University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics – serie

Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century.At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form.Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound, poetry, and music, and celebrate the power of community, marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately, Poetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.

Renowned poets and scholars address the question of how poetry sounds and signifies in different contexts.Soundings in Context brings together the second and third University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics by the renowned literary and textual scholar Jerome McGann, and the innovative, prolific Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist Lisa Robertson, respectively. The volume's first half presents McGann's "Reading (I Mean Articulating) Poetry, a Multi-Player Game," with responses by Nikolaus Wasmoen and Steve McCaffery; the second presents Lisa Robertson's "Dous Chantar: Refrain for a Nightingale," with responses by Shannon Maguire and Liz Howard. Initially given at different moments and since revised, the pieces considered in the lectures range widely, moving from the Romantics and medieval troubadour poetry to T. S. Eliot, Jackson Mac Low, Jacques Rouboud, and far beyond. Still, they are collectively concerned with questions of voice, recitation, and reception in different contexts; with sonic patterning and its modes of significance; and with foregrounding an embodied experience of oral and written language as opposed to its interpretation. McGann, Robertson, and their interlocutors all propose affective, pragmatic approaches to poetry that allow it to surface as materially formative, alive and lived. Reading their contributions together offers an opportunity to see how these values present themselves in differing cultures of poetic scenography across space and time.

Renowned poets and scholars address the question of how poetry sounds and signifies in different contexts.Soundings in Context brings together the second and third University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics by the renowned literary and textual scholar Jerome McGann, and the innovative, prolific Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist Lisa Robertson, respectively. The volume's first half presents McGann's "Reading (I Mean Articulating) Poetry, a Multi-Player Game," with responses by Nikolaus Wasmoen and Steve McCaffery; the second presents Lisa Robertson's "Dous Chantar: Refrain for a Nightingale," with responses by Shannon Maguire and Liz Howard. Initially given at different moments and since revised, the pieces considered in the lectures range widely, moving from the Romantics and medieval troubadour poetry to T. S. Eliot, Jackson Mac Low, Jacques Rouboud, and far beyond. Still, they are collectively concerned with questions of voice, recitation, and reception in different contexts; with sonic patterning and its modes of significance; and with foregrounding an embodied experience of oral and written language as opposed to its interpretation. McGann, Robertson, and their interlocutors all propose affective, pragmatic approaches to poetry that allow it to surface as materially formative, alive and lived. Reading their contributions together offers an opportunity to see how these values present themselves in differing cultures of poetic scenography across space and time.

Incisive observations on popular music, poetry, and culture, and on the ways that gender, race, class, and contemporary politics shape artistic production.Poet and critic Tyrone Williams (1954–2024) was a prolific reviewer of poetry, poetics, and culture, publishing nearly 150 reviews between 1975 and 2023. Starting with his omnibus reviews of music in a college student newspaper, this collection presents a selection of Williams's reviews that address prominent topics in American culture and in literary criticism, including the reception of experimental and innovative poetry; the history of African American writing and its reception; and the ways that poets, other writers, and musicians negotiate gender, class, and race. Williams understood art as deeply connected to everyday living. From readings attentive to the nuances of a single line of verse to broad evaluations of poetry collections and music in relation to historical and contemporary movements or events, Williams's reviews are instructive for students of American literature and culture and for anyone interested in the profound work poetry performs in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Written in engaging and often witty and impassioned prose, these reviews will both delight and provoke their readers.

Incisive observations on popular music, poetry, and culture, and on the ways that gender, race, class, and contemporary politics shape artistic production.Poet and critic Tyrone Williams (1954–2024) was a prolific reviewer of poetry, poetics, and culture, publishing nearly 150 reviews between 1975 and 2023. Starting with his omnibus reviews of music in a college student newspaper, this collection presents a selection of Williams's reviews that address prominent topics in American culture and in literary criticism, including the reception of experimental and innovative poetry; the history of African American writing and its reception; and the ways that poets, other writers, and musicians negotiate gender, class, and race. Williams understood art as deeply connected to everyday living. From readings attentive to the nuances of a single line of verse to broad evaluations of poetry collections and music in relation to historical and contemporary movements or events, Williams's reviews are instructive for students of American literature and culture and for anyone interested in the profound work poetry performs in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Written in engaging and often witty and impassioned prose, these reviews will both delight and provoke their readers.