Abstract
Several critics have sought to identify the basic tenor of contemporary poets’ engagements with political issues in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Christopher Nealon detects a “slightly camp attitude that creeps into poetic attempts to measure the approach to end-times when the idea of end-times seems itself outmoded”; as they struggle to imagine alternatives to capitalism, poets like Claudia Rankine and Kenneth Davies adopt a “strange, unstable rhetoric” that privileges hybrid forms and citational devices in response to the global spectacle of newspapers, TV, popular movies, and the Internet. Joseph Harrington calls attention to “a flourishing of documentary literary forms” in the past decade, exemplified by poets like Susan M. Schultz, Jena Osman, Gabriel Gudding, and many others. The goal of such “creative nonpoetry” is not simply to reproduce existing textual material but to reframe it artistically and skeptically so that “narrative, conceptual, and emotional connections are left to the reader to draw.... Sometimes the documents don’t even tell a story, buy rather produce lyrical and affective responses to the narratives from which they are drawn.” Brian Reed looks at a variety of creative practices subsumed under the labels “conceptual writing” and “Flarf.”
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Notes
Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 33 and 141
Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” Jacket 2, October 27, 2011, https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire; Brian Reed, “In Other Words: Postmillennial Poetry and Redirected Language,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 759. For other useful surveys, see Stephen Burt, “The New Thing: The Object Lessons of Recent American Poetry,” Boston Review, May 1, 2009, http://bostonreview.net/poetry/new-thing; and Michael Davidson, “Introduction: American Poetry: 2000–2009,” Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011): 597–630.
Mark Nowak, “Notes toward an Anticapitalist Poetics,” The Virginia Quarterly Review 82.2 (Spring 2006): 238
Anne Boyer, “On Being a Feminist Poet,” Delirious Hem Blog, January 4, 2009, http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/2009/04/by-anne-boyer.html; Rodrigo Toscano, “Red, White, and Blue: Poets on Politics,” ThePoetrySocietyofAmerica, 2012,http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/red_white_blue_poets_on_politics/rodrigo_toscano/(emphasis in the original).
David Ray Vance, “Mark Nowak: Radical Documentary Praxis [Redux],” in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2007 ), 346.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 121. As Aihwa Ong notes, the US military engagements in Asia since the beginning of the twentieth century have led to economic and cultural “enmeshment” with the continent, especially China: “Europe may have given birth to the American nation, but the maturing nation has a dysfunctional conjugal relationship with Asia.” Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations of Citizenship and Sovereignty ( Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006 ), 143.
Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary, with Photographs by Ian Teh and Mark Nowak (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009), 48. All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as CME in the text.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973 ), 321.
Mark Nowak, “Imaginative Militancy and the Transnational Poetry Dialogue,” Radical History Review 112 (Winter 2012): 175.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011 ), 235.
Paul Hoover, “Introduction: What Is Postmodern Poetry?” Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, 2nd edition, ed. Paul Hoover (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2013), liv.
Maria Damon, “Between Friendship Network and Literary Movement: Flarf as a Poetics of Sociability,” in Among Friends; Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, ed. Anne Dewy and Libbie Rifkin (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), esp. 147–48; Brian Reed, Nobody’s Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics ( Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013 ), 88–120.
Anne Boyer, “The Provisional Avant Garde,” HTML Giant, July 3, 2009, http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/anne-boyer-on-a-provisional-avant-garde/.
Qtd. in Chris McCreary, “The Business of Poetry: Fundraising and Community Building in the Small Press World,” Boog City 83 (2013): 5.
Calvin Bedient, “Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect,” Boston Review Online, July 24, 2013, http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/ against-conceptualism. Bedient’s notion of “cerebral avant-gardes” includes “Oulipo, Language poetry, conceptual writing, visual poetry, Flarf, critical poetics,” though he mainly discusses Oulipo and conceptual techniques as examples of what he calls “the stonewalling of affects.” Bedient’s provocation elicited plenty of online “comments,” as well as essays by Rachel Galvin and Drew Gardner published in Boston Review Online in February 2014.
Anne Boyer, My Common Heart (Denton: Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011), n.p.
Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions ( London and New York: Verso, 2013 ), 9.
Rodrigo Toscano, Deck of Deeds (Denver: Counterpath, 2012), 73 (emphasis in the original). All subsequent citations to this volume are indicated as DD in the text.
Roberto José Tejada, “Rodrigo Toscano,” BOMB Magazine, June 2013, http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/7255.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000 ), 58.
Rodrigo Toscano, “Bumper-Car Effect: Rodrigo Toscano in Conversation with Leonard Schwartz,” Jacket 28, October 2005, http://jacketmagazine.com/28 /schw-tosc.html.
Rodrigo Toscano, Platform ( Berkeley: Atelos, 2003 ), 21.
Rodrigo Toscano, Collapsible Poetics Theater ( Albany: Fence Books, 2007 ), 20.
Bertold Brecht, Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn ( London: Methuen, 2003 ), 141–42.
Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” trans. John Heckman, New Left Review 62 (July–August 1970): 95.
Charles Altieri, “The Place of Rhetoric in Contemporary American Poetics: Jennifer Moxley and Juliana Spahr,” Chicago Review 56.2/3 (Autumn 2011): 127.
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© 2014 Piotr K. Gwiazda
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Gwiazda, P.K. (2014). Dreams of a Common Language: Mark Nowak, Anne Boyer, Rodrigo Toscano. In: US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466273_6
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