Details

Subject(s)

• American poetry—20th century—History and criticism [Browse]
• American poetry—21st century—History and criticism [Browse]
• American poetry—Minority authors—History and criticism [Browse]
• Poetry—Social aspects—United States [Browse]
• Experimental poetry, American—History and criticism [Browse]
• Identity (Psychology) in literature [Browse]

Series

Contemporary North American poetry series [More in this series]

Summary note

In this capacious and challenging book, Maria Damon surveys the poetry and culture of the United States in two distinct but inextricably linked periods. In part 1, "Identity K/not/e/s", she considers the America of the 1950s and early 1960s, when contentious and troubled alliances took shape between different marginalized communities and their respective but overlapping bohemias - Jews, African Americans, the Beats, and gays and lesbians. Using a rich trove of texts and artifacts - ranging from Gertrude Stein's writings about her own Jewishness to transcripts from Lenny Bruce's obscenity trial, Bob Kaufman's Beat poetry - as well as her own stake in the material, Damon plumbs the complexities of social identity and expressive cultures to fascinating effect. Always erudite but never effete, Damon then turns to more contemporary issues and broader topics of poetics: micropoetries, cyberpoetics, spoken-word poets, performance poets, and their communities. Echoing many of the themes of the first section of the book, including poetic identity and the troubled nature of the poetic "I", part 2's "Poetics for a Postliterary America" goes on to paint a wider picture, dwelling less on close readings of individual poems and more on asking questions about the nature of poetry itself and its role in community formation and individual survival. Discussions of counterperformance, kinetics, the Nuyoricans, Latino identity, and electronic poetics enliven this section. Never reluctant to acknowledge the deeply personal origins of the work at hand, Damon cleaves to the subject matter, be it questions of identity, matters of poetry, or what it means to live in a postliterary culture. In doing so, she dares to ask what it means to be a member of the "shadow people" - those who occupy marginalized, nocturnal counterculture - creating verbal art.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Action note

Committed to retain in perpetuity — ReCAP Shared Collection (HUL)

Contents

• The Jewish entertainer as cultural lightning rod: the case of Lenny Bruce
• Jazz-Jews, jive, and gender: the ethnic politics of jazz argot
• Triangulated desire and tactical silences in the Beat hipscape: Bob Kaufman and others
• Displaysias: writing social science and ethnicity in Gertrude Stein and certain others
• Imp/penetrable archive: Adeena Karasick's Wall of Sound
• Kinetic exultations: postliterary poetry, counterperformance, and micropoetries
• When the Nuyoricans came to town: (ex)changing poetics
• Avant-garde or border guard: (Latino) identity in poetry
• Loneliness, lyric, ethnography: some discourses on/of the divided self
• Poetries, micropoetries, micropoetics: elegy on the outskirts
• Electronic poetics assay: diaspora, silliness and-'gender'.

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ISBN

• 9781587299575 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
• 1587299577 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

LCCN

^^2010041462

OCLC

670374842

RCP

H - S

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