Addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimental poetry and examines silence as an aesthetic strategy in itself. The result is an extended meditation on the precarious balance among competing forces in liberating poetic discourse from the realms of silence and the impasses it creates.

Addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimental poetry and examines silence as an aesthetic strategy in itself. The result is an extended meditation on the precarious balance among competing forces in liberating poetic discourse from the realms of silence and the impasses it creates.

Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's 'New American Poetry' anthology.

The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.

The Cambridge History of American Poetry offers a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their beginnings until the end of the twentieth century. Bringing together the insights of fifty distinguished scholars, this literary history emphasizes the complex roles that poetry has played in American cultural and intellectual life, detailing the variety of ways in which both public and private forms of poetry have met the needs of different communities at different times. The Cambridge History of American Poetry recognizes the existence of multiple traditions and a dramatically fluid canon, providing current perspectives on both major authors and a number of representative figures whose work embodies the diversity of America's democratic traditions.

"This volume studies the relation between globalization and inequalities in emerging societies by linking Area and Global Studies, aiming at a new theory of inequality beyond the nation state and beyond Eurocentrism"--