"[S]ongs of allusion": Sterling Brown, Harryette Mullen, and the Roots of Poetic Recycling

Abstract

Abstract: While recent works by well-known critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, and Kenneth Goldsmith have persuasively positioned poetic recycling and "unoriginal genius" as central to the development of modern and contemporary poetry, these writings generally overlook the ways in which vernacular forms, particularly the ballad and the blues, have provided a potent model for poetic recycling and intertextual play for poets in the twentieth century. African American poetry has been particularly attuned to the experimental possibilities of vernacular forms, and the poems of Sterling Brown and Harryette Mullen show how the roots of "unoriginal genius" might be seen to lie in hoary oral traditions. These poets suggest a different origin story for modernist citationality and provide a model for lyric expression embedded in collective poetic making.