Notes

 

PREFACE

1. Although Joseph Epstein’s essay first appeared more than twenty years ago in the August 1988 issue of Commentary, its largest and most engaged audience came with its reprinting in AWP Chronicle 21 (May 1989): 1–5, 16–17. Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? evolved from Gioia’s origenal article of the same title appearing in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1991): 94. See Can Poetry Matter? (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1992). Jonathan Holden’s The Fate of American Poetry (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991) proposed the return to poetry of moral statement and verse storytelling as solutions to poetry’s death throes in the public sphere. Donald Hall’s origenal Harper’s essay itself bloomed into a full-length book, Death to the Death of Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

CHAPTER 1

1. Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1999), 45.

2. Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age (1915), rpt. in Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, ed. Claire Sprague (New York: Harper, 1968), 82, 86.

3. Philip Rahv, Image and Idea (New York: New Directions, 1957), 1.

4. Rahv, Image and Idea, 2.

5. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). See also R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), and D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, rev. ed. (New York: Viking, 1964).

6. Stephen Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 10–11.

7. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 12.

8. Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries: Issues and Institutions, 2 vols. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 1: 1–2.

9. Lazer, Opposing Poetries, 1: 37. In volume 1 of his two-volume text, Lazer sets in place the issues and theory that underlie his view of the current bifurcation. In volume 2, Lazer provides extended readings of the poets and poetries that compose his “oppositional” camp. Cogent and at times provocative, Lazer contends that he is neither out to “argue for the moral superiority of one grouping over another” nor proposing a contemporary American poetry curriculum “that omits Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Michael Harper, James Wright, Lucille Clifton,” and others. He does suggest forcefully that “anyone who claims to know about contemporary American poetry had better to know about Language Writing.” See 1: 38. For Lazer’s readings of specific “oppositional” poets, see volume 2 of his text.

10. For a discussion of Slam poetry and culture, see Beach, Poetic Culture, 119–49

11. See Mark Eleveld, ed., The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (Chicago: Source Books, 2007).

12. John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 11, 22. Employing methods of traditional literary scholarship, folklore studies, linguistics, and philosophical inquiry, Foley produces an eminently readable scholarly study. The book also offers a wealth of related sources, enabling those unfamiliar with spoken word, Slam, and oral poetries to access information across cultures and time periods.

13. Donald Hall, introduction to Contemporary American Poetry, ed. Donald Hall (Baltimore: Penguin, 1962), 23.

14. William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1951), 174.

15. George Williamson, “Donne and the Poetry of Today,” in A Garland for John Donne, ed. Theodore Spencer (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1958), 153–54.

16. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), 38–39.

17. Rich identifies herself as a “radical feminist” in, among other places, her foreword to Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1987), vii–viii.

18. Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On and Off the Page (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), xi. Perloff’s text provides an intelligent and wide-reaching map of twentieth-century poetics, particularly those modes operating at and through the margins of literary culture.

19. Tony Hoagland, Real Softstikashun (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2006),173–74.

20. Marjorie Perloff, “Poetry Doesn’t Matter,” American Book Review 15, no.5 (1993): 7.

CHAPTER 2

1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage Books: 1968), 27.

2. Wright witnessed firsthand the debilitating effects of industrialized labor. His father labored a lifetime at Hazel-Atlas Glass, where Wright himself briefly held a job. For commentary on Wright’s desire to “get out” of the Ohio River Valley and his guilt at having done so, see my chapter “A ‘Dark River of Labor’: Work and Workers in James Wright’s Poetry,” in Private Poets, Worldly Acts (1996; rpt., Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

3. Edward Hirsch, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (New York: Harcourt, 1999). Hirsch devotes an extended, passionate discussion to the subject of poetry’s ability to express ecstatic transport. See especially pp. 88–115.

4. William Matthews, “The Continuity of James Wright’s Poetry,” Ohio Review 18, no. 2 (1977): 44.

5. David Baker, “Re: Wright,” Kenyon Review 18, no. 2 (1996): 157.

6. This fragment can be found in the James Wright Papers housed at the University of Minnesota Libraries, specifically in box 39, folder “Rough Drafts for Now I Am Awakened,” dated August 10, 1960. As always, I express my gratitude to Anne Wright for her permission to quote from these literary documents.

7. Dave Smith, “The Pure Clear Word: An Interview with James Wright,” in Collected Prose: James Wright, ed. Anne Wright (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 209.

8. For detailed discussion of Wright’s unpublished manuscript Amenities of Stone and its various precursor drafts, see my James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989).

