The Poetry of the Americas provides an expansive history of relations between poets in the US and Latin America over three decades, from the Good Neighbor diplomacy of World War II to 1960s Cold War cultural policy.

Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as Edgar Garcia makes clear in Signs of the Americas. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world. Garcia tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, he brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, Garcia depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.

The most inclusive single-volume anthology of Latin American poetry intranslation ever produced.

Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled “Intertextuality and Civilization in the Americas,” this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields. Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilizations. Addressing themes such as the Moses story in modern literature, the relation between power and cultural encounter, the first African-American novel, and the foundations of Latin American literature and the New World baroque, the contributors link multiculturalism with intertextuality, crossing disciplinary, national, linguistic, and hemispheric boundaries. The volume closes with Jefferson Humphries’ deft translation of a poem by Edouard Glissant, a featured speaker at the conference whose writings bear a special relation to the subject of intertextuality. Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.

Poets, teachers, and musicologists fusing studies of form, scansion, and musical creation to redefine the place of the American bard

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } In this capacious and challenging book, Maria Damon surveys the poetry and culture of the United States in two distinct but inextricably linked periods. In part 1, "Identity K/not/e/s," she considers the America of the 1950s and early 1960s, when contentious and troubled alliances took shape between different marginalized communities and their respective but overlapping bohemias--Jews, African Americans, the Beats, and gays and lesbians. Damon then turns to more contemporary issues and broader topics of poetics in part 2's "Poetics for a Postliterary America" which goes on to paint a wider picture, dwelling less on close readings of individual poems and more on asking questions about the nature of poetry itself and its role in community formation and individual survival. Discussions of counterperformance, kinetics, the Nuyoricans, Latino identity, and electronic poetics enliven this section.

This comprehensive chronological anthology includes 58 essays on poetry by 53 poets. Starting with James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost, the book offers diverse and often conflicting accounts of the nature and function of poetry. The collection includes rarely anthologized essays by Jack Spicer, Rhina Espaillat, Anne Stevenson, and Ron Silliman, as well as work by some of the finest younger critics in America, including William Logan, Alice Fulton, and Christian Wiman.