Poetry, Poetics, and Readers in Contemporary American Culture

FAIN: FB-52649-06

Lisa M. Steinman
Reed College (Portland, OR 97202-8138)

I hope to complete a book about the place of poetry in American culture from 1950 to the present, examining various, at times apparently irreconcilable, practices and explanations of how poetry works or what poetry does to or in writers, readers, and reading communities. The study focuses on different poetic practices and statements of poetic purpose from poets and schools of poetry as well as on what readers have said poetry offers them. Combining something like a sociology of American poetry with more detailed formal and rhetorical analyses, I hope to foster a new consideration of contemporary poetry and poetics and to set the multiple languages that form readers’ and writers’ ears for what counts as poetry in dialogue with one another.

Associated Products

"Resonance, Beauty, Integrity": Creative Rereadings of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Book Section)
Title: "Resonance, Beauty, Integrity": Creative Rereadings of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Editor: Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggaf-Turley
Abstract: John Ashbery’s (1956) poem, “Le Livre Est Sur La Table,” is resonant (in one sense of the word) of Wordsworth’s solitary reaper, although it also echoes—or resonates with—Wallace Stevens’s figure of a woman singing by the sea in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Certainly Ashbery draws on Wordsworth’s nightingale and Cuckoo bird breaking “the silence of the seas.” As his title suggests, the book Ashbery puts on our table is in part a volume of Wordsworth’s poems, but translated, with a new grammar, that of mid-twentieth-century American poetry. Moreover, the resonance set up by Ashbery’s and Stevens’s repetitions of Wordsworth’s haunting lyric is recast yet again in Adrienne Rich’s (1973) “Blood-Sister.” The chapter traces how poems work differently in different contexts, but add that an awareness of this can be seen as an integral part of Wordsworth’s legacy, which persist, if with salient differences, for reasons that can be discussed in both poetic and sociological contexts, in the twentieth-century American lyric.
Year: 2006
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Book Title: The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature
ISBN: 0814330584

In the Act of Finding (Article)
Title: In the Act of Finding
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Abstract: A discussion of commonalities in the work of Frank Bidart, Richard Tillinghast, Kimberly Johnson, Kay Ryan and C.S. Giscombe, each of whom published new volumes of poetry between 2005 and 2008
Year: 2009
Periodical Title: Michigan Quaerterly Review
Publisher: The University of Michigan

"Telling the Time": Narrative and Lyric in The Poetry of Lawrence Joseph (Article)
Title: "Telling the Time": Narrative and Lyric in The Poetry of Lawrence Joseph
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Abstract: The article traces the growth and changes in the poetry of Lawrence Joseph over several of his volumes, noting the ways in which the work responds to how the readers and language of American poetry changed between 1983 and 2005.
Year: 2009
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: University of Cincinnati Law Review
Publisher: University of Cincinnati

"Poetry in the 1980s: The Pressures of Reality" (Book Section)
Title: "Poetry in the 1980s: The Pressures of Reality"
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Editor: Alfred Bendixon and Stephen Burt
Abstract: A discussion of the work of the apparently very different poets, Thylias Moss and Charles Bernstein, in terms of the assumptions about and reading communities found in 1980s America.
Year: 2014
Access Model: print
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: The Cambridge History of American Poetry
ISBN: 9781107003361

Flexible Genealogies and Romantic Poetics (Book Section)
Title: Flexible Genealogies and Romantic Poetics
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Editor: Mark Sandy
Abstract: The chapter argues that William Carlos Williams’s poetics and his use of the image are indebted to practices found in Wordsworth. Williams, in turn, is claimed by later American poets from Philip Levine to Lorine Niedecker whose practices seem starkly opposed to one another. The primary argument is that current ways of distinguishing so-called mainstream work (often associated with Romantic poetry and lyricism) from so-called experimental work (often self-described as anti-Romantic) in the U.S. are not ultimately useful, in part because literary genealogies are complex and shift over time or between cultures. In particular, past poetry (here, primarily, Wordsworth’s and Williams’s) is re-read in different ways by different reading communities. Nonetheless, a surprisingly wide range of apparently opposed poetic camps in the U.S. defend poetry in ways familiar to anyone who works on the Romantics.
Year: 2012
Publisher: Ashgate
Book Title: Romantic Presences in the Twentieth-Century

The Pressures of Reality: American Poetry in the Eighties (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: The Pressures of Reality: American Poetry in the Eighties
Abstract: Examining the apparently divergent poetics and clearly different styles of poetry associated with the work of Thylias Moss and Charles Bernstein, the talk described the poets' shared assumptions about poetry without obscuring the ways in which their poetic styles differ.
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Date: 3/14/2008
Location: Vanderbilt University/ Rheney Speaker

Looking Forward to the 1960s (Article)
Title: Looking Forward to the 1960s
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Abstract: A response to a symposium on experimental poetry and poetics of the 1960s, questioning the ways in which -- given expectations about poetry and of poetry readers and writers at the time -- the categories of experimental and mainstream (as now used) might not be all that useful.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://jacket2.org/article/ordinary-capaciousness
Primary URL Description: This is the site of Jacket2, an on-line, juried, journal, which posted the presentations given at a symposium on the poetry of the sixties as well as solicited responses to those talks.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Jacket2
Publisher: Poet's House

Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics (Book)
Title: Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Abstract: A textbook (also for general readers) on how a variety of kinds of poems work and why they keep working.
Year: 2008
Access Model: print
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781405131643
Copy sent to NEH?: No

"Situating American Poetry" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "Situating American Poetry"
Author: Lisa M. Steinman
Abstract: The talk traced the ways in which the U.S., from the time of the early republic through the start of the twenty-first century did and did not authorize a "mainstream" style, arguing that for most of U.S. history (whether considering publishers, anthologies, and a range of poetic styles) there was no central authorizing agency. Thus, the "poetry wars " of the eighties, in particular, were based on a false idea of what counted as mainstream. As theorized -- though not always as practiced -- contemporary poetry in a variety of styles or "camps" actually shared numbers of assumptions about what poetry offers its readers or listeners.
Date: 10/15/06
Conference Name: Oregon State University Humanities Center, guest speaker

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