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Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present
248![Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.8.5)
Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present
248Hardcover
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Overview
In Voicing American Poetry, Lesley Wheeler explores how and why American poetry of the twentieth century and beyond keeps returning to voice as an idea, even though the term frustrates definition. Poetic voice is a crucial term precisely because of its ambiguity: both poets and critics invoke voice to argue for poetry's power. Because voice can also be a medium for poetry, this book offers a uniquely full history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry performance in the United States. Beginning with Edna St. Vincent Millay's captivating performances of presence on the page, the stage, and the radio, Wheeler investigates the rise of the academic poetry reading circuit and its various lively alternatives, from the Beats to the poetry-slam scene.
Along the way Wheeler examines how Langston Hughes transformed oral culture into visual poetry, and how collaborative poetry challenges the very idea of self-expression. Voicing American Poetry also features an annotated list of important poetry readings in the United States since 1950. Wheeler finds that American poetry itself remains a vital, coherent enterprise and that this commitment is constantly renewed in lecture halls, auditoriums, coffee shops, bars, and classrooms.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801446689 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 04/29/2008 |
Pages: | 248 |
Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Voice Identification 1
Sounding Poetic Voice 16
Edna St. Vincent Millay's Performance of Presence 39
Voice and the Visual Poetry of Langston Hughes 60
Lyric Collaborations: James Merrill, David Jackson, Denise Duhamel, and Maureen Seaton 89
Voice Activated: Contemporary Academic Poetry Readings and the National Poetry Slam 127
Afterword: Resonances 164
A Selected List of Public Poetry Soundings since 1950 169
Five Poets from Four Corners: An Interview, August 2005 175
Notes 187
Works Cited 205
Index 223
What People are Saying About This
Lesley Wheeler's close listening to the sounds of performed poetry captures what happens when textual voices become, for a moment, voiced texts. Amplifying the resonance of poems recited, staged, broadcast, and recorded by performers from Edna St. Vincent Millay and Langston Hughes to the contenders on the Four Corners slam team, this book restores the vitality, capaciousness, and flexibility of the term voice as a way to comprehend poetry as an idea, a genre, and a force for social and political change.
Lesley Wheeler's excellent new book explains today's beautiful and strange style of voicing poetry, from its origins with Edna St. Vincent Millay reading her poems on the radio, right up to the last poetry conference you attended. It captures today's scene in the world of poetry readings and engages the ideas of the most relevant contemporary critics and poets. One of my many favorite lines reads, 'You don't have to take dictation from W. H. Auden's ghost to recognize that all poems, even the most apparently lyric, are in various senses polyvocal, composite, choral, rife with dissenting discourses, even haunted.' Voicing American Poetry is smart, informative, and funny throughout. Perhaps most important, Wheeler chose her key poets wisely. She's superb on Langston Hughes and on the collaborative work of Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. This is a very good read and an important contribution to the field.
"Voicing American Poetry performs an important intervention in the poetry wars that continue to consume energy and ink, and it will also serve very valuable pedagogical purposes inside and outside the classroom. This is a kind of aesthetic peacemaking through close textual reading and cultural and performance studies. Wheeler's large mind and imagination are capable of seeing beyond simple oppositions to appreciate and to understand many different kinds of writing and poetry performance from various times and locations."
"With echoes from Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg, Lesley Wheeler's Voicing American Poetry celebrates the activation of language from eye/mind to ear/body."