Daniel Morris, Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy: A Thirty-Year Creative Reading Workshop

Roethke, Wilbur, and the Vision of the Child:Romantic and Augustan in Modern Verse Alan Nadel (bio) One of the oldest tenets of our literary tradition is that poetry ought to delight and instruct. From Horace to Matthew Arnold, implicity or explicity, the thread runs: art serves some function—moral, didactic, religious—and employs aesthetically pleasing devices of language and form so that the message is headed and understood. Harry Bailly, for instance, asks of the Canterbury Pilgrims tales with "sentence" and "solaas," tales that instruct and please. Rhyme and rhythm, particularly, have stood as exemplary methods for decorating ideas, making them more delightful. In Mother Goose, for instance, regularity of meter and rhyme made delightful the issues of the day.1 So successful, in fact, was this technique, that today we remember the rhymes long after their substantive references have been lost. All that remains is the nonsense sense in which Jack Sprat ate no fat, or Old King Cole was a merry old soul. Today, the rhymes delight without instructing, give "solaas" without "sentence." In the history of Mother Goose, therefore, we perhaps see one of the earliest transformations of representational literature into art for art's sake. In many ways, this now thoroughly fanciful art sets the formal standard for children's poetry, provides the definitive metric formulas. Devoid of their original referents, nursery rhymes also set the level of meaninglessness, of fantasy: Humpty Dumpties sitting on walls and old women living in shoes. When a modern poet thinks of writing children's poetry, I believe, he has those formal criteria in the back of his head as firmly as any classical conceptions he may have about poetry in general. But he is also writing out of another, more recent tradition that in many ways is antithetical to the classical [End Page 94] prescriptions: the idea that modern poetry should be difficult. Walt Whitman argued that poetry should be made difficult so that the American people would have to educate themselves to understand it. Whitman's call for difficult poetry was a project for the bettering of the democratic citizen. Whether this project—worthy of one of Swift's most outrageous projectors—was serious, ironic or a rationalization for the (then) difficult poetry that Whitman wrote, is impossible to determine. But, whatever its impetus, the idea has dominated American poetry for at least three quarters of a century.2 The contemporary American poet, therefore, writes out of two traditions: the 2000-year-plus tradition of western poetry, which holds that good poetry makes attractive garments out of moral fiber, i.e., simplifies the complex, and the modern tradition, which holds that good poetry gives us the rough threads of our existence, i.e., manifests the complex. As a result, the regularizing devices of rhyme and meter, the sing-song qualities which make poetry easy to recite, are virtually impossible to use seriously today. They are relegated to the realm of light verse: humor, sentimental greeting cards and popular songs. Serious poetry can employ rhyme and meter and often does, even in conjunction, but the use must be subtle, ironic, or in some way grate against the content so that the resulting matrix is difficulty. It is, in short, hard to take seriously verse in which we hear direct statement in a sustained, predictable, rhymed, metric pattern. These formal elements, however, survive in poetry for children, and in writing children's verse, many of our serious poets manifest elements of composition originating in Classical traditions from which, in their adult poetry, they have consciously distanced themselves. Although the formal elements of children's verse, furthermore, have a Classical origin, the concept of writing poetry for children is essentially Romantic. The child is rarely mentioned as an audience or subject in the Restoration and Augustan Age. The desire to instruct and delight the child, to describe and sentimentalize childhood, has its foundation in the Romantic conception that the child is [End Page 95] qualitatively different from the adult, and different in ways that do not reflect adversely on the child. In looking, therefore, at the way that modern American poets envision the child, use children's verse in their...

The modern age is prolific of literary movements and literarygenres. Documentary poetry, which can be considered a new genre,combines both primary source material, such as war, political events,terrorism, people in detention and many other events with poetry.Amiri Baraka is a contemporary American poet whose poem"Somebody Blew up America" belongs to this genre. It records theSeptember 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre from a perspectivedifferent from what the American propaganda and mass media tell theworld. The recent paper attempts to shed light on Amiri Baraka'sattitude towards this event, the reasons behind it, the real terroristsand the intentions behind this terrorist event according to this poem.The poet argues that the American government knew beforehand thatthe Trade Centre was going to be blown up and they took no action toprevent the catastrophe and, in this sense, they were partners in thecrime. Furthermore, he accuses the Americans of blowing up the tradecentre. The paper is divided into three sections and a conclusion.Section One is Introductory; it sheds light on documentary poetry, itscharacteristic features and practitioners. Section Two is a biographicalnote of Amiri Baraka paying special attention to his attitude toAmerican politics based on domination, persecution and genocide.Section Three gives a detailed analysis of "Somebody Blew upAmerica" as a documentary poem recording the September 11 blowingup of the Trade Centre with the aim of finding a pretext to invadeother countries. The paper concludes that this event happenedaccording to a well-made plan in cooperation with the Americangovernment and the CIA as partners.

The modern age is prolific of literary movements and literary genres. Documentary poetry, which can be considered a new genre, combines both primary source material, such as war, political events, terrorism, people in detention and many other events with poetry. Amiri Baraka is a contemporary American poet whose poem Somebody Blew up America belongs to this genre. It records the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre from a perspective different from what the American propaganda and mass media tell the world. The recent paper attempts to shed light on Amiri Baraka's attitude towards this event, the reasons behind it, the real terrorists and the intentions behind this terrorist event according to this poem. The poet argues that the American government knew beforehand that the Trade Centre was going to be blown up and they took no action to prevent the catastrophe and, in this sense, they were partners in the crime. Furthermore, he accuses the Americans of blowing up the trade centre. The paper is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section One is Introductory; it sheds light on documentary poetry, its characteristic features and practitioners. Section Two is a biographical note of Amiri Baraka paying special attention to his attitude to American politics based on domination, persecution and genocide. Section Three gives a detailed analysis of Somebody Blew up America as a documentary poem recording the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre with the aim of finding a pretext to invade other countries. The paper concludes that this event happened according to a well-made plan in cooperation with the American government and the CIA as partners.

The modern age is prolific of literary movements and literary genres. Documentary poetry, which can be considered a new genre, combines both primary source material, such as war, political events, terrorism, people in detention and many other events with poetry. Amiri Baraka is a contemporary American poet whose poem "Somebody Blew up America" belongs to this genre. It records the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre from a perspective different from what the American propaganda and mass media tell the world. The recent paper attempts to shed light on Amiri Baraka's attitude towards this event, the reasons behind it, the real terrorists and the intentions behind this terrorist event according to this poem. The poet argues that the American government knew beforehand that the Trade Centre was going to be blown up and they took no action to prevent the catastrophe and, in this sense, they were partners in the crime. Furthermore, he accuses the Americans of blowing up the trade centre.The paper is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section One is Introductory; it sheds light on documentary poetry, its characteristic features and practitioners. Section Two is a biographical note of Amiri Baraka paying special attention to his attitude to American politics based on domination, persecution and genocide. Section Three gives a detailed analysis of "Somebody Blew up America" as a documentary poem recording the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre with the aim of finding a pretext to invade other countries. The paper concludes that this event happened according to a well-made plan in cooperation with the American government and the CIA as partners.

Applications of Wittgenstein in literary studies are far from copious. There are, to be sure, many significant works, including Marjorie Perloff's Wittgenstein's Ladder, Walter Jost's Rhetorical Investigations, and the small but thriving industry of Ordinary Language Criticism (where work by both Perloff and Jost, among others, can be found). The present study seeks to contribute to this growing body. But where Ordinary Language Criticism often champions Wittgenstein for the resistance he offers to theory, this study, while acknowledging his emphasis on description over explanation, finds much in his philosophy which bears upon continental modes of thought, modes which his so-called analytic method is said to oppose. Part of the study's originality thus consists in its refusal to stigmatize Wittgenstein in relation to literary studies by regarding him as non-continental or anti-theoretical and therefore as having little or nothing to offer to literary theory. In particular, I seek to reduce the supposed rift between Wittgenstein and Derrida by way of illustrating a connection between the two which has important ramifications not only in the world of poetry but in other circles, as well, both ""theoretical"" and ""ordinary."" The contention, simply put, is that Wittgenstein's private language argument and Derrida's assertion that errancy is integral to the structure of the mark, taken together, thoroughly dispel any philosophical position which asserts that the mind is in some fashion a self-contained entity and/or that meaning can be guaranteed by a sole, or private, intention. The effect of this contention on our conception of the lyric speaker as an isolated figure might be guessed. Recent studies in lyric theory have stressed the publicity of both the lyric and its speaker as opposed to their privacy, the fact, that is, that both are always operative first and foremost in a world. The aim of such studies is to bring poetry back from the margins of culture (whereto it is often relegated as a private, and thus politically irrelevant, practice) to its centers. My own aim is to augment these endeavors by stressing the untenability of lyric privacy from a Wittgensteinian standpoint and via a consideration of the limits of language (what they prohibit and what they enable) as they are explored not only by Wittgenstein but by several contemporary American poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Charles Wright, Jorie Graham, Carl Phillips, and Frank Bidart.

The September 11 attacks, also called the 9/11 attacks, the series of plane hijackings and suicide attacks perpetrated in 2001 by 19 militants connected with the Islamic extremist organizations Al-Qaeda against goals in the United States, are the deadliest terrorist attacks and an extraordinary event on American soil. The attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. caused widespread death and destruction and sparked a massive United States counter-terrorism efforts. This study aims to explore the main trend of contemporary American poetry that deals with the topic of the September 11 attacks and to show the impact of September 11, 2001, on contemporary American poets. Many contemporary American poets in the period following the attack on the Twin Towers were influenced by the September 11 attacks. Many of the American poets consider the September 11 attacks a terrorist attack, and these poets are the ones who believe in the theory of terrorism, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of them.

This study reflects on and analyzes poetry by four contemporary American poets -- Sylvia Plath, William Heyen, Gerald Stem, and Jerome Rothenberg. Because none of these figures directly experienced the war of annihilation directed at European Jewry, they are denied the survivors' truth; thus their pain and suffering, their personal mandate, tell the story.

Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.

Reviewed by: From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century Michael Golston From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Jennifer Ashton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. x+201 pp. $80.00 (cloth). Barrett Watten: There’s a real confusion in American criticism as to how close the Formalists were to [the New Critics]. The Formalists saw language as relative to itself; the New Critics basically saw language as symbols for objects. [. . .] The only similarity is that they saw literature as an object for study. But their models of language were vastly different. “Russian Formalism and the Present,” 1980 (Watten, Total Syntax 29–30) I once had the good fortune to take a course with U.C. Berkeley’s Julian Boyd on the history of the English language. Occasionally, as a student in the class struggled with the finer points of deontic modality or the differences between “shall” and “will,” Boyd would suddenly glare at whomever was speaking and announce with mock sternness, “You are exactly wrong.” That’s how I feel about Jennifer Ashton’s book. It is subtly argued; it deals with challenging material; and it is exactly wrong. Ashton proposes to rewrite the history of American poetry by arguing that “the postmodern criticism that understands itself as a repudiation of a once mainstream New Criticism should be understood instead [. . .] as its continuation” (179). Charles Bernstein, she claims, “turns out to be a belated incarnation of I. A. Richards” (118); Steve McCaffrey and Lyn Hejinian are the ideological heirs of Wimsatt and Beardsley; and “the language movement’s place in the history of twentieth-century poetic theory is not as a repudiation of New Criticism but as its reassertion” (98). Ashton lobs any number of these counterintuitive critical bombshells in a calculated effort to provoke maximum shock and awe among members of the pomo poetry crowd. As Barrett Watten’s comments above show, this idea is hardly new, and was [End Page 157] perceived early on as a critical issue (and a scholarly mistake) by the founders of the “language movement” (a phrase that Ashton uses with devil-may-care looseness). The New Criticism and Language poetics are different, according to Watten, because they are based on different models of language; their only similarity is a superficial interest in literature as an object of study. By cherry-picking her sources, Ashton generalizes this and other surface similarities between New Critical and language poetics to argue for a “history” of postmodernism that is untenable. The best parts of Ashton’s study concern modernist poetics. Her chapter on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Louis Zukofsky is a concise summary of what the “objective” in “objectivism” means; she argues that these three “old literalists,” as she calls them, are committed in their different ways to turning nouns into things. She is also astute at rehearsing the reasons for (Riding) Jackson’s decision in the early 1940s to renounce poetry, showing how for (Riding) Jackson, paradoxically, “for the poem to mean it must not be” (110). Ashton is at her strongest in these chapters; her grasp of the issues informing the “objectivist critique of metaphor,” as she terms it, enables her to clarify important aspects of modernist poetics. Ashton is less convincing when it comes to Gertrude Stein. She charts Stein’s “movement from what she understands as a phenomenological model of composition to a logical one” (32), arguing that Stein wants to “revitaliz[e] nouns by making them work like names” (89). Stein allegedly thereby produces texts that “have nothing to do with the reader” (93) and thus effectively shuts off the “indeterminacy” identified by critics like Marjorie Perloff as the distinguishing mark of avant-garde poetry. Accordingly, Ashton claims, Stein practices “a logical formalism irrevocably at odds with both the phenomenological commitments of poststructuralist linguistics and the materialist commitments of language poetry” (68). But while this may be true of a rune poem like “Rose is a rose is a rose,” it is not clear how Ashton’s method pans out when applied to longer, more complicated pieces, since she provides no readings of any other of Stein’s poems. How would...

Writing with the vigor and elan that readers have come to expect from his many astute reviews and essays, Willard Spiegelman maintains that contemporary American poets have returned to the poetic aims of an earlier era: to edify, as well as to delight, and thus to serve the didactic muse. What Spiegelman says about individual poets--such as Nemerov, Hecht, Ginsberg, Pinsky, Ammons, Rich, and Merrill, among others--is wonderfully insightful. Furthermore, his outlook on their work--the way he takes quite literally the teacherly elements of their poems--challenges long-standing conceptions both about contemporary writing and about the poetry of the Eliot-Pound-Stevens-Williams generation. Beginning the book with a meditation on W. H. Auden's legacy to American poets, Spiegelman ends with a discussion of the multiple scenes of learning in Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, which he identifies as not only the major epic poem of the second half of the twentieth century but also as the period's most important georgic: a textbook full of scientific, mythic, artistic, and human instruction. The Didactic Muse reminds us that poets have traditionally acknowledged their function as teachers, from Horace's advice that poetry should please and instruct to Robert Frost's aphorism that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Whereas many of the critical remarks of the most important Romantic and modern poets suggest their desperate attempts to separate poetry from instruction, Spiegelman demonstrates that their practices often contradicted their theories. And he shows that our best contemporary poets are now embracing the older, classical paradigms.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

O, O, O Charles Alexander (bio) William Blake, William Morris, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Jonathan Williams, Leslie Scalapino, Allan Kornblum, Karl Young, Douglass Messerli, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Nathaniel Tarn, Tom Raworth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Johanna Drucker, Kyle Schlesinger, Susan Schultz, Barbara Henning, Ann Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Rosmarie Waldrop, Alan Loney, Mary Laird, Jonathan Greene, Annabel Lee, Matvei Yankelevich, Anna Moschovakis. All are poets and/or other sorts of writers who also have been or continue to be publishers or printers or editors of books, journals, or a myriad of kinds of publications. They are individuals who understand, in some cases, the smell of ink, the feel of a lead-alloy individual letter in the hand, the weight of a press cylinder as they turn its handle. In some cases they know the difference between a Coptic stitch and a side stitch, a deckled edge from a faux deckled edge. They may have bled on books as they slightly punctured themselves with a bookbinding needle without realizing and then dripped blood onto 100 percent rag paper. They know what a quarto or an octavo is in book terms, and know what to most people are rather odd words, like quoins and ems and ascenders and descenders and ligatures. Many of them have had ink on their fingers, the kind of ink that is thick like fudge sauce and requires more than soap and water to remove. Printers & publishers & editors & poets are what this column is about. I'm one of them, and the shape of pages of books has had a structural impact on how I think about writing. How I think about the odd mix of materiality and immateriality in writing has had a impact on how I think about making books in a way that transcends their materiality, all the while knowing that there's not anything much more material than paper, ink, type, thread, and other components that go to make the book. Of course, I did begin with William Blake, who transforms inks and paints into diaphanous spiritual entry points of color. Maybe that's what I want all printing & bookmaking & [End Page 187] writing to do. I'm drawn to those who share a vision in writing and publishing that explores just what and where that liminal line may be between the material and the spiritual, between the known and the unknown, between what we touch and what we intuit, between phenomenon and perception and thought about perception. I am drawn to those who explore that territory in writing and in publishing or printing or book making. I am drawn to the work of Leslie Scalapino and O Books. O because O man, O Sunflower, O as a space to enter the letter and go right through it, O as a kinship with Molly Bloom's YES!, O as a way, a practice, a chant, a song, a light or a space for light to enter and exit at the same time. To live in the O. Scalapino O. O Books is the press Scalapino began in 1986 and directed for the next twenty-five years, while also writing some of the finest, and most challenging, works of that period, before she passed away in 2010. During that period I met with her several times, including her Chax Press residency in Tucson, other appearances here that included organizing and rehearsing performances (not full scale, though one was something more than a staged reading) of her plays, and meetings in Berkeley or San Francisco, including a heady day contemplating all those Os and the poetry that fills them while meeting Leslie, walking with her, meeting Norman Fischer, and the three of us having lunch near the ocean twenty miles or so north of San Francisco. I don't remember Leslie talking much about O Books or even about "poetry" in terms of finished and published works, but I do remember talking about how words and letters inhabit texts, texts inhabit pages, pages inhabit books. I remember talking about vast distance, which happens in microseconds, between perception and thought. I remember thinking that this poet makes little or...

Reviewed by: The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later Michael Piafsky The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later Edited by Jason ShinderFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 256 pp., $30 It has been fifty years since Allen Ginsberg's Howl was released, and to commemorate the occasion Jason Shinder, a friend and coworker of Ginsberg's, has compiled a collection of essays on the poem and its writer. These responses, from celebrated artists and critics as varied as Amiri Baraka, John [End Page 165] Cage and Luc Sante, attempt to trace the poem's impact from its first reading in October of 1955 until today. Certainly there is reason to be optimistic about such a project. Howl was legitimately famous, and not just within the walls of the academy. The assault on Howl was one of the last highly publicized obscenity trials, making it a legal, if not a literary, successor to Ulysses. And finally, Howl was a genuinely important poem, widely read and widely discussed. It was a poem about alienation and fear, and its corporate villain Moloch seems as fearsome today as in Eisenhower's America. Unfortunately, the collection is thin, and one finishes it knowing strangely little about poet, author or audience. There is, of course, the problem of redundancy. As it turns out, many of the writers here have overlapping favorite passages, and, to make matters worse, few of them have a particularly novel reading of them, so that other than to say that the first few lines of the poem touched the writer personally and profoundly (it felt like he was speaking to me!) these critics have very little to say about the words on the page. Frank Bidart's piece is one of the few that actually considers the poem itself. Instead of insight, what we have are personal reflections on how these contributors came to the poem, and what happened when they did. And what is really interesting in reading this collection is the sense that Ginsberg's most famous work has become something of a Rorschach for critics, all seeing in it something of themselves, so that each writer's own particular brand of juvenile alienation (one's Jewishness, homosexuality, socialism) becomes the solitary lens through which the poem is interpreted. Quite often the very same line speaks to several alienated readers of very different issues. It is a tribute to the poem that it can mean so personally to so many disparately disenfranchised. But just as the words in the poem don't change because of the lens, the recollections here are too alike. The writers are near unanimous in their admiration for the poem's courage, for the poet's humanity, for the rhythm and energy of the writing: all good things, none worthy of three hundred pages. Strangely, there is a lack of historical or biographical perspective in a project whose conceit is looking at a poem fifty years later. Neither the writers nor the editor place the poem within its specific period; none discuss how Ginsberg came to write the poem or edit it. There isn't nearly enough about the trial, and there's no attempt to look specifically at how the relevance of this poem has morphed as America's problems have shifted, and ultimately [End Page 166] shifted back. There are twenty-six contributions to this collection, all good, but too often overlapping in scope and perspective. This book would have offered a perfect opportunity to include not only personal recollections by the eloquent and famous but real insight into the poem and poet. It is unfortunate also that no response could be included from the major Beats themselves, all of whom are now dead. Finally, it has been fifty years, yet Shinder allows no room for dissent. Howl, for all of its popularity, was not a universally loved poem in its time. Critics, scholars, poets reviled it not only for its vulgarity but for what they deemed to be its amateurishness and its lack of control. Surely some of those who originally bashed it are still alive. Wouldn't it have been interesting to see how fifty years, and a place...

American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History presents a series of case studies that shows how poets perceived the new technology of cinema as a rival threatening to their prestige, but also as a sister art deserving of encouragement. Each chapter places a key poem at the center and takes up the issues arising from the engagement of these two art forms, such as the poets' mixed feelings about living in a national culture dominated by visual media. Whether it is Hart Crane writing on Chaplin, Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe, Frank O'Hara on James Dean, or Louise Erdrich on John Wayne, poets have made sense of their own time by reference to film icons and values shared by all Americans thanks to the dream factory, Hollywood.As an increasingly popular genre of modern poetry, and one that permits a unique view of this century's dominant art form, the movie poem has needed an explanatory book like this one. As cinema and television continue to wield extraordinary influence over the lives of all Americans, the efforts of poets to understand the visual culture will come to be appreciated as central to the task of modern and postmodern literature. This critical history is an important and timely contribution to the study of American literature and American institutions.One of the impressive things about the book is that while pursuing the seemingly narrow category of poems-about-movies, Goldstein is able to raise and illuminate virtually all the key issues surrounding the poetry of the period. Roger Gilbert, Cornell University. . . a discerning book, combining criticism and social history. It satisfies scholarly standards while appealing to general readers. - Philip French, coeditor of the Faber Book of Movie VerseIn this work, [Goldstein] provides a new way of looking at American poets, both familiar and neglected. The approach is chronological and thematic, and films are seen from black, gay, Jewish, and feminist as well as middle-class white perspectives. Library JournalLaurence Goldstein is editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and Professor of English, University of Michigan.

This article attempts a switch in perspective. Instead of arranging modern and contemporary American poets in a forward-moving lineage or scanning such a lineage for generative breaks, it asks what poetries come into view if we look backward from the circuitries of twenty-first-century digital writing. The thought experiment of this article is to start the story with the body electric of the cyborg used to introduce the website of the performance artist Stelarc. The shock of Stelarc's performance—the claim that the bounded, flesh-and-blood body has been overtaken by networked-and-programmable flesh-and-wire circuitry—obscures a more complex and interesting hypothesis. It is suggested that there is not a break but a synergy between Stelarc's claim and the thinking of twentieth-century American poets who position their work at the human-machine interface in order to protest conditions of industrial labor, to appropriate for writing the aims and strategies of emergent recording and storage technologies, and to participate in the human-computer collaborations of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cybernetic culture.

Razvoj slovenske poezije po letu 1950 se da razumeti kot prozaizacijo in estetsko inverzijo, pisanje poezije v prostem verzu pa kot poezijo v prozi. Ker mnogi literarni zgodovinarji izum prostega verza pripisujejo ameriškemu pesniku Waltu Whitmanu, razprava uvodoma pojasni, na podlagi kakšnih ustvarjalnih načel je ta zasnoval svojo zbirko Travne bilke. Številni sodobni ameriški pesniki se imajo za Whitmanove naslednike, podrobneje pa je predstavljeno, kako to razume bitnik Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Walt Whitman je v prvi polovici 20. stoletja vplival na Otona Župančiča in Antona Podbevška, v drugi polovici in do danes pa neposredno prek prevodov njegove poezije v slovenščino in posredno prek bitniških pesnikov na mnoge slovenske ustvarjalce. Zato lahko v določeni meri in ob upoštevanju drugih vplivov tudi na razvoj prostega verza pri nas gledamo kot na nadaljevanje Whitmanove tradicije. Razprava prikaže, kakšne ustvarjalne rešitve so v prostem verzu našli Andrej Brvar, Esad Babačić in Uroš Zupan.