Matthew Hart
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195390339
- eISBN:
- 9780199776191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195390339.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the ...
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This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.Less
This chapter considers the aesthetic, literary‐historical, and political meanings of the term “Afro‐modernism.” It first introduces Melvin B. Tolson's modernist epic, Harlem Gallery (1965), via the innovative blues quatrains of Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995), explaining how both poems exemplify an embattled “Afro‐modernist” tradition. The chapter then analyzes Tolson's 1953 Libretto for the Republic of Liberia via the documentary evidence of his appointment as Liberian Poet Laureate. As a late modernist epic about an oligarchic state led by freed slaves, Libretto witnesses a crucial overlapping of the narratives of diasporic nationalism and African “local imperialism.” The chapter concludes by explaining how the poetic form of Libretto registers the schism between the modernizing statecraft of the Liberian elite and the transgressive “countermodernity” of Pan‐Africanism.
Craig Dworkin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287987
- eISBN:
- 9780823290321
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Chapter 6 considers Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995), based in part on Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and the American Heritage Dictionary, in the ...
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Chapter 6 considers Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995), based in part on Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and the American Heritage Dictionary, in the context of the OuLiPo and Mullen’s other poetic engagements with the dictionary. Through a careful attention to her specific dictionary borrowings and the cryptic play of anagram, palindrome, and paragram in Muse & Drudge, the chapter explicates the poem’s argument for and enactment of miscegenation. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre’s theory of the hypogram and Jacques Derrida’s theory of the signature, the chapter uncovers the motivating poetic force of the proper name in Mullen’s poem. Together, these readings complicate the received critical accounts of Mullen’s sources and the very ways in which we imagine the relation between source-text and poem.Less
Chapter 6 considers Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995), based in part on Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and the American Heritage Dictionary, in the context of the OuLiPo and Mullen’s other poetic engagements with the dictionary. Through a careful attention to her specific dictionary borrowings and the cryptic play of anagram, palindrome, and paragram in Muse & Drudge, the chapter explicates the poem’s argument for and enactment of miscegenation. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre’s theory of the hypogram and Jacques Derrida’s theory of the signature, the chapter uncovers the motivating poetic force of the proper name in Mullen’s poem. Together, these readings complicate the received critical accounts of Mullen’s sources and the very ways in which we imagine the relation between source-text and poem.
Samantha Pinto
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814759486
- eISBN:
- 9780814789360
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814759486.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter focuses on Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge (1995) and M. NourbeSe Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). Both poets redeploy race, gender, and diaspora ...
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This chapter focuses on Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge (1995) and M. NourbeSe Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). Both poets redeploy race, gender, and diaspora through the epic collection and accumulation of diasporic knowledge, displayed as book-length poems that do not follow a linear, chronological, or even conceptual narrative. These nonnarrative epics are testaments to the expansive potential of gender, race, and diaspora as critical categories of analysis—ones that can do far more than mimetically represent a reductive social reality for black women as subjects and for black women's writing. In general, they accumulate the “things” of diaspora and feminist knowledge that are impossible to fully reconcile within a singular order.Less
This chapter focuses on Harryette Mullen's Muse and Drudge (1995) and M. NourbeSe Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989). Both poets redeploy race, gender, and diaspora through the epic collection and accumulation of diasporic knowledge, displayed as book-length poems that do not follow a linear, chronological, or even conceptual narrative. These nonnarrative epics are testaments to the expansive potential of gender, race, and diaspora as critical categories of analysis—ones that can do far more than mimetically represent a reductive social reality for black women as subjects and for black women's writing. In general, they accumulate the “things” of diaspora and feminist knowledge that are impossible to fully reconcile within a singular order.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in ...
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This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in an age of distraction. Poetry-as-project is an attempt to recover the ordinary; at the same time, these works extend and at times critique the experimental realism and everyday-life poetics of the postwar years. This chapter examines why such projects have proliferated, why they are attractive to those fascinated by the quotidian, and why quite similar projects flourish in vernacular culture. The chapter discusses the controversial “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith; also, recent projects by Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen, and other poets who exploit the possibilities of the everyday-life project for social and political criticism.Less
This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in an age of distraction. Poetry-as-project is an attempt to recover the ordinary; at the same time, these works extend and at times critique the experimental realism and everyday-life poetics of the postwar years. This chapter examines why such projects have proliferated, why they are attractive to those fascinated by the quotidian, and why quite similar projects flourish in vernacular culture. The chapter discusses the controversial “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith; also, recent projects by Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen, and other poets who exploit the possibilities of the everyday-life project for social and political criticism.
Craig Dworkin
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780823287987
- eISBN:
- 9780823290321
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this ...
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Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.Less
Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.