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Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990S
The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries. This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics. Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity. This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.
- GenresPoetry
408 pages, Hardcover
First published November 27, 2001
3 people are currently reading
119 people want to read
About the author
Harryette Mullen
30 books105 followersHarryette Mullen is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. She was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She wrote poems such as Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name.
Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.
Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981.
Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background.
Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.
Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. In Texas, she worked in the Artists in Schools program before enrolling in graduate school in California, where she continued her study of American literature and encountered even more diverse communities of writers and artists.
Mullen was influenced by the social, political, and cultural movements of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and women in the 1960s-70s, including Civil Rights, Black Power, the Black Arts Movement, Movimiento Chicano, and feminism. Her first book, Tree Tall Woman, which showed traces of all of these influences, was published in 1981.
Especially in her later books, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, Muse & Drudge, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, Mullen frequently combines cultural critique with humor and wordplay as her poetry grapples with topics such as globalization, mass culture, consumerism, and the politics of identity. Critics, including Elisabeth Frost and Juliana Spahr, have suggested that Mullen’s poetry audience is an eclectic community of collaborative readers who share individual and collective interpretations of poems that may provoke multiple, divergent, or contradictory meanings, according to each reader’s cultural background.
Mullen has taught at Cornell University, and currently teaches courses in American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. While living in Ithaca and Rochester, New York, she was a faculty fellow of the Cornell University Society for the Humanities and a Rockefeller fellow at the Susan B. Anthony Institute at University of Rochester. She has received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry, a Katherine Newman Award for best essay on U.S. ethnic literature, a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received a PEN Beyond Margins Award for her Recyclopedia (2006). She is also credited for rediscovering the novel Oreo, published in 1974 by Fran Ross. Mullen won the fourth annual Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2010.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 2, 2010
So what's changed since this book came out? Flarf and conceptual poetry have emerged, the apparent LANGUAGE confrontation continues to perplex the poetry scene despite the fact that their claims about poetry (and here I'm quite sympathetic, though not entirely convinced by) are some 40-50 years dated since their inception. Ok movie btw. But what I'm most interested in is the fact that avant-garde has come to be synonymous with poetries who consciously seek to engage with our social relations, which is to say that to be avant-garde in our poetic field is to engage with Marx directly or indirectly at a variety of levels. Those who turn away from this task are then defined as part of the cooked school(?), or maybe they could easily get published by Fence.
Spahr gets the most interesting thing happening in a poetics of late-modernity, the end of our post-modern moment, a poetics of conclusiveness as opposed to fracture, a poetics that seeks to engage with the larger world compiling it together so that there might be some force behind the solidarity of a greater front. This is a poetics that contradicts some of the ideology of fracture we've engaged with in the past, and note that these things are not mutually exclusive, that the need to coalesce means that there was something broken in the past, and indeed the presence of "schools" altogether is one possible starting point. But more importantly, how can poetry further enable an axis of possibility while overcoming the chasms we've long entrenched ourselves within?
Spahr gets the most interesting thing happening in a poetics of late-modernity, the end of our post-modern moment, a poetics of conclusiveness as opposed to fracture, a poetics that seeks to engage with the larger world compiling it together so that there might be some force behind the solidarity of a greater front. This is a poetics that contradicts some of the ideology of fracture we've engaged with in the past, and note that these things are not mutually exclusive, that the need to coalesce means that there was something broken in the past, and indeed the presence of "schools" altogether is one possible starting point. But more importantly, how can poetry further enable an axis of possibility while overcoming the chasms we've long entrenched ourselves within?
February 21, 2010
Reasons to buy this collection: Steve Evans's Intro to Writing from the New Coast, Lisa Robertson's "How Pastoral: A Manifesto," Kristin Prevallet's "Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source," Jeff Derksen's "Unrecognizable Texts: From Multicultural to Antisystemic Writing," Sianne Ngai's "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust," Bill Luoma's "Cowgirls Like the Salt Lick: Gender & Some Poem Analysis," Tan Lin's "ambient stylistics," and Juliana Spahr's "spiderwasp or literary criticism"
June 17, 2008
This is a great book for people interested in approaching avant-garde poetics with concerns about political or ethnic literatures. The aesthetic and political are seen in the same frame.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews