Crisis and the US Avant-Garde (Poetry and Real Politics)

Crisis and the US Avant-Garde charts the energies and tensions of avant-garde poetics and vanguard politics.
Crisis and the US Avant-Garde examines the politics of poetry through the lens of crisis. A timely commentary on the role poetic culture might play in political struggle going forward into our own various contemporary crises, the book connects major twentieth-century poets and movements, including Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Language Poetry, with their various moments of political upheaval. Reading poems as attempted interventions in ‘turning-points’ or ‘moments of decision’ within American culture, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde looks at how poetry seeks to go beyond poetic language, and investigates how experimental American poetry has attempted to responds to imperialism, war, class conflict and capitalism itself.


Key features:
Reassesses the US avant-garde’s relation to political events
Explains how we might talk about a ‘context’ for avant-garde art
Provides detailed readings of major poets, including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, George Oppen, Amiri Baraka and others
Key reference point for experimental cultural politics today

Ben Hickman is the author of John Ashbery and English Poetry (Edinburgh, 2012) and has published numerous essays on the New York School, the New American Poetry, John Clare and others. He studied at University College, London and currently teaches at the University of Kent.