New Books in Poetry

Published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2016, Nick Admussen’s exciting new book Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry explores the development of twentieth-century prose poetry within the unique political and cultural context of Communist China. In this ambitious study, Admussen attempts not only to define prose poetry but also to trace its ever-shifting role in modern Chinese society. In doing so, he produces a study which comprehensively analyses the dynamic manner in which Chinese prose poetry engages with a range of diverse cultural discourses, including science, popular culture and political rhetoric. Throughout the book, Admussen foregrounds the protean nature of the genre by exploring how prose poetry has been used by poets working both within and outside of official Communist Party strictures. Moreover, he identifies Chinese prose poetry as a unique tradition, distinct from Euro-American manifestations of the genre. In addition to these insightful analyses, Recite and Refuse also contains a number of original translations of important Chinese prose poems, including Ouyang Jianghe’s stunning “Hanging Coffin”. Miranda Corcoran received her PhD in 2016 from University College Cork, where she currently teaches American literature. Her research interests include Cold-War literature, genre fiction, literature and psychology, and popular culture. She has published articles on paranoia, literature, and Cold-War popular culture in The Boolean, Americana, and Transverse, and contributed a book chapter on transnational   paranoia to the recently published book Atlantic Crossings: Archaeology, Literature, and Spatial Culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Leni Shilton takes us back to Central Australia of the 1930s to tell the story of Bertha Strehlow, one of very few white women living among Aboriginal people at the time. In her new collection, The Sky Runs Right Through Us: Poems from the Edge of the Indian Ocean (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Renee Pettitt-Schipp recounts her time working with asylum seeker and islander students on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an experience that can never be forgotten, even after her return to the Australian mainland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Christopher Grobe’s The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV (New York University Press, 2017) traces the ways the performance of confession permeated and transformed a wide range of media in postwar America. Grobe explores how confession—from the confessional poets of the 1960s to contemporary reality TV—is both constructed and authentic, artful even in its ostensible artlessness, and always on the move between and across media. The work’s archive is expansive, placing in conversation poetry, performance art, comedy, legal confession, film, and reality TV, genres whose conventions transform and whose boundaries blur when confronted with artists impulses to confess, to stage what Grobe calls “breakthroughs” out of both generic and sociocultural containment. Laying bare the ways confessional performances are stylized and mediated to elicit “a satiety of experience which can be taken as reality” while taking seriously artists’ attempts to reveal and perform an authentic self, Grobe demonstrates how confession energizes new ways of being, forms of collectivity, and political mobilization. Christopher Grobe is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College where he teaches a wide range of courses on drama, poetics, performance, and performance culture and theory. Petal Samuel is a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is completing Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Decolonial Soundscapes, a book project that traces the evolution of noise legislation and public discourses decrying noise as technologies of racial control in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, while highlighting the ways Afro-Caribbean women writers have reclaimed noise against the grain of colonial injunctions to remain quiet as a condition of civic inclusion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

The list is the origin of culture. At least, that’s according to Umberto Eco, whose words open Liam Cole Young‘s new book, List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to Buzzfeed (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Young follows shifting functions of the list through history, revealing a form that “mediates boundaries between administration and art, knowledge and poetics, sense and nonsense” (10). Where systems of order surround and enframe human society, the list is there. Lists shape and shift the social world as new uses for the list are discovered, adapted, modified, and abandoned. As a searching exploration of the way that our intellectual tools “simultaneously conceal and reveal, enforce and subvert social systems,” List Cultures proves to be a rewardingly vigorous and sweeping intellectual history. List Cultures restores formal analysis to a critical discourse divided between analyses of institutions, contexts, and particular historical uses of texts. Beginning with a rereading of the earliest writing (inventories and transaction records), Young builds his case for the primacy of the list by explicating the ways lists negotiate tensions and paradoxes that have persisted across time. Young extends the work of Foucault, Latour, Borges, Benjamin, Ong, Innis and many others, demonstrating that listing is a cultural technique that constitutes concepts and categories on which technical systems and social institutions are built. List Cultures explores the pop charts and the innerworkings of Buzzfeed, giving readers a chance to see our world anew through the lens of media materialism. Lists draw borders, create hierarchies, and provide points of reference in the world of tastemaking and fandom, and speed the spread of viral media through databases and traced signatures. As an extension and counterpoint, the exploration of lists in the administrative states of Renaissance Italy and Nazi Germany provide careful reflections on how lists have been used to establish facts, determine personhood, police subjects, and build structures of knowledge that expose bodies to violence. Making the case for modernity as primarily logistical in orientation, Young closes List Cultures with a heartening meditation on ways the list has been used to remake old orders, explode boundaries, and extend horizons of possibility. Following Wolfgang Ernst’s argument that real-time data collection channels ancient forms of organizing time, List Cultures‘ final chapter plays with a binary of narrative and non-narrative modes of writing and thinking, asking us to consider how lists can displace the logic of logistical modernity and preserve a heterotopian space for thinking “other.” Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor who researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work and request an editorial consultation at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Often, poetry and punk rock are seen as distinct activities that occur in different locations with separate audiences. Many would also ascribe to them varying levels of cultural and political capital. Daniel Kane, the author of Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2017) challenges these notions and explores the interaction between the New York Schools of Poetry and early punk music. In this podcast, we discuss how poets, such as Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, and Anne Waldman, affected the writing and careers of Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. We also explore how punk rock, in turn, shaped the work of Elaine Myles and Dennis Cooper. Kane’s work helps re-map the relationships between poetry and punk rock. Daniel Kane is Professor in English and American literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His books include We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009) and All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003). The host for this episode is Richard Schur, Professor of English at Drury University. He is the author of Parodies of Ownership: Hip Hop Aesthetics and Intellectual Property Law and the co-editor of African American Culture and Legal Discourse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

There is a long tradition of the study of Sikhism in Western academia. However, historiographical accounts still lack a clear vision of the early formation of the tradition. Rahuldeep Singh Gill, Associate Professor of Religion at California Lutheran University, addresses this lacuna in Drinking From Love’s Cup: Surrender and Sacrifice in the Vars of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (Oxford University Press, 2017). Through a detailed analysis and lucid translation of the literary tradition of Bhai Gurdas Bhalla (d. 1636), the tradition’s most important poet, Gill challenges and critiques current modes of Sikh scholarship. Bhai Gurdas’ poetry shaped early Sikh theology and practice, providing an emotive lexicon for communal identity. Gill highlights some of the most important of Gurdas’vars in articulating key themes in his writing, including spiritual death, martyrdom, sacrifice, and divine love. These tropes often emerge in the context of relationships with Sikh leadership, such as the martyr Guru Arjan and his son Guru Hargobind. In our conversation we discussed the state of Sikh Studies, the founding tradition around Guru Nanak and the transformations that shaped Gurdas’ life, the Sikh canon and its broader textual landscape, Islamicate influences, the manuscript tradition, practices of feet veneration, scholarly orientalism, translational practices, and interfaith engagement. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kjpetersen@unomaha.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Jackson Poetry Prize Winner Speaks Patricia Spears Jones has been writing poetry since she was twenty and then she was “good.” Today, the prolific poet is the winner of one of the most prestigious poetry prizes–the Jackson Poetry Prize. She has numerous published collections, and A Lucent Fire, New & Collected Poems (White Pines Press, 2015), is a report on the current state of everything. “Poetry is hard work,” Jones says. Yet the job of the poet is to say something that will matter, that can improve the daily and momentary experience of living and speak back to American capitalist business when it comes to gentrification, stolen history, and racist hatred. Rachel Levistsky of Bomb Magazine writes “Jones’s poems insist on making vibrantly possible American, black, female, queer, poor, jazz, assimilated, heroic, unemployed, crazy, displaced lives that, considering the constant assault on them, can appear merely endangered and precarious.” Additionally, A Lucent Fire croons with blues and gospel, on Cuban and opera. “Her poems are full of harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, songs, and a meticulous aesthetic,” says Linda Rodriguez of La Bloga. When asked “what is Poetry?” Spear Jones suggest checking out George Quasha’s wonderful video. Spears Jones is the author of Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010), Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha Press, 2006), and The Weather That Kills (Coffee House Press, 1995). She has been the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Goethe Institute, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A resident of New York City since the 1970s, Spears Jones currently serves as a fellow of the Black Earth Institute and has long been involved with the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. She has taught at Cave Canem, Parsons School of Design, The New School, Sarah Lawrence College, and Naropa University, and she currently teaches at CUNY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

