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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.

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.

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.

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.