The books gathered here demonstrate the arrival of a new era in American poetry studies that takes seriously the materiality of form and the relationship it implies between textual detail and social, political, and historical context. The sense of a poem as a “palimtext,” to cite Michael Davidson, is assumed here by the way these books deploy the historicist methods Davidson argues are necessary for tracing the intertextual and multiply layered registers of meaning making in American poetry (Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press [1997], 9). All three situate the aesthetic word in relation to a range of institutional, cultural, and political worlds that lie beyond poetry’s frame. They continue the work of restoring the political and critical capabilities once recognized by early Marxists, as Davidson notes, and which had been displaced by fantasies of poetry as removed...
Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form
The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith
Rebecca Walsh is associate professor of English at North Carolina State University and cochair of The H.D. International Society. Her book, The Geopoetics of Modernism (Univ. Press of Florida, 2015), reads the transnational spatial poetics and practices of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Helene Johnson, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. alongside academic and popular geography of the time. She is currently coediting a collection called Rethinking Globalization and Spatial Scale. In addition to guest editing a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies on global diasporas, she has published articles and essays in several journals and edited collections.
Rebecca Walsh; Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry
American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form
The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith. American Literature 1 September 2016; 88 (3): 648–650. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3650319
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