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US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012

Part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Book Series

DOI: 10.1057/9781137466273

ISBN: 978-1-349-50078-9

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US - Springer Journals

Nov 2, 2015

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Chapter 1Introduction

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 1 –31

[In this book, I consider poems published in the United States since 1979 that directly engage with national and global politics. I show that over the past 35 years some of America’s leading poets became discerning witnesses of their country’s transformation from self-appointed defender of...
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Chapter 2“Beyond My Outrage or My Admiration”: Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 33 –51

[In 1964, Robert Lowell wrote a poem about the American empire at its peak. Titled “July in Washington,” the poem describes the US capital as the center of the world, a “wheel” whose spokes “touch the sore spots of the earth.” The United States has replaced the old colonial European powers, even...
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Chapter 3“Nothing Else Left to Read”: Adrienne Rich’s “An Atlas of the Difficult World”

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 53 –72

[In her interview with Bill Moyers, Adrienne Rich states that the title poem of her 1991 collection An Atlas of the Difficult World “reflects on the condition of my country, which I wrote very consciously as a citizen poet, looking at the geography, the history, the people of my country.” 1 The...
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Chapter 4“Who the Biggest Terrorist”: Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America”

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 73 –92

[In the previous chapter, I discussed the argument—hardly specific to the 1980s yet certainly emblematic of the period’s culture wars—that poetry occupies a marginal place in American society. I also noted that such complaints usually ignore the extraordinary wealth of poetic practices in the...
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Chapter 5Ether: Juliana Spahr, Ben Lerner, Lisa Jarnot

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 93 –113

[It is time to take a closer look at poets who inherited the civic tradition in post-World War II American poetry. What did the generation of poets born in the 1960s and 1970s learn from Pinsky, Rich, Baraka, and their peers? How do today’s younger poets envision their role as public...
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Chapter 6Dreams of a Common Language: Mark Nowak, Anne Boyer, Rodrigo Toscano

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 115 –137

[Several critics have sought to identify the basic tenor of contemporary poets’ engagements with political issues in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Christopher Nealon detects a “slightly camp attitude that creeps into poetic attempts to measure the approach to end-times when the...
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Chapter 7Coda

Gwiazda, Piotr K.

Pages: 139 –143

[Near the end of Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration ceremony on January 21, 2013, Cuban American poet Richard Blanco stepped to the podium at the US Capitol to recite “One Today,” a poem he had composed especially for the occasion. In the course of the next six minutes, he delivered...

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