Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy

In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by &quote;learning twice&quote; about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme.Morris's study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls &quote;a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the 'new historicist' concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.&quote; Essays address from multiple perspectives-prophetic, diasporic, ethical-the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics-the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space-to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.