BOOK NEWS: Post-1960 poetry speaks directly to eroding notions of public life

Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public

By Keegan Cook Finberg

Columbia UP, 2025

ISBN: 9780231219228

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/

In the second half of the twentieth century, poetry leapt out of books and became an interdisciplinary public form. Poetry entered bureaucratic systems of organization like index card catalogues; it pushed the boundaries of privately owned public parks. Keegan Cook Finberg argues that poetry became an increasingly capacious force during this period because it could speak directly to the degradation of the social-democratic notion of the public.

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.

Poetry in General explores how poets expanded their practice into the realms of politics, work, and everyday life from 1960 to the present, from the apex of the welfare state to an era of privatization and austerity. It considers a compelling array of figures—including Yoko Ono, George Brecht, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Eleanor Antin, Adrian Piper, and NourbeSe Philip—whose works draw on conceptual techniques to transform official documents and spaces. Finberg shows how these public texts expose the mechanisms of the neoliberal consensus about work and leisure, the state’s facilitation of capitalism, and enduring racial and gender inequities. She also provides politically charged ways to interpret and critique racial capitalism, antiabortion legislation, and mass debt. A new literary and institutional history of postwar poetics, this book shows how poetic experiments address the privatization of collective life and rethink the category of the public.

"Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: poetry—when at its weirdest!—is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital." —Sarah Dowling, author of Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form

"Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the genre of poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies." —Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

Keegan Cook Finberg is an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Departments of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Language, Literacy, and Culture at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

SPECIAL FEATURE: The Garden and the Machine, a Closer Look at JML 49.1

 

In a post for the Indiana University Press blog, author Robert Fillman discusses William Carlos Williams's unique approach to the pastoral. Read it HERE.

His JML 49.1 essay, "'[A] certain amusing comfort that makes you happy': William Carlos Williams’s Ambivalent Pastoral Aesthetic," is available to read FREE for a limited time.

BOOK NEWS: The influence of architecture on 20th century American poetry

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms

BY JO GILL

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780198868347

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modern-american-poetry-and-the-architectural-imagination-9780198868347?cc=us&lang=en

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both.

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.

The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as "modern" (and often "international style") architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

• Expands our understanding of poetry and place; poetry and the city; poetry and the arts
• Covers a range of familiar poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Frank O'Hara and Wallace Stevens and others who are less widely studied
• Brings architectural and poetic theory, practice, and debates together in unexpected and productive ways
• Opens up the field of twentieth-century American poetry to new interpretations
• Features unpublished archival research

Jo Gill is vice-principal and head of the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She specializes in mid-century American literature and culture and has published widely on writers including Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

BOOK NEWS: New critical edition of Larsen's Passing

Passing by Nella Larsen

EDITED BY RAFAEL WALKER

Broadview Press, 2023

ISBN: 9781554815159

https://broadviewpress.com/product/passing/#tab-description

Written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance (the first sustained artistic movement by African Americans) and of Jim Crow (one of this cultural group’s greatest obstacles), Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is easily among the most penetrating, skillfully composed explorations of race and gender in the twentieth century. It focuses on two estranged friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who, after years apart, are joltingly thrown back together, their lives transformed radically through one of the most scandalous and intriguing social phenomena of Larsen’s time—racial passing. Today, Larsen is ranked as one of the leading novelists of her generation; this novel, her masterpiece, demonstrates why.

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.

Appendices include material on the novel’s composition and reception, as well as legal documents relating to mixed-race individuals and a selection of recent critical work on the novel’s afterlife and the 2021 film adaptation.

“This new edition of Nella Larsen’s now-classic novel, with Rafael Walker’s excellent introduction and chronology, along with relevant reviews and contemporary documents about passing, is the best we have, perfect for classroom use and the general reader alike.” — George Hutchinson, Cornell University, author of In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line

“Rafael Walker’s introduction, along with the edition’s appendices, offers important historical contextualization for Larsen’s life and novels. These materials enhance, rather than cover over, the proliferation of meanings and contradictions that emerge not only from reviews and criticism but also from biographies and accounts that detail the archival fragments of who Larsen was. Nella Larsen was a formidable novelist and social figure of the Harlem Renaissance, but Walker creates a pathway for students and educators alike to confidently approach the magnitude of her being.” — Haylee Harrell, University of Houston

Rafael Walker is assistant professor of English, Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the editor of The Awakening and Selected Stories (Warbler Classics).

Book News: Literary modernism and the environment

Eco-Modernism: Ecology, Environment and Nature in Literary Modernism

EDITED BY JEREMY DIAPER

Clemson UP, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-949-97985-5

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54594/

This volume of critical essays provides the first major guide to ecology, environment and nature in literary modernism. It explores the environmental turn and green consciousness in modernist criticism and broadens the boundaries and scope of current ecocritical enquiry. In drawing together contributions from leading and emerging scholars from across the UK and America, Eco-Modernism offers a diverse range of environmental and ecological interpretations of modernist texts and illustrates that ecocriticism can offer fresh and provocative ways of understanding literary modernism. In the rapidly burgeoning field of environmental studies, it will serve as a vital touchstone for scholars and students alike to explore the major areas and crucial themes in ecocritical modernism.

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.

CONTENTS

“Ecocriticism and Modernism”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“Modernism and the Rural Novel”

Dominic Head

“Edith Sitwell: Modernist Experimentation and the Revitalisation of Nature Poetry”

Elizabeth Black

 

“‘No poetic phantasy / but a biological reality’: The Ecological Visions of H.D.’s Trilogy”

Elizabeth O’Connor

 

“‘Has it begun to sprout?’: The Ecological Life of Modernist Corpses”

Julia E. Daniel

“Marianne Moore’s Ecopoetics”

Sharla Hutchinson

 

“Modernism’s Insect Sense”

Rachel Murray

“Eco-consciousness and Eco-poetics in Modernist Writing”

Fiona Becket

 

“‘The Parched Eviscerate Soil’: Environmental Thought in Eliot’s Poetry and Prose”

Jeremy Diaper

 

“The Law of Hoes and Rakes”: Wallace Stevens’s Agrarian Poetics

Jasmine McCrory

 

“‘Grain by grain’: Beckett’s Agripessimism and the Anthropocene”

Caitlin McIntyre

 

“‘There All The Time Without You’: Modernism and the Anthropocene”

Peter Adkins

Jeremy Diaper has published numerous articles and chapters on T.S. Eliot's agrarianism and the history of the organic husbandry movement. His essays have appeared in Agricultural History, Agricultural History Review, the Journal of the T.S. Eliot Society UK, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Literature & History. He recently edited a special issue of Modernist Cultures on "Modernism and the Environment." 

Book News: The lecture tour as a mover of modernism

Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour

BY ROBERT VOLPICELLI

Oxford University Press, 2021

ISBN: 9780192893383

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transatlantic-modernism-and-the-us-lecture-tour-9780192893383?cc=gb&lang=en#

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Many Americans' first encounter with international modernism came, not on the page, but in person—through the widespread phenomenon of the US lecture tour. Attending to these encounters, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour reroutes our understanding of modernism away from the magazines and other mass media that have so far characterized its circulation and toward the unique form of cultural distribution that coalesced around the tour.

Offering many new and compelling archival insights, this volume works across an admirably broad cultural landscape to reveal the US lecture tour as a primary mover of modernism. The study highlights the role this circuit played in the formation of transatlantic modernism by following a diverse group of authors—Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Gertrude Stein, and W. H. Auden—on their whistle-stop tours across America, illuminating in the process how this extremely physical form of circulation transformed authors into object-like commodities to be sold in a variety of performance venues. Moreover, it shows how these writers responded to such wide-ranging distribution by stretching their own ideas about modernist authorship. In doing so, Transatlantic Modernism and the US Lecture Tour adds to a critical tradition of exposing those popular dimensions of modernism that far exceeded its standard coterie definition while also uncovering something else: how the circuit's particular diversity of social contexts forced modernists to take on a new authorial flexibility that would allow them to make in-roads with practically any audience—elite, popular, and everything in between. 

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.

Robert Volpicelli is an assistant professor of English at Randolph-Macon College where he specializes in transnational modernisms and modern poetry. His essays on modernist literature and culture have appeared in such journals as Textual Practice, NOVEL, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among others. He also co-edited a recent issue of College Literature on the topic of "Poetry Networks."