Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry

by Maria Damon

Overview

Damon foregrounds a number of modern American poets work and lives in order to argue that the American avant-garde is located in the experimental literary works of social "outsiders." Discussed is the work of Black/Jewish surrealist street poet Bob Kaufman, Boston-Brahmin Robert Lowell and three teenaged women writing from a South Boston housing project, pre-Stonewall gay poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, and Jewish lesbian-in-exile Gertrude Stein.

"An engaging and important book. Damon's sophisticated, theoretical approaches to American verse, coupled with her fresh, writerly style in The Dark End of The Street, put her on the forefront of American poetry's next generation of literary criticism." -American Literature

"A work of art as well as a work of criticism. Addresses important questions about art and social life, about the margins and the center, and about oppression and suppression." -George Lipsitz

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816619870
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	02/05/1993
Series:	American Culture , #7
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Maria Damon is assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota.