Crisis and the US Avant-Garde : : Poetry and Real Politics / / Ben Hickman.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Hickman, Ben,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (208 p.) :; 1 B/W illustrations

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

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 'Longing for perfection': history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky -- 2 'Atlantis buried outside': Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war -- 3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history -- 4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War -- 5 'You can be the music yourself': Amiri Baraka's attitudes, 1974-80 -- 6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index