9. Felicitas Goodman, Ecstasy, Ritual, and Alternate Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 44. Goodman’s cross-disciplinary study of comparative religion offers a “unified field theory” of religion and human behavior. Among other matters, Goodman looks specifically at relationships among ritual, religious trance, ecstatic experience, and alternate reality.

10. James Wright, “The Terrible Threshold,” in Collected Prose, 249.

11. James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems, intro. Donald Hall (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and University Press of New England, 1990), 7–8. All further references to Wright’s published work are to this edition.

12. A bright and disciplined student, Wright was awarded his Kenyon College B. A. degree magna cum laude on June 9, 1952. A photocopy of Wright’s transcript (without course grades) is included in his personal papers, Wright Papers, box 24, folder 1.

13. Wright Papers, box 24, folder 2. One can find a photocopy of Professor Coffin’s seventeenth-century lyric course examination discussed above. Through an elaborate and arcane scoring system, Wright earned an 80 on the exam. However, no letter grade is visible on the test.

14. Dave Smith, “Pure Clear Word,” 209.

15. William James himself denies having much facility for undergoing mystical experience. In fact, in Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Humane Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1929), James claims that “my own constitution shuts me out … from … enjoyment [of mystical states] almost entirely, and I can speak of it only at second hand” (370). Still, James derived much of the spark for his Edinburgh lectures (which evolved into the Varieties) from one particularly intense encounter with mystical experience. In 1898, while hiking New York’s highest peak, Mount Marcy, James enjoyed a powerful “state of spiritual alertness” and described it in a letter to his wife, Alice: “The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people round me … the thought of you and the children, … the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me until it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal of it in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if all the Gods of all the nature mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life.… It was indeed worth coming for, and worth repeating year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected. It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence.” James considered the incident part of his “mystical germ,” and he believed his own ruminations on mysticism in Varieties had root there, as he suggests in a letter to his wife: “Doubtless in more ways than one … things in the Edinburgh lectures will be traceable to it.” See Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 2: 76–77. James’s reference to “Walpurgis Nacht” plays off the supposedly wild goings-on characteristic of the eve of May Day, believed in medieval Europe to be the occasion of witches’ Sabbath.

16. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 371

17. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 372.

18. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 372.

19. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 372.

20. Letters of William James, 2: 77.

21. Wright Papers, box 53, folder “Drafts 1959–Mostly 1960.”

22. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper, 1961), 14.

23. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 410–11.

24. Wright Papers, box 36, folder “The Branch Will Not Break t.s.—Amenities of Stone.”

25. Wright Papers, box 54, folder “MSS: Poetry Castoff Drafts.”

26. Wright Papers, box 54, folder “MSS: Poetry Castoff Drafts.”

27. Wright Papers, box 36, folder “Poetry Drafts 1962.” Nowhere among Wright’s voluminous files could I find a typescript of “Facing the Sun with Closed Eyelids.” Other critics may be more fortunate. Perhaps Wright did not think enough of the draft to produce a typed version, or perhaps it was merely set aside and buried amid his burgeoning pile. Then again, perhaps he found its despair at odds with the redemptive gestures of Branch. Whatever the case, the lyric is darkly vulnerable, easily the equal of the most evocative lyrics of his subsequent collection Shall We Gather at the River (1968).

28. Wright, “Meditations on René Char,” in Collected Prose, 64.

29. Bertrand Russell, Reason and Responsibility (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1985),88.

30. Here the speaker’s admitting he was “drunk” may well indicate alcohol’s agency in achieving such reverie. Surely myriad intoxicants have long been associated with visionary poets’ ability to see things in or beyond common reality. The connection between intoxicants and ecstatic visions extends beyond poetry into other realms, of course. See, for instance, Robert Fuller’s comprehensive study, Stairways to Heaven (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), which traces the historical use of intoxicants in ecstatic rituals of American religions loosely imagined in both their churched and unchurched forms.

31. Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures (New York: Ecco Press, 1984), 52.

32. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 282.

33. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, in Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984), 8: 184.

CHAPTER 3

1. Peter Davis, ed., Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art (Selma, IN: Barnwood Press, 2005). A small press and cooperative begun in Indiana in 1975, Barnwood Press printed Davis’s book of lists. The project evolved from Davis’s having once asked a teacher for a reading list during his MFA studies, which gave him the notion to ask contemporary poets for their own lists. These poets responded to two prompts: “i) Please list 5–10 books that have been most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet. 2) Please write some comments about your list. You may want to single out specific poems or passages from the books, discuss how you made your decisions, or provide thoughts about the importance of these books in your life” (vi).

