Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics

In 1934, The Marxist And Modernist Poet Louis Zukofsky Was Labelled A 'detached Recorder Of Isolated Events' By His Communist Contemporaries, A Writer Who 'identifies Life With Capitalism, And So Assumes That The World Is Merely A Wasteland'. Crisis And The Us Avant-garde Charts The Trajectory Of This Tension Between Avant-garde Poetics And Vanguard Politics Since The Twin Legacies Of Modernism And The Great Depression. The Book's Radical Reappraisal Of Twentieth-century Experimental Poetry In The Us Reads Major Figures Including Charles Olson, Denise Levertov And Amiri Baraka Within A New Approach To Traditional Notions Of Historical Context, Exploring The Ways In Which Poetry Can Properly Be Said To Respond To Political Crises. Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Longing For Perfection: History And Utopia In Louis Zukofsky -- Atlantis Buried Outside: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth And War -- Slipping The Cog: Charles Olson And Cold War History -- Husky Phlegm And Spoken Lonesomeness: Poetry Against The Vietnam War -- You Can Be The Music Yourself: Amiri Baraka's Attitudes, 1974-80 -- Figures Of Inward: Language Poetry And The End Of The Avant-garde -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index Ben Hickman. Title From Publisher's Bibliographic System (viewed On 29 Sep 2017). English