounts for her commitment to her art, her extravagant self-promotion and self-presentation, and her fame, which was of a kind no longer associated with poets. It also explains the devaluation of Lowell's poetry and criticism, since a woman's diva status is always short-lived and the accomplishments of celebrity women are typically dismissed and trivialized. In restoring Lowell to her place within the American poetic renaissance of the nineteen-teens and twenties,

The Beat movement nurtured many female dissidents and artists who contributed to Beat culture and connected the Beats with the second wave of the women's movement. Although they have often been eclipsed by the men of the Beat Generation, the women's contributions to Beat literature are considerable. Covering writers from the beginning of the movement in the 1950s and extending to the present, this book features interviews with nine of the best-known women Beat writers, including Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, Joanne Kyger, Brenda Frazer (Bonnie Bremser), Janine Pommy Vega, Anne Waldman, and the critic Ann Charters. Each is presented by a biographical essay that details her literary or scholarly accomplishments.

In these critical essays Gregory Stephenson takes the reader on a journey through the literature of the Beat Generation: a journey encompassing that common ethos of Beat literature - the passage from darkness to light, from fragmented being toward wholeness, from Beat to Beatific. He travels through Jack Kerouac's ""Duluoz Legend"", following Kerouac's quests for identity, community, and spiritual knowledge. He examines Allen Ginsberg's use of transcendence in ""Howl"", discovers the Gnostic vision in William S. Burroughs' fiction, and studies the mythic, visionary power of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. Stephenson also provides detailed examinations of the writing of lesser-known Beat authors: John Clellon Holmes, Gregory Corso, Richard Farina, and Michael McClure. He explores the myth and the mystery of the literary legend of Neal Cassady. The book concludes with a look at the common traits of the Beat writers - their use of primitivism, shamanism, myth and magic, spontaneity, and improvisation, all of which led them to a new idiom of consciousness and to the expansion of the parameters of American literature.

This study offers a lively account of the Imagist Poets, the first significant group of modernist poets writing in English. It discusses what their writing achieved, and analyses the theoretical claims of Imagism in relation to its poetic practice. It revises the received view of Imagism by drawing upon current re-readings of modernism in terms of gender and sexuality, cultural geography, and the idea of literary institutions and formations. The book shows the variety of practice within the Imagist group, and shifts the focus from seeing Imagism purely as the creation of Ezra Pound, by granting a much stronger focus to often overlooked figures such as Amy Lowell, F.S. Flint and John Gould Fletcher. It also examines the cultural formation of Imagism as a movement competing within the artistic avant-garde of London in the early twentieth century.

The shades and structures of the blues had an immense impact on the poetry of Langston Hughes. Steven C. Tracy provides a cultural context for Hughes's work while revealing how Hughes mined Black oral and literary traditions to create his poetry. Comparing Hughes's poems to blues texts, Tracy reveals how Hughes's experimental forms reflect the poetics, structures, rhythms, and musical techniques of the music. Tracy also offers a discography of recordings by the artists--Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and others--who most influenced the poet.

In the late 1950s the notion of a 'mother poem' emerged during a confessional literary movement that freed poets to use personal, psychosexual material about intimate topics such as parents, childhood, failed marriages, children, infidelity, and mental illness. In Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that male poets have contributed to what we think of as the literature of motherhood - that confessional and post-confessional modes have been formative in the way male poets have grappled with the stories of their mothers and how those stories reflect on the writers and their artistic identities. Through careful readings of formative elegies and homages written by male poets of this time, Saltmarsh explores how they engaged with femininity and feminine voices in the 1950s and 60s and sheds light on the inheritance of confessional motifs of gender and language as demonstrated by postconfessional writers responding to the rich subject matter of motherhood within the contexts of history, myth, and literature.

New York City was the site of a remarkable cultural and artistic renaissance during the 1950s and '60s. In the first monograph to treat all five major poets of the New York School-John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler-Mark Silverberg examines this rich period of cross-fertilization between the arts. Silverberg uses the term 'neo-avant-garde' to describe New York School Poetry, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Happenings, and other movements intended to revive and revise the achievements of the historical avant-garde, while remaining keenly aware of the new problems facing avant-gardists in the age of late capitalism. Silverberg highlights the family resemblances among the New York School poets, identifying the aesthetic concerns and ideological assumptions they shared with one another and with artists from the visual and performing arts. A unique feature of the book is Silverberg's annotated catalogue of collaborative works by the five poets and other artists.

"Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retained their outsider status. Despite such status, however, the formal, intellectual, ideological, and ethical concerns of the Objectivist nexus have increasingly influenced poetry and poetics in the United States. Thus, argue editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, the time has come for an anthology that unites essential works on Objectivist practices and presents Objectivist writing as an enlargement of the possibilities of poetry rather than as a determinable and definable literary movement. The authors' collective aim is to bring attention to this group of poets and to exemplify and specify cultural readings for poetic texts--readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history, and readings concerned with the production, dissemination, and reception of poetic texts. The contributors consider Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky within both their historical milieu and our own. The essays insist on poetry as a mode of thought; analyze and evaluate Objectivist politics; focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by certain Objectivist affiliations with Judaism; and explore the dissemination of poetic texts and the vagaries of Objectivist reception.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson was an innovative poet and literary theorist, whose work is only now beginning to attract the attention it merits. Her aesthetic is founded on engagements with the criticism of William Empson and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and develops through an early assimilation of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, including the seminal work of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. In her referentially rich poetry, Forrest-Thomson engages with the full range and history of poetry in English in her explorations of three themes: identity, the nature of experience, and the representation of both British and American contemporary poets, including those usually known as the language poets: North American writers who, since the 1970's, have explored a related poetics. This study provides the first sustained consideration of Forrest-Thomson's poetry, and of the relationships between her work and that of the language writers. It all culminates in an overview of the project of Language writing and its important contribution to contemporary 'avant-garde', and shows that Forrest-Thomson's body of work, both poetry and poetics, deserves to be considered as one of the most remarkable achievements of the late twentieth century.

The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment. Aphrodite's Daughters introduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression.     Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women--Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery--who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence.   The product of extensive archival research, Aphrodite's Daughters draws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.

The story of a new style of art--and a new way of life--in postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury "confessional" poets have in common with today's reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work--always ongoing, never complete--to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of "confessional performance" unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors--and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl is a seminal document for the post-modernisms exfoliating out of World War II - much like T.S. Eliot's Waste Land for modernism. This study traces his formative development in time/space during years 1943 till mid-50s Howl breakthru of individual voice. (A concluding chapter sketches subsequent development up to Plutonium Ode 1978). Close-reading of individual poems is set within the context of biography and cultural politics showing growth of Ginsberg's poetics as adapted from William Carlos Williams' visions of ordinary mind, Whitman's expansiveness and comradeship, and Blake's politics of desire. As -revolt of sudras (untouchables) poet, - Ginsberg has concentrated language on marginal mankind so that poetic praxis folds into a dimension of visionary politics and poem becomes prophetic moment voiced against the paranoia of state terrorism.

In this book, Linda Reinfeld explores the relationship between contemporary critical theory and the new form of poetic expression?visible in the work of Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, and Susan Howe?called Language poetry. She holds that the experimental work of the Language poets should not be dismissed as esoteric or inaccessible. Language poetry may be read as an American response to critical theory. It rejects both the Romantic and the Modernist aesthetic and refuses to account for diversity by the imposition of unifying schemes or rigid structures. The role of the Language poet merges with that of the critic, in recognition that reading cannot flourish apart from writing, nor poet apart from audience. According to Reinfeld, the new genre serves as an antidote to the ?ills of mystification? by reminding us of the limits of ideology, and it offers a vision of writing as rescuing us from a abstractions that deny the openness of language. Although often viewed as a new trend in poetic expression, Language poetry comes out of a strong social and intellectual tradition. Reinfeld traces its interests and concerns to Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, and finds its poetic antecedents to extend through English and American literature. She explores the work of Bernstein, Palmer, and Howe in juxtaposition with modern critical theory as it appears in the writings of Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, and Roland Barthes. Language Poetry is a timely book on an influential literary movement. Reinfeld's analysis of this writing is sure to illuminate the study of American poetics and critical theory.

This text will make one see something new [by granting] new eyes to see with, as Ezra Pound remarked of Imagism. Still he soon dissociated himself from the movement he helped found, to which T. S. Eliot never belonged. Why, then, study Pound and Eliot as Imagists? As the former phrased it, to offer language to think in regarding their shared premium on precision; and to explicate differing reasons for this emphasis. Pound plies accuracy to carve distinctions. By carving, he sought to delineate components of a model culture. Conversely, and paradoxically, severances renderable through apt language enabled Eliot to intuit a divine amalgamation-which would displace inevitable confusions among objects, and between subject and object: turmoil dramatized in Eliot's early work.

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.

This volume collects critical essays on John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch; writers from the generation of New York School poets who emerged in the 1950s. In collecting the nineteen essays comprised in this volume, editors Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller "take the literary historical category of the School as a convenient given, and opportunity for multi-faceted investigation of writers who merit positive attention. Coupling historicizing gestures and close reading, these critics account for complexities of gender, sexual identity, race, and even social debates about cinema and the climate of the Cold War" -- Thomas Fink.

Sylvia Plath in Context brings together an exciting combination of established and emerging thinkers from a range of disciplines. The book reveals Plath's responses to the writers she reads, her interventions in the literary techniques and forms she encounters, and the wide range of cultural, personal, artistic, political, historical and geographical influences that shaped her work. Many of these essays confront the specific challenges for reading Sylvia Plath today. Others evaluate her legacy to the writers who followed her. Reaching well beyond any simple equation in which biographical cause results in literary effect, all of them argue for a body of work that emerges from Plath's deep involvement in the world she inhabits. Situating Plath's writing within a wide frame of references that reach beyond any single notion of self, this book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, instructors and researchers of Sylvia Plath.