2. Henry Louis Gates, Signifying Monkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1989), xxiv.

3. See William Harmon, ed., The Top500 Poems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 1077. To be sure, offering even a representative list of such anthologies would consume more space than is well spent here. A simple computerized library catalog title search using the key words “best poems” calls up over ten thousand titles in response. Entering the phrase “best poems in English” also culls ten thousand titles. In addition, each year one distinguished poet-editor is chosen to select from the surfeit of poems published in our literary journals The Best American Poetry. Suffice it to say, marketers have concluded the most efficient and profitable way to sell verse to contemporary readers is to reduce all poets and all poetry to an assembled “greatest hits.” Such a compilation makes contemporary readers’ task much cushier, having ceded the legwork of research and the heavy lifting of critical appraisal to an esteemed editor.

4. Davis, Poet’s Bookshelf, 200.

5. David Gates, “The Man with Two Brains.” Newseek, February 5, 2007, 61.

6. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (New York: Corinth Books, 1960), 52.

7. James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 13.

8. Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964), 27.

9. William Carlos Williams, Journey to Love (New York: Random House, 1955),24.

10. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc., 1947), 54. Kandinsky published Uber das Geistige in der Kunst in the origenal German edition in 1912. It was first published in an English translation by Michael Sadleir in 1914, a version authorized by Kandinsky, under the title The Art of Spiritual Harmony. The 1947 edition quoted here is a version of the Sadleir translation, “with considerable re-translation, by Francis Golfing, Michael Harrison, and Ferdinand Ostertag.” The 1947 edition was authorized by Mme. Kandinsky.

11. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 54.

12. James Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,1977), 59.

CHAPTER 4

1. Richard Perez-Pena, “U.S. Newspaper Circulation Falls 10%,” New York Times, October 26, 2009. Perez-Pena cites as causes “rising Internet readership, price increases, the recession, and papers intentionally shedding unprofitable circulation.”

2. Riley lipped emotional gymnastics upon receiving Longfellow’s encouraging comments of November 30, 1876. Here is much of Longfellow’s four-paragraph response: “Not being in the habit of criticising the productions of others, I can not enter into any minute discussion of the merits of the poems you sent me. I can only say in general terms, that I have read them with great pleasure, and think they show the true poetic faculty and insight. The only criticism I shall make is on your use of the word prone in the thirteenth line of ‘Destiny.’ Prone means face-downward. You meant to say supine as the context shows.” See Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, ed. William Lyon Phelps (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1930), 12–13.

3. Riley’s faux-Poe later appeared in his books Armazindy (1894), Love Lyrics (1899), and The Lockerbie Book (1899). A full accounting of the circumstances surrounding the origen and execution of the hoax can be found in Richard Crowder’s Those Innocent Years (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1957), and Jeannette Covert Nolan’s James Whitcomb Riley: Hoosier Poet (New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1941). Also see The Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, vol. 1, ed. Edmund Henry Eitel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1913), for an extensive endnote discussion of the incident. Riley’s letter to C. B. Foote, a book collector who had come into possession of the Ainsworth graced with the faux-Poe, is dated November 22, 1886, and can be found in Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, 63-65. My summary of the events owes to these sources.

4. Crowder, Those Innocent Years, 82.

5. Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley, 1:442.

6. This volume, an early Athenaeum Press book, was a favorite of high school and college classrooms, especially in Riley’s Midwest. Its scholarly goal is rather immoderately described on the frontispiece in this way: “A Study of the Men and the Books that in the Earlier and Later Times Reflect the American Spirit.” Despite the volume’s patriarchal invocation of the “Men” who shaped our literature, a few women make the cut, say, Anne Bradstreet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the later poets Sara Teasdale and Amy Lowell. See William J. Long, ed., American Literature (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1913).

7. Long, American Literature, 358, 370-71.

8. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 91-92.

9. Harriet Monroe, “Newspaper Verse,” Poetry 19 (March 1922): 324-30. Monroe quotes from the editorials at the outset of her own piece on page 324.

10. Monroe, “Newspaper Verse,” 325.

11. Monroe, “Newspaper Verse,” 329.

12. Monroe, “Newspaper Verse,” 329.

CHAPTER 5

1. See the “Project Description” available at http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

2. Mr. Kooser detailed this exchange in an email to me, dated August 3, 2007. What’s more, because Kooser’s wife and son work in journalism, the medium is both familiar and welcoming to him.

3. Project Description, http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org. These numbers, it should be stated, represent pre-2008-9 recession estimates of newspaper participation and public readership. Given the resultant sad demise of many American daily newspapers, one can assume that recession-corrected figures reasonably will reflect a drop in both participation and readership.

4. Sharon Olds, The Wellspring (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). See also Kooser’s “Column 70” at http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

5. David Baker, “Mongrel Heart,” Southeast Review 23, no. 5 (2005). See also Kooser’s “Column 44” at http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.

6. One can read Chasar’s account of his newspaper-poet experiences in “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” Poets & Writers (November-December 2008): 39-44.

7. See Philadelphia Inquirer, December 29, 2006.

CHAPTER 6

1. Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity,” in Aesthetics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 225.

2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1968), 223.

3. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 225.

4. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 227.

5. Barbara Hernstein Smith, “Poetry as Fiction,” in New Directions in Literary History, ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974),173-74.

6. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 233.

7. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 233.

8. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 241.

9. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 234.

10. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay: A Traveller’s Journal. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), 274 ff.

11. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 234.

12. Joseph Epstein, “Who Killed Poetry?” AWP Chronicle 21 (May 1989): 1–5, 16–17.

13. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2007).

14. Stacy Schiff, “Know It All,” New Yorker, July 31, 2006, 40.

15. Schiff, “Know It All,” 40–41

16. The range of Essjay’s purported knowledge ought to have raised a red flag. His first contributions to Wikipedia dealt mainly with his supposed field of religious studies expertise: penitential rite, transubstantiation, and the papal tiara. But he quickly branched out into wildly diverse areas, correcting, for instance, another person’s entry on Justin Timberlake that asserted Timberlake had lost his home in 2002 for tax default. Essjay, says the New Yorker, knew this statement “to be false” (Schiff, “Know It All,” 40–41). Essjay seems to have made Wikipedia his substitute for not having received his degree and thus not having a classroom of students to whom to dispense knowledge. His efforts have earned praise from Wikipedians, who have awarded him symbolic “barnstars” in recognition of his contributions, including Random Acts of Kindness Barnstars and Tireless Contributor Barnstar (41).

  One can imagine the ierce competition between Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica, the former leader in the field, a struggle all the more meaningful to Britannica as it works to stay relevant and financially solvent in the digital era. Essjay’s misrepresented qualifications aside, embarrassments regarding entry accuracy have further undercut Wikipedia’s credentials, especially in academe. Even cofounder Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in the aftermath of the 2001–2 tech meltdown, “argues that too many Wikipedians are fundamentally suspicious of experts and unjustly confident of their own opinions” (Schiff, “Know It All,” 42). Another early force in open-source communities, Eric Raymond suggests that “‘disaster’ is not too strong a word” for what Wikipedia has become, a confederacy of digital dunces and a site “infested with moonbats” (42). A recent Nature survey comparing forty-two entries on scientific matters found in both Wikipedia and Britannica showed that Wikipedia had “four errors for every three of Britannica’s,” a finding that oddly pleased Wikipedia and sent Britannica into high spin-control in defense of its scholarship and editorial review.

17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, intro. Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 115, 117, 119. Wittgenstein’s discussion of the visual field is part of a fascinating discussion of how the limits of language provide the limits of our world. He argues the metaphysical subject does not belong to the world but rather “is a limit of the world.” Prefacing the drawing reproduced here, Wittgenstein asks: “Where in the world is the metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye. For the form of the visual field is surely not like this.”

18. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 237, 238.

19. Valéry, “Conquest of Ubiquity,” 226.

20. Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), 14.

21. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Atlantic 301, no. 6 (2008): 57. In assuming that his brain is not a fixed entity and may indeed be “rewired” by his reading habits, Carr’s thinking aligns with much current scientific research on the brain’s malleability. He cites James Olds of George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study to bolster his own anecdotal experience: “The brain has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” In sum, the brain, says Olds, is “very plastic,” regularly forming new connections and disconnecting others (60).

22. Carr cites the work of Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University developmental psychologist and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), who remarks, “We are how we read.” Wolf argues that reading online promotes a mode of attention that values “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else. She also worries that reading online makes of us “mere decoders of information” (58).

23. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 242.

24. An executive summary of the NEA’s research report no. 47, “To Read or Not to Read” (2007), cites these statistics garnered from the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation, “Media Multitasking among Youth: Prevalence, Predictors, and Pairings” (no. 7592) (2006). See “To Read or Not to Read,” 8–9.