Ever since their composition in the 13th century the poems of the Persian writer Rumi have enthralled millions of readers around the world. In Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love (Harper, 2017), Brad Gooch describes the life of their author and the path that took him from scholarship to poetry. The son of a scholar and cleric, Rumi traveled extensively as a child and enjoyed a wide-ranging education that prepared him for a life as a teacher and jurist. His meeting with the traveling mystic Shams of Tabriz transformed Rumi’s life, as he soon abandoned his education and responsibilities in favor of immersion into a life of aestheticism. As Gooch explains, it was this relationship which sparked Rumi’s development into the poet he became, as his deep and passionate relationship with Shams created a wellspring of emotions that were subsequently embodied in some of the most enduring verses ever written. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, but it captures an idea that goes back to Aristotle. And this is the idea: a poem–at least a good poem–is a finally crafted work of art, and the way its crafted, the way its words are structured, is intrinsic to its meaning. You can’t paraphrase a poem. You can’t say it really means or basically means this or that, like you can with other sorts of communication, without distorting it, because how a poem uses language is as important as what its language conveys. In a poem, form and content are inseparable. This view of poetry is the reason those of us who love poetry end up running to our bookshelves in the middle of a dinner party and pulling down our favorite poems and reading them aloud to our unsuspecting guests, because once you mention a poem you love, it doesn’t only feel inaccurate to say its about this or that, it feels like a kind of heresy, like your clumsy paraphrase is damaging it. And that’s exactly how I feel about the poet I’m interviewing today. Leia Penina Wilson’s new book is called i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) (Red Hen Press, 2014). And if your ear or your mind popped a little when I said that title, that’s because even her titles are poetry. Here’s another title: “she eats his heart she has two hearts she doesn’t know which one to use she begins to call the second heart ‘little baby’ or ‘blitzkrieg.'” As you can hear, the sheer verbal energy, the grammatical verve and irreverent jolts, of her language are dazzling, surprising, unparaphrasable, and if you happened to find yourself at my house for dinner, you’d be hearing me read it over more than one glass of wine. Fortunately, we have her here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In Literature, Exile, Alterity: The New York Group of Ukrainian Poets (Academic Studies Press, 2014), Maria G. Rewakowicz explores a unique collaboration of the poets residing in the United States and writing poetry in the Ukrainian language. This research offers a systematized and chronologically organized vision of the group, which, in spite of the geographical limitations implied by its name, appeared to invite artists from a variety of geographical loci and aesthetic backgrounds. Literature, Exile, Alterity focuses on seven founding members of the New York Group: Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Bohdan Rubchak, Zhenia Vasylkivska, Patricia Kylyna, Emma Andijevska, and Vira Vovk. Acquiring its shape during the 1950s and 1960s and actively participating in the cultural, social, and political dialogues during the subsequent decades, the New York Group expanded and eventually went rather far beyond its original core. Over the decades, the group also dispersed geographically; however, as Rewakowicz argues, it retained its aesthetic and philosophical essentials revolving around the notions of home/homeland, exile, the collaboration of the center and the periphery, political and social impetus of poetry, poetic forms and meanings they generate, etc. Rewakowicz contextualizes the New York Group from the viewpoint of the poets relationship with their native language(s): writing in Ukrainian was a conscious choice for the majority of the groups members. Language thus is presented not only in terms of creative enterprise but also in terms of political, social, and cultural negotiations. As the research attests, the members of the group situate themselves in opposition to Soviet Ukraine, to the mainstream culture (both in Ukraine and the US), and to the literary conventions supported by the literary establishments. From this perspective, the groups focus on linguistic choices and preferences marks a gesture toward re-inventing selves and poetry, re-negotiating selves and others, and disrupting the mainstream. In addition to the theoretical framework for the discussion of the New York Group phenomenon, Literature, Exile, Alterity also offers an exquisite analysis of the poetry. Rewakowicz illuminates the multilayeredness the poets embrace and presents the groups diverse poetic experimentations as the engagement with altered selves. Existential undertones that the poetic works lavishly comprise are discussed in the context of Western European modernism. In spite of the strong modernist influences that the works of the New York Group demonstrate, the researcher also initiates a discussion of the group in terms of the overlapping of modernism and postmodernism. Literature, Exile, Alterity contributes to the discussion of modern Ukrainian literature from the perspective of intercultural and interliterary connections and influences. Rewakowicz also engages in the conversation regarding diverse intricacies of literary developments. Maria G. Rewakowicz, poet, translator, literary scholar, teaches Ukrainian literature at Rutgers. She received a PhD in Slavic Studies from the University of Toronto. Rewakowiczs research interests include: Ukrainian language, culture, and literature; language politics, literature and identity construction; feminism and nationalism in post-Soviet space; women and gender issues in literature; Ukrainian migr poetry; exile and literature; postcolonial studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry