Product Description: The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry...read more

Product Description: A long overdue collection of critical writing on Oppen's substantial legacy.George Oppen, a crucial figure in the founding of the Objectivist poetry movement, is considered by many critics and poets to be one of the foremost innovators of 20th-century American poetry...read more

Product Description: Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today. Jerome Rothenberg’s work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work...read more

Product Description: The Alphabet is a remarkable and notorious literary achievement, decades in the making, one continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments first appeared in the 1970s. Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative...read more

Product Description: Offering 12 years of incisive writing about contentiously debated topics in modern poetry, these essays, interviews, and reflections focus on two central themes—the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways to embody spirituality...read more

Product Description: Poetry. Renewing and drawing upon a spiritual legacy in innovative poetry--an American poetic lineage that includes Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson, that continues in the writing of Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, John Taggart--Hank Lazer explores the possibilities for a newly articulated spiritual poetry...read more

Product Description: A unique collection of eleven poems, each quite different from the next, Elegies & Vacations explores the relationships of the living and the dead. Lazer's poems have an unusual emotional intimacy as he tests the ability of an experimental poetry to address emotionally charged subjects such as the loss of a loved one and the vexing ritual of the family vacation...read more

Product Description: This volume presents a selection of nine years of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. These essays are a kind of temporal cubism, a shifting but repeated focus on several key issues: the consequences of poetry's institutionalization; the pedagogic and political value of experimental poetry; and the crisis that results from professionalized, mainstream poets' misidentification of poetry with self-expression...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

This volume presents a selection of nine years of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. These essays are a kind of temporal cubism, a shifting but repeated focus on several key issues: the consequences of poetry's institutionalization; the pedagogic and political value of experimental poetry; and the crisis that results from professionalized, mainstream poets' misidentification of poetry with self-expression. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry. Part One: "Issues and institutions" is an examination of the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works which address poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, of poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice. In Part Two: "Readings", Lazer presents a series of sustained readings of important experimental texts. Included are the poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry; Lazer places these poets in the context of contemporary literary theory, and inspects both the successes and the failures of said theory to interpret these works.

Product Description: Poetry. "DOUBLESPACE is a noble attempt to bridge the chasm between Language poetry and the traditional anectdotal and meditative poetry of the 'free form' mode. Free form poetry communicates in diciplined, conversational speech, one of its important princples...read more

Product Description: These essays on Simpson's poetry provide a commentary on poetics, aesthetics, and literary politics