In this capacious and challenging book, Maria Damon surveys the poetry and culture of the United States in two distinct but inextricably linked periods. In part 1, 鈥淚dentity K/not/e/s,鈥 she considers the America of the 1950s and early 1960s, when contentious and troubled alliances took shape between different marginalized communities and their respective but overlapping bohemias鈥擩ews, African Americans, the Beats, and gays and lesbians. Using a rich trove of texts and artifacts鈥攔anging from Gertrude Stein鈥檚 writings about her own Jewishness to transcripts from Lenny Bruce鈥檚 obscenity trial, Bob Kaufman鈥檚 Beat poetry鈥攁s well as her own stake in the material, Damon plumbs the complexities of social identity and expressive cultures to fascinating effect.
Always erudite but never effete, Damon then turns to more contemporary issues and broader topics of poetics: micropoetries, cyberpoetics, spoken-word poets, performance poets, and their communities. Echoing many of the themes of the first section of the book, including poetic identity and the troubled nature of the poetic 鈥淚,鈥 part 2鈥檚 鈥淧oetics for a Postliterary America鈥 goes on to paint a wider picture, dwelling less on close readings of individual poems and more on asking questions about the nature of poetry itself and its role in community formation and individual survival. Discussions of counterperformance, kinetics, the Nuyoricans, Latino identity, and electronic poetics enliven this section.
Never reluctant to acknowledge the deeply personal origins of the work at hand, Damon cleaves to the subject matter, be it questions of identity, matters of poetry, or what it means to live in a postliterary culture. In doing so, she dares to ask what it means to be a member of the 鈥渟hadow people鈥濃攖hose who occupy marginalized, nocturnal counterculture鈥攃reating verbal art.
鈥淢aria Damon sets us on a path toward a poetics of culture that has long been promised by prominent scholars within the cultural studies sphere but, until now, seldom delivered. Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz to Micropoetries provides a rare juxtaposition of poetics, race, ethnicity, and gender, showing how 鈥榠nsider鈥 art made by 鈥榦utsiders鈥 becomes canonical and how innovative literature enters the mainstream.鈥濃擜ldon Nielsen, author, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation
&苍产蝉辫;鈥Postliterary America makes key connections between the seemingly disparate fields of poetics and cultural studies. Indeed, Maria Damon persuasively argues for reading poetry in dialogue with its social and cultural contexts. Weaving together threads of beat poetics, cultural critique, queer theory, ethnography, and the social diversity of race, gender, and class analyses, Postliterary America presents nothing less than a sophisticated tapestry of contemporary American culture.鈥濃擶alter Kalaidjian, author, The Edge of Modernism: American Poetry and the Traumatic Past
