Bøger i Contemp North American Poetry serien

"Offering readers a rare glimpse into collaborations between poets and painters from the 1950s to the present, this book highlights how the artist's book became a critical form for experimental American artists in the 20th and 21st centuries. In addition to providing a broad overview of the artist's book form since 1945 and the many ongoing debates surrounding it, this book thinks through the challenges, from the disciplinary to the institutional, that these forms continue to pose. It then turns to look at five case studies, detailing not only how each individual collaboration came to be but how all five together engage and challenge conventional ideals about art, subjectivity, poetry, and interpersonal relations, as well as complex social questions related to gender and race. Making several of these books, typically consigned to special collections libraries and museum archives, more available to a broad readership, the book aims to brings to light a whole genre of works that has been largely forgotten or neglected in critical scholarship and institutional exhibitions. As this study illustrates, the artist's book has been an especially rich site for both poets and painters to engage with the world around them and with each other since the mid-twentieth century and consequently deserves more scholarly and institutional attention than it has been previously granted"--

"Poetry FM listens back to the experimental period of FM radio's development from the late 1940s to the 1980s to show how American poetry was shaped by, and shaped in turn, the emergence of a radio counterculture. Like FM radio history, the literary history of American poetry during this period is defined by waves of opposition to the literary and critical establishment by poets and movements who likewise stressed experimentalism, alternative networks of distribution, regionalism, and community. In this study, Lisa Hollenbach focuses on two major radio stations-Pacifica's KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York-to develop an institutionally grounded analysis of how poets' involvement with FM radio contributed to postwar aural imaginaries. While poetry programming on Pacifica Radio has always been capacious, including poetry from the past as well as contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and poetry by unpublished writers, Hollenbach focuses on writers who played important roles at these stations and whose work embraces oral poetics and/or radio and sonic tropes. These especially include poets associated with the New American Poetry-William Everson, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Paul Blackburn, and Amiri Baraka, among others-who brought the oral poetics of the "new" poetry to Pacifica Radio's experiment in FM radio. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the racial, gender, and sexual politics of both the New American Poetry and the FM revolution came under increasing scrutiny and contestation. During these years, poets as different as Spicer, Ginsberg, Baraka, and Audre Lorde responded to this terrain of struggle by creating-in their poetry, performances, and radio work-alternative aural imaginaries, or figurative channels for the transmission of fugitive signals across time and place. This is a book about how radio-the once-dominant mass media form-became an underground medium for and key figure in American poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s"--

"Poetics of Cognition investigates the material effects of experimental poetics using new evidence emerging from cognitive science. It asks, how do experimental poems "think," and how do we think through them? Examining experimental modes such as the New Sentence, proceduralism, projective verse, sound poetry, and visual poetry, Jessica Lewis Luck argues that experimental poems materialize not so much the content as the activity of the embodied mind, and they can thus function as a powerful scaffolding for extended cognition, both for the writer and the reader. While current critical approaches tend to describe the effects of experimentalism solely in terms of (often paralyzing) emotion and sensation, Luck shifts from the feeling to the thinking that these poems can generate, expanding the potential blast radius of experimental poetic effects into areas of linguistic, sonic, and visual processing and revealing a transformational potency that strictly affective approaches miss. The cognitive research she draws upon suggests that the strangeness of experimental poetry can, in fact, re-shape the activity of the reader's mind, creating new forms of attention, perception, and cognition. The book closes by shifting from theory to praxis, extracting forms of teaching from the forms of thinking that experimental poems instill in order to better enable their transformative effects in readers and to bring poetry pedagogy into the twenty-first century"--