Rethinking the North American Long Poem: Form, Matter, Experiment [Paperback]

For centuries, critics, poets, poet-scholars, and philosophers have either openly proclaimed or tacitly assumed the long poem as the highest expression of literary ambition and excellence.Rethinking the North American Long Poemfocuses on the North American variant of this notorious form—notorious because of its often forbidding and difficult character, particularly with respect to the dialectics of content and form, aesthetics and politics, matter and genre. In nine essays and a contextual introduction, the editors and contributors scrutinize seminal long poems by North American writers, including Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Ezra Pound’sThe Cantos, Muriel Rukeyser’sThe Book of the Dead, and Charles Olson’sThe Maximus Poems. They also explore recent efforts that have redefined or reopened the case of the long poem, including Rachel Blau DuPlessis’sDrafts, M. NourbeSe Philip’sZong!, and Claudia Rankine’sCitizen. Taking the categories of form, matter, and experiment as frames of conceptual reference, the book examines the ways in which material and immaterial aspects of literary practice and the philosophically and politically inscribed duality of experience and experiment are negotiated in and by North American long poems from the nineteenth century to the present.
Ridvan Askinteaches North American literature at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He is the author ofNarrative and Becomingand the coeditor of several books, includingNew Directions in Philosophy and Literature.

Julius Greveis a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. He is the author ofShreds of Matter: CormacMcCarthy and the Concept of Nature. “Rethinking the North American Long Poemis an ambitious, multipronged approach to one of the mosl³/