This book is a major source for scholars of the latest American poetry. These exciting essays comprise energy and documented discussions on experimentalism, multiculturalism, hyperspace, and gender. Anthologies and little magazines form the matrix for this exploration on conceptual issues surrounding language. The author widens the perspective in which a great deal of writing forced the limits of poetry in this kind of publications. At the same time, he analyzes new contexts and enters into conversation with other sources for inspiration found through other disciplines such as social theory, philosophy, linguistics, and art generated at both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Reflective, taut with alertness, and exploding the postmodern concept of word/object as a liberating experience, this book becomes a driving force to address poetry and challenging political issues with admirable depth.

In February 1978, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E newsletter, founded and edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, established the first public venue for the thriving correspondence of an emerging set of ambitious young poets. It circulated fresh perspectives on writing, politics, and the arts. Instead of poems, it published short essays and book reviews on the model of the private letter. It also featured extensive bibliographies and excerpts of cultural, social, and political theory. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein's L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: The Complete Facsimile makes available in print all twelve of the newsletter's original issues along with three supplementary issues.

Written between 1970 and 1978, these letters detail the development of the concepts and styles that came to define one of the most influential movements in post-1960s writing.

What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.