Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1
Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray, and Paul Jaussen

Section 1: Poetry before "American Poetry" 5

2 Worldmaking and Ambition in History Poems by Early American Women: The Examples of Anne Bradstreet and Sarah Wentworth Morton 7
Tamara Harvey

3 Before Poetry: Revival Verse and Sermonic Address in Eighteenth-Century America 18
Wendy Raphael Roberts

4 The Inca in the Nineteenth-Century US Poetic Imaginary 28
Adam Bradford

5 African American Spirituals and Their Legacy 39
Lauri Scheyer

Section 2: Poetry and The Transcendent 51

6 Death and Mourning in American Poetry from the Puritans to the Modernists 53
Wendy Martin and Camille Meder

7 Artificers of the World: Transcendentalism and Its Poetic Legacies 68
Bruce Ronda

8 "Do Not Be Content with an Imaginary God": Modern Poetry, Spirituality, and the Problem of Belief 82
Norman Finkelstein

9 Enduring Epiphany: The Politics of Revelation in Contemporary Poetry 95
Nikki Skillman

Section 3: Experimentalisms, Early and Late 107

10 The New in Hindsight: Modernist Poetry and Poetics in the Classroom 109
Bob Perelman

11 Philosophy, Poetry, and the Principle of Charity 120
Johanna Winant

12 "Making a Way": The Black Mountain Review and Mid-Twentieth Century Communities 133
Joshua Hoeynck

13 Causes, Movements, Theory: Between Language Poetry and New Narrative 146
Kaplan Harris

14 Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora 157
Tyrone Williams

15 Wearables and Modernist Poetry’s Prototypes 166
Margaret Konkol

16 Reading the Unreadable in Modern American Poetry 184
Steven Gould Axelrod

Section 4: Poetry and Identity 199

17 The Black Quatrain and America's Racialized Poetics 201
Ben Glaser

18 Queer Poetics: Voices of the Subaltern in American Poetry 216
Daniel Enrique Pérez

19 Trans Poetry and Poetics 230
Trace Peterson

Section 5: Transnational Poetry 243

20 Ezhi-aawechigaazhangwaa: Indigenous American Comparisons 245
Margaret Noodin

21 Trans-Pacific Poetics: Eastern Influences on American Poetry in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries 257
Susan M Schultz

22 "Audience Distant Relative": Fugitive Transnationality and Poetic Form 269
Mayumo Inoue

23 "A Little Room in a House Set Aflame": American Poetry and Globalization in the Twenty-First Century 283
Walt Hunter

24 Rethinking Transnationalism in American Poetry 294
Sarah Dowling

Section 6: Poetry and the Arts 303

25 "Sketch of a Man on a Platform": The Modern Feminist Portrait Poem 305
Andrew Epstein

26 Poetry in the Public Square 320
Stephen Cushman

27 Life as New Media: Bioart, Biopoetry, and the Xenotext Experiment 332
Avery Slater

28 "Compared to What": Past and Future Paths in Rap Poetics 344
Andrew DuBois

29 American Poetry Goes to the Movies 354
Susan Cooke Weeber

Section 7: Nature and After 367

30 Reading God's Book of the World 369
Robert Daly

31 "Sharing with the Ants": American Ecopoetry from Lydia Sigourney to Ross Gay 379
Christoph Irmscher

32 Post-Natural Modernism 390
Mark C Long

33 Rethinking the Anthropocene: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Epochal Imaginings 402
Margaret Ronda

Section 8: Poetry of Engagement 415

34 American War Poetry 417
Cary Nelson

35 Lynch Fragments 431
Aldon Lynn Nielsen

36 Indigenous Docupoetry: "'Last Indian War' in Verse" 442
Kimberly Blaeser

37 "It's Been a While": Latinx Poetries and the Empire of Borders 455
Michael Dowdy

38 The Politics of American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century 469
David Lau

Index 484

About the Author

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.