In "A Serpentine Gesture": John Ashbery's Poetry and Phenomenology Elisabeth W. Joyce examines John Ashbery's poetry through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of phenomenology. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is a process through which people reach outside of themselves for sensory information, map that experiential information against what they have previously encountered and what is culturally inculcated in them, and articulate shifts in their internal repositories through encounters with new material. Joyce argues that this process reflects Ashbery's classic statement of poetry being the "experience of experience." Through incisive close readings of Ashbery's poems, Joyce examines how he explores this process of continual reverberation between what is sensed and what is considered about that sensation and, ultimately, how he renders these perceptions into the "serpentine gesture" of language.

Here is a selection by the distinguished critic of his essays and commentaries on American writing and writers, from Emerson and Whitman through Auden and Ashbery. Denis Donoghue examines the canon in the light of what he takes to be the central dynamic of the American enterprise--the imperatives of a powerful national past versus the subversions of an irrevocably anarchic spirit.

This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the "politics of form," the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution—and critique—of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.

All This Thinking explores the deep friendship and the critical and creative thinking between Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, focusing on an intense three-year period in their three decades of correspondence. These fiercely independent American avant-garde poets have influenced and shaped poets and poetic movements by looking for radical poetics in the everyday. This collection of letters provides insight into the poetic scenes that followed World War II while showcasing the artistic practices of Mayer and Coolidge themselves. A fascinating look at both the poets and the world surrounding them, All This Thinking will appeal to all readers interested in post–World War II poetry.

In 1966, John Ashbery wrote: 'The English language is constantly trying to stave off invasion by the American language; it lives in a state of alert which is reflected to some degree in English poetry.' This book shows how the work of a major post-war American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in Ashbery's oeuvre in the context of an 'other tradition' of modern English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashbery's recent Collected Poems, Mark Ford, through Lee Harwood in the late 1960s, F. T. Prince in the 1950s, to 'chronologically the first and therefore most important influence' on his own work, W. H. Auden. Through detailed close readings of the poetry of Ashbery and these English poets, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented. The biographical slant of the book is highly significant, as it reads these writers' poetry and correspondence together for the first time, suggesting how major poetic innovations arose from specific social contexts, from the particulars of relations between poets, and also from a broader climate of Anglo-American exchange as registered by each poet. The book's presentation of the process of poetic influence is attentive to actual exchanges between contemporaries as evidenced in correspondence, as opposed to speculative relationships with dominant figures, and as such represents a departure from many other studies of Ashbery's work. Key themes include 'Englishness' as a national imaginary, the concept of the 'minor', reciprocal influence, and the poetry of coteries. The result is that both Ashbery himself, and the landscape of post-war English poetry, are presented in significantly new lights.

By tracing the impulses of punk rock, trash film, and camp through poetry, Drew Gardner sheds light on a literary tendency that has been part of poetry's DNA all along: uncovering the poetic values hidden in unpoetic things. This unique anthology introduces readers to collage-driven poetry that embodies the sensibilities of punk, trash, and camp in a line of writing that cuts through received taxonomies of movements, influences, and styles. Moving through the twentieth century, the poetry focuses on the unexpected, the anarchic, the demotic, the absurd, the irreverent, the coarse, the rude, and the deliriously playful. It marks an alternative strain of modernism that stretches from one side of the century to the other and includes such diverse voices as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Russell Atkins, Sun Ra, and Bernadette Mayer, along with many other well-known and lesser-known poets. Readers of Ingenious Pleasures will delight in experiencing poetry as they never have before.

One glaring lacuna in studies of Haitian Vodou is the scarcity of works exploring the connection between the religion and its main roots, traditional Yoruba religion. Discussions of Vodou very often seem to present the religion in vacuo, as a sui generis phenomenon that arose in Saint-Domingue and evolved in Haiti, with no antecedents. What is sorely needed then is more comparative studies of Haitian Vodou that would examine its connections to traditional Yoruba religion and thus illuminate certain aspects of its mythology, belief system, practices, and rituals. This book seeks to bridge these gaps. Vodou in the Haitian Experience studies comparatively the connections and relationships between Vodou and African traditional religions such as Yoruba religion and Egyptian religion. Such studies might enhance our understanding of the religion, and the connections between Africa and its Diaspora through shared religious patterns and practices. The general reader should be mindful of the transnational and transcultural perspectives of Vodou, as well as the cultural, socio-economic, and political context which gave birth to different visions and ideas of Vodou. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.

Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding enjoyed a fascinating if brief three-year friendship via correspondence between 1927 and 1930, and in A Description of Acquaintance, Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm make the letters available to a larger audience for the first time. Riding and Stein are important figures in twentieth-century poetry and poetics and are considered progenitors of later movements such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. The editors contextualize their relationship and its time period with an introduction; annotations to the letters; and supplementary materials, including pieces by Stein and Riding that exemplify their singular perspectives on modernism as well as their personal poetics. The book provides unique insight into Stein’s and Riding’s writing processes as well as the larger literary world around them, making it a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry.

Broad-ranging and pluralistically investigative, the essays in Thinking with the Poem document Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s authorial interventions as a poet, scholar, and cultural critic steeped in the linguistic and political frames of her time. The writers included in this volume engage root-level questions at the heart of DuPlessis’s praxis as posed by her in a recent essay: “What is a poem, what is a poet, what is an oeuvre, what is the ‘poetic’?” Inventive and noncanonical, these essays offer substantive responses to these and other questions, providing new routes of inquiry into the poetry and poetics of this preeminent figure of new writing.