Companion to American Poetry

MARY MCALEER BALKUN is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. Her research interests include early American literature and culture, the American gothic and grotesque, and digital humanities. She is the author of The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, as well as articles on early American literature, digital humanities, and pedagogy. She is co-editor of several anthologies, including Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, and Transformative Digital Humanities.JEFFREY GRAY is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry and of many articles on American and Latin American literature. He is the editor and co-editor of several anthologies, including The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry and The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement.PAUL JAUSSEN is Associate Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University, where he co-directs the “Humanity+Technology” lecture series. His teaching and research focus is on poetry and poetics, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. He is the author of Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital. His essays and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, Comparative Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and ASAP/J, among others.

• 1 Introduction 1Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul JaussenSection 1: Poetry before "American Poetry" 52 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton 7Tamara Harvey3 Before Poetry: Revival Verse and Sermonic Address in Eighteenth-Century America 18Wendy Raphael Roberts4 The Inca in the Nineteenth-Century US Poetic Imaginary 28Adam Bradford5 African American Spirituals and Their Legacy 39Lauri ScheyerSection 2: Poetry and The Transcendent 516 Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists 53Wendy Martin and Camille Meder7 Artificers of the World: Transcendentalism and Its Poetic Legacies 68Bruce Ronda8 "Do Not Be Content with an Imaginary God": Modern Poetry, Spirituality, and the Problem of Belief 82Norman Finkelstein9 Enduring Epiphany: The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Poetry 95Nikki SkillmanSection 3: Experimentalisms, Early and Late 10710 The New in Hindsight: Modernist Poetry and Poetics in the Classroom 109Bob Perelman11 Philosophy, Poetry, and the Principle of Charity 120Johanna Winant12 "Making a Way": The Black Mountain Review and Mid-Twentieth Century Communities 133Joshua Hoeynck13 Causes, Movements, Theory: Between Language Poetry and New Narrative 146Kaplan Harris14 Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora 157Tyrone Williams15 Wearables and Modernist Poetry’s Prototypes 166Margaret Konkol16 Reading the Unreadable in Modern American Poetry 184Steven Gould AxelrodSection 4: Poetry and Identity 19917 The Black Quatrain and America's Racialized Poetics 201Ben Glaser18 Queer Poetics: Voices of the Subaltern in American Poetry 216Daniel Enrique Pérez19 Trans Poetry and Poetics 230Trace PetersonSection 5: Transnational Poetry 24320 Ezhi-aawechigaazhangwaa: Indigenous American Comparisons 245Margaret Noodin21 Trans-Pacific Poetics: Eastern Influences on American Poetry in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 257Susan M Schultz22 "Audience Distant Relative": Fugitive Transnationality and Poetic Form 269Mayumo Inoue23 "A Little Room in a House Set Aflame": American Poetry and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century 283Walt Hunter24 Rethinking Transnationalism in American Poetry 294Sarah DowlingSection 6: Poetry and the Arts 30325 "Sketch of a Man on a Platform": The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem 305Andrew Epstein26 Poetry in the Public Square 320Stephen Cushman27 Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment 332Avery Slater28 "Compared to What": Past and Future Paths in Rap Poetics 344Andrew DuBois29 American Poetry Goes to the Movies 354Susan Cooke WeeberSection 7: Nature and After 36730 Reading God's Book of the World 369Robert Daly31 "Sharing with the Ants": American Ecopoetry from Lydia Sigourney to Ross Gay 379Christoph Irmscher32 Post-Natural Modernism 390Mark C Long33 Rethinking the Anthropocene: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Epochal Imaginings 402Margaret RondaSection 8: Poetry of Engagement 41534 American War Poetry 417Cary Nelson35 Lynch Fragments 431Aldon Lynn Nielsen36 Indigenous Docupoetry: "'Last Indian War' in Verse" 442Kimberly Blaeser37 "It's Been a While": Latinx Poetries and the Empire of Borders 455Michael Dowdy38 The Politics of American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century 469David LauIndex 484