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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 The extent to which American poetry reinvented itself after World War II is a testament to the changing social, political, and economic landscape of twentieth- century American life. Registering an important shift in the way scholars contextualize modern and contemporary American literature, this Companion explores how American poetry has documented and, at times, helped propel the literary and cultural revolutions of the past sixty-five years. Offering authoritative and accessible essays from fourteen distinguished scholars, the Companion sheds new light on the Beat, Black Arts, and other movements while examining institutions that govern poetic practice in the United States today. The text also introduces seminal figures like Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, and Gwendolyn Brooks while situating them alongside phenomena such as the “academic poet” and popular forms such as spoken word and rap, revealing the breadth of their shared history. Students, scholars, and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to postwar and late-twentieth-century American poetry. Jennifer Ashton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches literary theory and the history of poetry. She is author of From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century and has published articles in Modernism/Modernity, Modern Philology, American Literary History, and Western Humanities Review. A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information THE CAMbriDge COMpaNION to AMericaN PoetrY SINCE 1945 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information TH E C A M bri D ge C O M pa N io N to AMericaN PoetrY SINCE 1945 EDITED BY JENNIFER ASHtoN University of Illinois at Chicago © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521147958 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data The Cambridge companion to American poetry since 1945 / [edited by] Jennifer Ashton. p. cm. – (Cambridge companions to literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-76695-1 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-521-14795-8 (pbk.) 1. American poetry – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Ashton, Jennifer, 1964– PS323.5.C27 2012 811′.509–dc23 2012016512 ISBN 978-0-521-76695-1 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-14795-8 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information CONTENTS Notes on Contributors page ix Acknowledgments xiii Chronology of Publications and Events xv 1. Periodizing Poetic Practice since 1945 1 Jennifer Ashton 2. From the Late Modernism of the “Objectivists” to the Proto-postmodernism of “Projective Verse” 16 Mark Scroggins 3. Confessional Poetry 31 Deborah Nelson 4. Surrealism as a Living Modernism: What the New York Poets Learned from Two Generations of New York Painting 47 Charles Altieri 5. The San Francisco Renaissance 66 Michael Davidson 6. Three Generations of Beat Poetics 80 Ronna C. Johnson 7. The Poetics of Chant and Inner/Outer Space: The Black Arts Movement 94 Margo Natalie Crawford 8. Feminist Poetries 109 Lisa Sewell vii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information Contents 9. Ecopoetries in America 127 Nick Selby 10. Language Writing 143 Steve McCaffery 11. American Poetry and Its Institutions 158 Hank Lazer 12. The Contemporary “Mainstream” Lyric 173 Christina Pugh 13. Poems in and out of School: Allen Grossman and Susan Howe 187 Oren Izenberg 14. Rap, Hip Hop, Spoken Word 202 Michael W. Clune 15. Poetry of the Twenty-First Century: The First Decade 216 Jennifer Ashton Index 231 viii © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information Notes ON CONtributors Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley. His most recent books are The Particulars of Rapture (Cornell University Press, 2004) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell, 2009). He has just completed a book manuscript, Wallace Stevens and the Phenomenology of Value. Jennifer Ashton teaches in the University of Illinois at Chicago and is one of the founding editors of nonsite.org. She is the author of From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and a contributor to The Cambridge History of American Women’s Writing, edited by Dale Bauer (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her scholarly articles have appeared in ELH, Modernism/Modernity, Modern Philology, ALH, Western Humanities Review, and the international online arts journal, Interval(le)s. Michael W. Clune is Assistant Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of American Literature and the Free Market, 1945– 2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Elements of his new book project, Writing Against Time, have appeared in Representations, Criticism, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Margo Natalie Crawford is the author of Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (Ohio State University Press, 2008) and the coeditor, with Lisa Gail Collins and Alondra Nelson, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006). She is associate professor of African American literature and visual culture at Cornell University. Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (University of California Press, 1997), Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (University of ix © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76695-1 - The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 Edited by Jennifer Ashton Frontmatter More information Notes on Contributors Chicago, 2003), and Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan, 2008). His most recent book, Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002). He is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Arcades (O Books, 1998). He is the coauthor, with Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He has written extensively on disability issues, most recently “Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance,” in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, ed. Sharon Snyder et al. (Modern Language Association, 2002); “Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body,” GLQ 9:1–2 (2003); Universal Design: The Work of Disability in an Age of Globalization, The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis (Routledge, 2010); and “Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes,” Novel 54.3 (Summer 2010). Oren Izenberg