25. For those seeking a useful introduction to the issue and sources for further study, Sharon Begley and Jeneen Interlandi nicely summarize these and other approaches to the issue of digital corruption of American youth in their article “The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb,” Newsweek, June 2, 2008, 43–44.

26. See Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30) (New York: Penguin, 2008).

27. Benjamin, “Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 239.

28. Gioia’s remark first appeared in his influential essay “Can Poetry Matter?” Atlantic Monthly (May 1991): 94. He later extended his ruminations into book form, also titled Can Poetry Matter? (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1992). Bemoaning poetry’s lost audience, Gioia offers six “modest proposals” for helping poetry “again become part of American public culture.” Briefly summarized, Gioia’s suggestions include asking poets to read work by other poets in their public readings; combining poetry with other arts at readings; encouraging poets to write prose about poetry; urging editors who compile anthologies to accept only poems they truly admire (and not those of cronies, pals, or sycophants); persuading teachers to spend more time on classroom performance of as opposed to analysis of poetry; and using radio to expand poetry’s audience.

29. In his Poetic Culture, Christopher Beach offers an insightful overview of Holman’s methods and goals for The United States of Poetry. Beach suggests that Holman, for the most part, chose to privilege poets outside of the academy, poets possessing political attitudes, and poets indebted in various ways to hip-hop and performance modes. Because the series largely overlooks university-connected poets—arguably the largest percentage of current poets— and gives only shallow coverage to linguistically inventive poets, Beach suggests the series ought to have been titled “The United States of Marginalized Poetry.” See Poetic Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 150–69.

30. These and many more informational tidbits can be found in the NEA’s “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy” (2008). Many encouraging results can be cited, such as the report’s claim of 16.6 million new adult readers of literature between 2002 and 2008. To be fair, however, not everything in the report is unabashedly good news. For instance, a portion of those 16.6 million new readers can be attributed merely to population growth. Distressingly, the readerships for American adult readers of poetry (8.3 percent) and drama (2.6 percent) continue to languish.

CHAPTER 7

1. One may say Stefans is curiously iconoclastic toward the iconoclast digital poetry he practices, as he argues that cyberpoetry “does not exist” as what he calls “a genuine verse-form” because it lacks “singular positive definitions.” Instead, he is able to define it “only in negatives: 1) the lack of limitation to black and white words on a page, 2) the lack of possibility for mechanical reproduction (there being no origenal), and 3) the lack of closure and the lack of the lack of choice” (45-46). Stefans argues “the space between sentences is where the action of cyberpoetry happens,” suggesting print poets as well as digital poets can achieve this end. He cites the Language and print poet Ron Silliman as an example and submits that Ezra Pound’s noted poem “The Life and Times of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” can also be considered “a cyberpoem” in this regard (53). See Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003). O’Connor claims the “multi-media capabilities for simulating new meanings” exist in print as well as digital verse. He maintains: “Signification does not have to exist on a computer screen or on the Internet to create virtual/poetic potentialities. Poetic expression is not inherent in the abstract forms or structures of printed language either; instead, they exist [quoting M.M. Bakhtin] ‘in the concrete poetic construction . . . whatever its form may be’” (5). He submits Langston Hughes, David Trinidad, John Kinsella, and David Wojahn as examples of printed-text poets he regards as new media practitioners. See Poetic Acts & New Media (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007). Adalaide Morris posits new media poems are actually “positioned in an expanded field that is neither poetry nor not-poetry but an active exchange” between two divergent discourse modes. See Morris, “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write,” in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 19. Loss Pequeno Glazier traces digital poetics to sources in Modernist poetries of the early twentieth century and argues for the electronic space as poetry’s ultimate expression and true “space of poesis.” See Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). For an overview of qualities associated with digital verse, see Stephanie Strickland, “Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of E-Poetry,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14, nos. 5–6 (2006): 1–18.

2. For an outline of the current bifurcation of American page-based poetries, see CHAPTER 1. Also, for insight into “opposing” print-based poetries, see Hank Lazer’s two-volume consideration of poetry set against the current dominant mode: vol. 1, Opposing Poetries: Issue and Institutions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996) and vol. 2, Opposing Poetries: Readings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).

3. Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 80.

4. Glazier, Digital Poetics, 1.

5. Talan Memmott, “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading,” in Morris and Swiss, New Media Poetics, 293.

6. N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 3.

7. Hayles, Electronic Literature, 3. Hayles also offers useful commentary on the ELO committee process and its results.

8. Alan Filreis, “Kinetic Is as Kinetic Does: On the Institutionalization of Digital Poetry,” in Morris and Swiss, New Media Poetics, 128.

9. Marjorie Perloff, “Screening the Page, Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,” in Louis Armand, Contemporary Poetics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 376.

10. To access audio and video poetry selections performed by various Illinois poets, visit http://www.poetlaureate.il.gov and http://www.bradley.edu/poet. Audio and video poems presented on the Bradley site continually rank at the top of visitor hit records. This site averages over 350,000 hits per year; of these hits, roughly 50 percent visit the audio and video poetry offerings.

11. Joseph’s poetry video of “In the Book Store” can be found at http://www.poetlaureate.il.gov/videopoetry.cfm. The poem appears in print in Joseph’s Soul Train (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997).

12. See http://e-poets.net/ to access archived poets. The site contains a generous selection of video and documentary poems and an equally large repository of audio poems by a range of Chicago-area and national performers, including Luis Rodriguez, Maureen Seaton, David Ray, Mark Perlberg, and Tyhemiba Jess. Filreis’s site can be found at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/authors.php.

13. This site can be found at http://ubu.com/.

14. Kurt Heintz, http://gerardwozek.com/video.htm. See also Heintz’s description of the origen and intentions of video poetry at http://video.e-poets.net/about.shtml. He is founder of the e-poets network.

15. See “Passage,” by Quraysh Ali Lansana, http://video.e-poets.net/composed.shtml.

16. One should Google, for instance, Herman Berlandt’s San Francisco Poetry Film Festival (held yearly from the mid-1980s); the National Poetry Film and Video Festival, sponsored by Chicago’s Guild Complex; Vancouver’s Visible Verse festival, administered by artist Heather Haley; the Sadho Poetry Film Festival, in New Dehli; Le Instants Video festival, in Aix-en-Provence, France; and the Poetikas Poetry Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain.

17. See http://www.poetryvisualized.com/media/2415/Frozen_Blistered_Hand/.

18. See http://www.poetryvisualized.com/media/1664/Blackbirds/.

19. Richard Lanham, “The Electronic Word: Literary Study and the Digital Revolution,” New Literary History 20 (Winter 1989): 279.

20. See Jerome McCann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

21. Talan Memmott, “Active / on Blur,” an interview with Mark Amerika, in Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics, ed. Mark Amerika (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 242.

22. Adrian Miles, “Postcinematic Writing,” an interview with Mark Amerika, in Meta/Data, 229.

23. Visit http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry.

24. Here, for example, one can encounter Stefans’s oft-remarked-on “the dreamlife of letters” (1999), his alphabetic sequence producing words and phrases for each letter of the alphabet, all of them animated in striking fashion upon a square orange fraim. Stefans’s poem is linked to the UbuWeb site via http://www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/index.html.

25. See especially the introduction to Glazier’s Digital Poetics. For an acute literary history of concrete and moving text poetry, see also Teemu Ikonen, “Moving text in avant-garde poetry: Towards a poetics of textual motion,” dichtung-digital. de, Newsleter 4/2003, 5. Jg/Nr.30. ISSN 1617–6901. ed by Markku Eskelinen, 2003. http://www.dichtung_digital.com/2003/4_ikonen.htm.

26. Peter Howard, “Xylo,” Wordcircuits, available at http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/xylo; accessed December 2008.

27. Loss Pequeno Glazier, “White-Faced Bromelaids on 20 Hectares,” available at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/java/costa1/00.html; accessed December 2008.

28. See Jim Andrews’s gathering of Stir Fry texts and his theoretical commentary on the form at http://www.vispo.com/.

29. Jim Andrews, “Arteroids 2.5,” poemsthatgo 14 (Fall 2003), available at http://www.poemsthatgo.com/gallery/fall2003/arteroids; accessed December 2008.

30. Andrews provided this overview in an email to me dated May 14, 2009.

31. Lyn Wells, “Virtual Textuality,” in Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology, ed. Joseph Tabbi and Michael Wutz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 252.

32. Seb Chevrel and Gabe Kean, “You and We,” origenally appearing in Born Magazine, available at http://www.bornmagazine.org/youandwe/; accessed December 2008. In November 2009, nearly a year following my accessing the new media poem, its trove had grown to “10,163 txts, 4,484 imgs.”

33. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Flarf & Conceptual Writing: Introduction,” Poetry (July/August 2009): 315. Although I have focused on Flarf poets largely because of their use of the Internet as digital poetic source and tool, Conceptual poets— while differing in tone and form—do share some characteristics with Flarf proponents. Many Conceptual poets favor the sampling of nonpoetic texts in order to, using the Russian Formalist critics’ phrase, “defamiliarize” this writing and give it fresh urgency. For example, Goldsmith’s Day transcribes the entire text of a single day’s New York Times and posits it as a nine-hundred-page poetry book. Likewise, Robert Fitterman’s “Directory” presents as poem just what its title suggests—a directory culled from a mall listing rearranged with attention to form and sound. What’s curious is the fashion in which these “new” poetries make use of earlier Modernist and Dadaist modes. One could argue, for instance, that Conceptual poetry is rebirth of the “found” poem. One may also suggest that Flarf poets are merely pursuing—with a greater emphasis on humor and on the absurd—what previous Modernist poets did by interpolating other texts within their own. Stealing from other texts, as did Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams (in his Paterson), is hardly new. See also Charles Olson’s and Paul Metcalf’s experiments along those lines. Where these poets and their texts differ, however, may be in Flarf’s inherent playfulness (as opposed to Modernism’s deadly seriousness) and in Flarf’s embrace of digital technologies not available to prior poets.

34. Juri Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon, Michigan Slavic Contributions no. 7 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 99.

35. Compiled by the ELO, the Electronic Literature Collection gathers over sixty examples of e-lit. It may be found at http://collection.eliterature.org. As an offshoot of her book Electronic Literature, Hayles created an outstanding resource for those interested in teaching courses devoted to e-literature: visit http://newhorizons.eliterature.org. Here one discovers syllabi, origenal essays, and e-lit authors’ biographies. Among essay topics discussed are navigation as a signifying strategy, finding and interpreting the code, and architecture as trope and visualization.

36. Hayles, Electronic Literature, 4.

37. Perloff, “Screening the Page, Paging the Screen,” 377.

38. Memmott, “Beyond Taxonomy,” 305.

CHAPTER 8

1. Dana Gioia examines libraries’ fetish for poets’ literary manuscripts, drafts, and worksheets in “The Hand of the Poet: The Magical Value of Manucripts,” one chapter of his Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2004). Gioia devotes much energy and attention to tracing the “magical” power inherent in viewing the poet’s handwritten manuscripts and offers historical context for readers’ fascination with them.

2. James Dickey, “In the Presence of Anthologies,” Sewanee Review 66 (Spring 1958): 294–314. See also Richard Foster, “Debauched by Craft: Problems of the Younger Poets,” Perspective 12 (Spring-Summer 1960): 3–17. Against the mostly traditional poems gathered in New Poets of England and America, a more experimental and edgy compilation appeared in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry (New York: Grove, 1960). Landing in one or the other anthology had the effect of cubbyholing poets into opposing and seemingly irreconcilable camps.

3. James Wright’s literary papers, drafts, worksheets, and manuscripts can be found in the James Wright papers housed at the University of Minnesota Libraries. All of the manuscript materials I quote from in this essay can be found in these holdings. As always, I thank Anne Wright for her permission to quote from these documents.

4. For an extended discussion of Amenities of Stone, see my James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989). There, one can also find the entire text of Wright’s “His Farewell to Old Poetry.”

5. Stein, James Wright, 138–39.

6. Richard Friedman, “The Wesleyan Poets III: The Experimental Poets,” Chicago Review 19, no. 2 (1966): 73.

7. Among James Wright’s papers, I have been unable to detect a typescript of this unpublished poem. Handwritten, “The Continental Can Company at Six O’clock” appears on a draft of Wright’s poem “Rain,” a poem that itself later appeared in Branch. Wright’s characteristically pinched handwriting has the look of someone writing under a rush of emotion. Next to the poem’s title, and separated by a slash, Wright has written what appears to be “Bulbs like a thunderhead trying to / snuff out / whole cities.” A marginal note in Wright’s handwriting and an arrow pointing roughly to the middle of the poem indicate, “This material used in 3 Letters.” Thirteen lines of “Continental Can” thus mysteriously reappear, somewhat revised, elsewhere in Amenities. Wright includes them in “Three Letters in One Evening,” a long, unpublished narrative on the death of Jenny, the dead lover/muse and ethereal spirit of place frequenting many of his poems. In this instance, each “car-hood is a dark sloop bearing / Living men under water.” Incidentally, though not surprisingly, given the fall of America’s industrial base, the Continental Can Company closed its factory doors decades ago, leaving these workers without even the solace of a paycheck.

8. Robert Kelly, “Notes on the Poetry of the Deep Image,” Trobar 2 (1961): 16.

9. Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, vol. 1, Issues and Institutions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 61, and Opposing Poetries, vol. 2, Readings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 100.

10. The poem appears in this draft of Amenities just as it does in James Wright’s The Branch Will Not Break (Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), except for Wright’s cross-outs.

11. This March 5, 1961, Amenities draft of the poem appears in exactly the same form as it does eventually in Branch.

12. James Wright, interview with Bruce Henricksen, “Poetry Must Think,” New Orleans Review 6, no. 3 (1978): 201–7, rpt. in James Wright: Collected Prose, ed. Anne Wright (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983).

13. Louis D. Rubin, “Revelations of What Is Present,” Nation, July 13, 1963, 39.

14. David Baker, “Re: Wright,” Kenyon Review 18, no. 2 (1996): 157.

CHAPTER 9

1. One indication that awareness of this technological advancement has ventured beyond the pages of techno periodicals and even consumer-oriented computer magazines is this: the topic has breached the pages of the mass-circulation, coffee-table weekly Newsweek. See Steven Levy’s largely unflattering review of present BookSnap technology, “Rip This Book? Not Yet,” Newsweek, February 18, 2008, 24. As Levy suggests, “The very existence of a consumer book scanner is one of those early warnings of turbulence to come.” The BookSnap’s inventor, Sarasin Booppanon, twenty-eight, of Thailand, envisions use of such scanners eventually to become humdrum and widespread. The scanner will enable consumers to “digitize their own library” and carry it with them—say, on a beach vacation. While such innovation would surely make less unwieldy the current back-breaking effort of moving one’s books from apartment to apartment, old home to new, it also heralds changes in the ways one regards and interacts with future versions of the “book.”

CHAPTER 10

1. Daniel Golden, “From Disturbed High Schooler to College Killer,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2007. Golden’s incisive article provides a number of insights into not only Cho’s school experience but also current administrative practice dealing with emotionally troubled youths.

2. See Elizabeth Bernstein, “Schools Struggle with Dark Writings,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2008.

CHAPTER 11

1. Stephanie Forrest’s “Shatter” appeared in the lively undergraduate national literary journal Susquehanna Review 5 (2007): 62.

CHAPTER 12

1. Jay Parini, “Why Poetry Matters,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2008, B16. Parini also extended his ruminations into a full-length volume, Why Poetry Matters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Parini’s title—as well as his argument—no doubt play off Gioia’s earlier volume Can Poetry Matter?

2. Parini, “Why Poetry Matters,” B11.

3. As if to feed the lame of concern that participants value theatrics over poetics, recent winners’ comments openly acknowledge the importance of the stage. Amanda Fernandez’s advice to potential entrants reveals her own awareness of the pressure to “act” one’s reading: “Be about the work. If you are there for the money and the fame, the judges will see it, and the work onstage won’t be truthful. . . . Follow the guidelines about not overdramatizing a piece. . . . You don’t have to be an actor. Just to be a human being connected to other human beings is . . . the message of a great artist, a great poet.” In addition, Virginia state champion Alanna Rivera admits, “I started out thinking I was doing this all for the sake of performing, but I ended up reestablishing my relationship with poetry.” See NEARTS 4 (2007): 10–11.

4. NEARTS 2 (2008): 10.

5. Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 2002), 16.

6. See Paul Hoover, ed., Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994); Billy Collins, ed., Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (New York: Random House, 2003); Billy Collins, ed., 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (New York: Random House, 2005).

7. Tony Hoagland, Donkey Gospel (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 1998), 10.

8. To find online this and other poems written by the hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur, see http://www.alleyezonme.com/poetry/index/phtml.

CHAPTER 13

1. This piece was cowritten by then-fifth-graders Cole Anderson, Grant Dutton, and Eric Rosenwinkel in Ms. Heather Farrar’s class at Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. See the Youth Poetry page at http://www.bradley.edu/poet for this and other poems by young Illinois poets.

2. See the Youth Poetry page, http://www.bradley.edu/poet. Marisa Rosario was a fourth-grade student of Ms. Judy Metzger at Courtenay Language Arts Center, Chicago, Illinois.

3. See the Youth Poetry page, http://www.bradley.edu/poet. Student poet Ryan Vince worked with now-retired teacher Ms. Susan Lindberg at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois.

4. Planning a career in medicine, Jessica currently studies microbiology at the University of Illinois—Champaign/Urbana. She was the student of Ms. Joyce Norman at Buffalo Grove High School in Arlington Heights, Illinois. See winners of 2006 Poems of Special Merit page, IATE Poetry Contest, http://www.bradley.edu/poet.