A Companion to American Poetry

A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries.

Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.

MARY MCALEER BALKUN is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include early American literature and culture, the American gothic and grotesque, and digital humanities. She is the author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, as well as articles on early American literature, digital humanities, and pedagogy. She is co-editor of several anthologies, including Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and Transformative Digital Humanities.

JEFFREY GRAY is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry and of many articles on American and Latin American literature. He is the editor and co-editor of several anthologies, including The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry and The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement.

PAUL JAUSSEN is Associate Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University, where he co-directs the “Humanity+Technology” lecture series. His teaching and research focus is on poetry and poetics, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. He is the author of Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital. His essays and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Comparative Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and ASAP/J, among others.

1 Introduction 1

Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen

Section 1: Poetry before “American Poetry” 5

2 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women:

The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton 7

Tamara Harvey

3 Before Poetry: Revival Verse and Sermonic Address in Eighteenth-Century America 18

Wendy Raphael Roberts

4 The Inca in the Nineteenth-Century US Poetic Imaginary 28

Adam Bradford

5 African American Spirituals and Their Legacy 39

Lauri Scheyer

Section 2: Poetry and The Transcendent 51

6 Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists 53

Wendy Martin and Camille Meder

7 Artificers of the World: Transcendentalism and Its Poetic Legacies 68

Bruce Ronda

8 “Do Not Be Content with an Imaginary God”: Modern Poetry, Spirituality, and the Problem of Belief 82

Norman Finkelstein

9 Enduring Epiphany: The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Poetry 95

Nikki Skillman

Section 3: Experimentalisms, Early and Late 107

10 The New in Hindsight: Modernist Poetry and Poetics in the Classroom 109

Bob Perelman

11 Philosophy, Poetry, and the Principle of Charity 120

Johanna Winant

12 ‘‘Making a Way”: The Black Mountain Review and Mid-Twentieth Century Communities 133

Joshua Hoeynck

13 Causes, Movements, Theory: Between Language Poetry and New Narrative 146

Kaplan Harris

14 Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora 157

Tyrone Williams

15 Wearables and Modernist Poetry’s Prototypes 166

Margaret Konkol

16 Reading the Unreadable in Modern American Poetry 184

Steven Gould Axelrod

Section 4: Poetry and Identity 199

17 The Black Quatrain and America’s Racialized Poetics 201

Ben Glaser

18 Queer Poetics: Voices of the Subaltern in American Poetry 216

Daniel Enrique Pérez

19 Trans Poetry and Poetics 230

Trace Peterson

Section 5: Transnational Poetry 243

20 Ezhi-aawechigaazhangwaa: Indigenous American Comparisons 245

Margaret Noodin

21 Trans-Pacific Poetics: Eastern Influences on American Poetry in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 257

Susan M Schultz

22 “Audience Distant Relative”: Fugitive Transnationality and Poetic Form 269

Mayumo Inoue

23 “A Little Room in a House Set Aflame”: American Poetry and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century 283

Walt Hunter

24 Rethinking Transnationalism in American Poetry 294

Sarah Dowling

Section 6: Poetry and the Arts 303

25 “Sketch of a Man on a Platform”: The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem 305

Andrew Epstein

26 Poetry in the Public Square 320

Stephen Cushman

27 Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment 332

Avery Slater

28 “Compared to What”: Past and Future Paths in Rap Poetics 344

Andrew DuBois

29 American Poetry Goes to the Movies 354

Susan Cooke Weeber

Section 7: Nature and After 367

30 Reading God’s Book of the World 369

Robert Daly

31 “Sharing with the Ants”: American Ecopoetry from Lydia Sigourney to Ross Gay 379

Christoph Irmscher

32 Post-Natural Modernism 390

Mark C Long

33 Rethinking the Anthropocene: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Epochal Imaginings 402

Margaret Ronda

Section 8: Poetry of Engagement 415

34 American War Poetry 417

Cary Nelson

35 Lynch Fragments 431

Aldon Lynn Nielsen

36 Indigenous Docupoetry: “‘Last Indian War’ in Verse” 442

Kimberly Blaeser

37 “It’s Been a While”: Latinx Poetries and the Empire of Borders 455

Michael Dowdy

38 The Politics of American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century 469

David Lau

Index 484

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