BOOK NEWS: Contemporary ecopoetry connecting nature's creation processes and composition

Experimental American Poetry and the New Organic Form

By João Paulo Guimaraes

Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

ISBN: 9781350414891

https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/experimental-american-poetry-and-the-new-organic-form-9781350414891/

Arguing that the nineteenth century concept of “living form” (the idea that, like an organism, a poem develops itself from within, according to an internal logic) is not, as some critics have argued, anathema to avant-garde writing, this book contends that the concept survived and flourished in the work of a number of contemporary experimental poets.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Indebted to nineteenth century science, the notion of a “living form” endured throughout the twentieth century and the poetic vanguard's word games and collages mirrored the disjunctive frameworks that redefined how scientists made sense of life in the age of networks and non-linear systems.

Featuring readings of texts from poets including Ed Dorn, A.M.J. Crawford, P. Inman, Chris Vitiello, and Christian Bök, this book shows how a number of vanguardist poets explores the commonalities they detected between nature's processes of creation and their own methods of composition. In doing so, it highlights devices like punning, paragrammatic play, metamorphic figuration and memetic repetition, mechanisms these poets find at work in the cybernetic, genetic and digital systems they investigate in their poems.

"An excellent contribution to scholarship on poetry and the natural sciences, persuasively linking recent innovative poetics to changing ideas of living systems. Splendid readings of the poetry of Vitiello, Inman, Crawford, and Dorn, as well as an overview of new direction in biopoetry and a glance backward at Moore as a modernist precursor reshaping models of life via language. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in nonhuman poetry, ecopoetry, or Romanticism's evolving legacy" --Susan Venerborg, University of South Carolina

João Paulo Guimarães is an FCT full-time researcher at the Comparative Literature Institute of the University of Porto.