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A collection of critical texts exploring poetry's engagement with the social

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   ix
INTRODUCTION   1
Maria Damon and Ira Livingston

Precursors
1   Preface to Lyrical Ballads   21
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
2   Two Essays on Poetry and Society   25
THEODOR ADORNO
3   On Some Motifs in Baudelaire   37
WALTER BENJAMIN
4   What Is a Minor Literature?   56
GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI
5   Of the Sorrow Songs   61
W. E. B. DU BOIS
6   A Theory of Discourse   67
ANTONY EASTHOPE

Ethnography
7   Some Aspects of Folk Poetry   77
AMERICO PAREDES
8   The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning   90
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.
9   Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry   116
LILA ABU-LAUGHOD
10   The Poetric Construction of Self   133
STEVEN C. CATON
11   Tell Them about Us: Some Poems from Southie   147
MARIA DAMON

Mass Culture/Cultural Politics
12   The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction   163
BARRETT WATTEN
13   Assembly Poetics in the Global Economy: Nicaragua   177
BRUCE CAMPBELL
14   Black Texts/Black Contexts   195
TRICIA ROSE
15   Kickin' Eality, Kickin' Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles   199
ROBIN D. G. KELLEY
16   Poetry for the People   213
AMITAVA KUMAR
17   La Douceur de foyer: Lyric Poetry of the Year1857 as a Model for the Communication of Social Norms   226
HANS ROBERT JAUSS

National (De)Formations
18   Smoke Rings: Worker-Poets in the France of Louis-Philippe   237
JACQUES RANCIERE
19   Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space   248
KRISTIN ROSS
20   Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics   266
JOSEPH HARRINGTON
21   Nation and Imagination   285
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
22   Angel Island and the Poetics of Error   301
YUNTE HUANG
23   "HOO, HOO, HOO": Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Male Whiteness   310
RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS

Subject (De)Formations
24   A Poem Is Being Written   333
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK
25   A Musician Is Being Beaten   340
JOHN MOWITT
26   Poetry and Anthropology   347
TRINH T. MINH-HA
27   Poetry Is Not a Luxury   355
AUDRE LORDE
28   A Blow Is Like an Instrument   359
CHARLES BERNSTEIN   359

Reinventing Tradition
29   Sappho Is Burning: Fragmentary Introduction   375
PAGE DUBOIS
30   Genocide, Modernism, and American Verse: Reading Diana Der-Hovanessian   390
WALTER KALAIDJIAN
31   The Forms of Things Unknown   406
STEPHEN HENDERSON
32   History of the Voice, 1979=1981   417
KAMAU BRATHWAITE
33   Of Poetry and Power: Maya Angelou on the Inaugural Stage   428
ZOFIA BURR
34   Nuyorican Language   437
MIGUEL ALGARIN
INDEX   447
 

About the Author

Maria Damon is a professor of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry.Ira Livingston is a professor and chair of humanities and media studies at Pratt Institute; his most recent book is Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics.

Reviews

"It is time for this book. Poetry is studied more and more frequently with a cultural studies approach, and Damon and Livingston provide the perfect balance in this collection." Juliana Spahr, co-editor of Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary and author of several collections of poetry