In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme. Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.

What is more direct and intimate than one-to-one conversation? Here two forces in American poetry, the Kenyon Review and the University of Arkansas Press, bring together discussions between one of America's leading poets and editors, David Baker, and nine of the most exciting poets of our day. The poets, who represent a wide array of vocations and aesthetic positions, open up about their writing processes, their reading and education, their hopes for and discontents with the contemporary scene, and much more, treating readers to a view of the range and capacity of contemporary American poetry.

Reflections on poetry, from the birth of modernism to the present

This collection of interviews and essays presents an entertaining and provocative introduction to the critical thought of Marjorie Perloff. The fourteen interviews conducted by accomplished scholars, poets, and critics from the United States, Denmark, Norway, France, and Poland cover many topics: poetry s nature as a literary genre, its current state, and its relation to art, politics, language, theory, and technology. The volume also features three essays by Perloff: an academic memoir, an exploration of poetry pedagogy, and an essay on the (re)constitution of the intellectuals in the 21st century. It will be an inspiring resource for both scholars and poets who care to live a life of attention, on and off the page of poetry."

This anthology is a new reading of the contemporary poetries. The collection gathers together the work of a number of scholars, poets, and teachers on the challenges and productive possibilities that arise when teaching contemporary writing today.