Art, Labour and American Life

Ben Hickman is Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry and Director of the Centre for Modern Poetry at the University of Kent, UK, having studied at University College, London and the University of Kent. Recent publications include John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), and Poetry and Real Politics: Crisis and the US Avant-Garde (2016), also with EUP.

• Introduction: life after the avant-garde.- 1 Proletarian realism, proletarian modernism: life in the Thirties.- 2        The managerial avant-garde: Hannah Arendt, John Cage and Jackson Pollock.- 3 The labour of mid-century leisure: grace, time and pastoral in Frank O’Hara’s work poems.- 4 Extraordinary measures: work, race and violence from Umbra to Gary, Indiana.- 5 Performing women’s work: Linda Montano, Bernadette Mayer and Karen Finley.- 6 Life and death: illness, labour and writing from Audre Lorde to Anne Boyer.- 7 Labour value and the web of life: the new century’s poetics of scale.- 8 Life at zero hours: language, networks and precarity since 2008.