Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics

Description

Charts the energies and tensions of avant-garde poetics and vanguard politicsCrisis and the US Avant-Garde examines the politics of poetry through the lens of crisis. A timely commentary on the role poetic culture might play in political struggle going forward into our own various contemporary crises, the book connects major twentieth-century poets and movements, including Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Language Poetry, with their various moments of political upheaval. Reading poems as attempted interventions in ‘turning-points’ or ‘moments of decision’ within American culture, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde looks at how poetry seeks to go beyond poetic language, and investigates how experimental American poetry has attempted to responds to imperialism, war, class conflict and capitalism itself.Key Features:Reassesses the US avant-garde’s relation to political eventsExplains how we might talk about a ‘context’ for avant-garde artProvides detailed readings of major poets, including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, George Oppen, Amiri Baraka and othersKey reference point for experimental cultural politics today