A Companion to American Poetry

A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY

A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day.

Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries.

Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.

Mary McAleer Balkun is Professor of English at Seton Hall University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in early American literature and culture, the American gothic and grotesque, and digital humanities. She is also an instructor in the university’s Honors program. She has served as the Director of Faculty Development at the university since 2015. She is the author or editor of six books, as well as numerous articles on early American topics, instructional pedagogy, and faculty governance. Her current book project is New World Upside Down: The Early American Grotesque.

Jeffrey H. Gray is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is the author of the book Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry and ofnumerous articles on American and Latin American literature. He is the editor of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry, the largest reference work of its kind, and co-editor, with Ann Keniston, of The News from Poems: Essays on the New American Poetry of Engagement and of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21^st Century Anthology. His poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Yale Review, PN Review, Lana Turner Review, Western Humanities Review, and other journals. He is also the translator of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels The African Shore (nominated for the Pen Translation Award in 2014) and Chaos: A Fable.

Paul Jaussen is an Associate Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University in Detroit, MI, where he co-directs the Humanity+Technology lecture series. His teaching and research focuses on poetry and poetics, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. His first book, Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (Cambridge University Press, 2017), deploys systems theory as a model for comprehending the complex, adaptive forms of the modern and contemporary American long poem. His most recently published essays have been dedicated to poetry and the art object in the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, spectrality and the transhistorical literary catalogue, and the use of hypothetical focalization in William Faulker’s Absalom, Absalom! These and other works have appeared in New Literary History, Comparative Literature, Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Chicago Review, and ASAP/J, among others. He is currently writing a second book alongside this Companion, tentatively entitled Rumors of Utopia: Contemporary Literature’s Public Language.