Not One of Them in Place

Norman Finkelstein is Professor of English at Xavier University. His previous works include two volumes of poetry, Restless Messengers and Track, and The Ritual of New Creation: Jewish Tradition and Contemporary Literature, also published by SUNY Press.

"From the first-generation Objectivists to their contemporary heirs, from the visionary grandeur of Allen Grossman to the ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg and Armand Schwerner, Jewish American poets have made a singularly rich and wide range of contributions to their art at the end of the millennium. Approaching these poets through an adroit combination of exemplary close reading, nuanced literary history, and the scholarship of Judaica, and writing from inside his subject as a poet himself, Norman Finkelstein lucidly negotiates central terms of identity, poetics, and spirit as he constructs a field-altering map of the achieved and the possible." — Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry"A mainstay for anyone researching the subject of American Jewish poetry. Finkelstein both crystallizes the issues and complicates the questions." — Janet E. Kaufman, coeditor of How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser

• Acknowledgments Preface IntroductionThe Traditions of Jewish American Poetry 1. Tradition and Modernity: Charles Reznikoff and the Test of (Jewish) Poetry 2. Jewish American Modernism and the Problem of IdentityWith Special Reference to the Work of Louis Zukofsky 3. Allen Grossman's Theophoric Poetics 4. Between Poland and Sumer: The Ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg and Armand Schwerner 5. Objectivist Continuities: Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, Hugh Seidman AfterwordSaying Kaddish: Holiness, Death, and the Jewish Difference in Poetry Works Cited Index