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

Description

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. — 240 p. — ISBN-10: 0748682856; ISBN-13: 978-0748682850.Crisis 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.Introduction‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and warSlipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka’s attitudes, 1974–80Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde