 | The News from Poems: Essays on the 21st-Century American Poetry of Engagement Subjects: American poetry -- 21st century -- History and criticism; Politics and literature -- United States -- History -- 21st century; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 21st century; Poetics -- United States; The News from Poems examines a subgenre of recent American poetry that closely engages with contemporary political and social issues. This "engaged" poetry features a range of aesthetics and focuses on public topics from climate change, to the aftermath of recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the increasing corporatization of U.S. culture. The News from Poems brings together newly commissioned essays by eminent poets and scholars of poetry and serves as a companion volume to an earlier anthology of engaged poetry compiled by the editors. Essays by Bob Perelman, Steven Gould Axelrod, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Wilner, and others reveal how recent poetry has redefined our ideas of politics, authorship, identity, and poetics. The volume showcases the diversity of contemporary American poetry, discussing mainstream and experimental poets, including some whose work has sparked significant controversy. These and other poets of our time, the volume suggests, are engaged not only with public events and topics but also with new ways of imagining subjectivity, otherness, and poetry itself. Jeffrey Gray is a Professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is coeditor (with Ann Keniston) of The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st-Century Anthology and author of Mastery's End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry . Ann Keniston is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada-Reno. She is author of Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry . |
