Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This review examines five books published in the field of poetics in 2021: Andrea Brady's Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint; Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics; Kevin Quashie's Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being; Rachel Zolf's No One's Witness: A Monstrous Poetics; and Timothy Yu's Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia. Together, these texts reveal important new directions in historical poetics, and a growing closeness between poetics and Black studies. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Historical Poetics; 3. Poetics and Black Studies; 4. Conclusion.

Abstract
This review examines three books published in the field of poetics in 2020: Candice Amich's Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas; Ren Ellis Neyra's The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics; and Anthony Reed's Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. I show that these three books, which discuss poetry in connection with other art forms, each call for a reordering of the senses through which we perceive and analyze poetry (and other texts). While Ellis Neyra advocates multisensorial listening and Reed calls for a mode of listening attentive to what remains unnamed within current perceptual and political schema, Amich shows the importance of paying attention to the embodied rhythms and tactility of poetry and performance texts. For all three authors, these alternatives to individualized, detached, and indeed deadened linguistic contemplation proffer strategies for remaking not only common sense, but the common itself. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetics; 3. Sensoria; 4. Politics.

Abstract
This chapter surveys scholarship in poetics published in 2019 that engages with concepts of 'world'. I begin from the contention that poetics scholarship is at a crossroads: while questions of race, nation, and politics were often cast aside in poetry criticism of the late twentieth century in favor of considerations of modernist lineages and philosophical approaches to language, new work in poetics increasingly prioritizes the discussion of racial capitalism, colonialism, and dispossession. The review is divided into four sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetry and the World, which considers three works that discuss poetry in relationship to world literature; 3. Worlds of Poetry, which examines three works that consider the so-called poetry world; and 4. Conclusion. The works discussed in this review include two scholarly monographs, a collection of experimental essays by a poet-critic and translator, an introduction to poetry by a poet and literary critic, a short polemic by a poet-critic and ethnic studies scholar, and a journal article exemplifying what I take to be the most significant new direction in poetics scholarship, namely the re-evaluation of apparently abstract, depersonalized formal and generic categories through the analytic of race.

In this essay I read the long poem Tokinish by the Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens. Stevens borrows passages of prose description from Roger Williams's 1643 Narragansett lexicon, A Key into the Language of America, as well as the earlier text's structure of facing columns of English and Narragansett words. Appropriations from Williams's lexicon introduce the figure of translation into the poem and also allow Stevens to create echoes between present and past. The poem concerns two types of contact: contact as historical phenomenon in the Americas and contact as contemporary sexuality. Stevens brings these two types of contact into relationship, so that the speaker's sexual and romantic experiences are echoed in the ethnographic commentary appropriated from Williams's text. I argue that Stevens uses these echoes to describe queer desire in colonial, proprietary terms, but that it is precisely this proprietary feature of desire, being claimed by the lover as "mine," that translates the poem's Native speaker from an unrecognizable status into a fully human subject. I also argue, with Stevens, that the way we unthinkingly speak about our desires using colonial metaphors of contact, conquest, exploration, and possession demonstrates the ongoing impact of the history of colonialism in North America.