About the Book
Poetics of Social Engagement emphasizes the ways in which innovative American poets have blended art and social awareness, focusing on aesthetic experiments and investigations of ethnic, racial, gender, and class subjectivities. Rather than consider poetry as a thing apart, or as a tool for asserting identity, this volume’s poets create sites, forms, and modes for entering the public sphere, contesting injustices, and reimagining the contemporary. Like the earlier anthologies in this series, this volume includes generous selections of poetry as well as illuminating poetics statements and incisive essays. This unique organization makes these books invaluable teaching tools. A companion website will present audio of each poet’s work.
Poets included:
Rosa Alcalá
Brian Blanchfield
Daniel Borzutzky
Carmen Giménez Smith
Cathy Park Hong
Christine Hume
Bhanu Kapil
Mauricio Kilwein Guevara
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Barbara Jane Reyes
Roberto Tejada
Edwin Torres
Essayists included:
John Alba Cutler
Chris Nealon
Kristin Dykstra
Joyelle McSweeney
Danielle Pafunda
Molly Bendall
Eunsong Kim
Michael Dowdy
Brent Hayes Edwards
J. Michael Martinez
Martin Joseph Ponce
David Colón
Urayoán Noel
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction by Michael Dowdy ROSA ALCALÁ Poems from Undocumentaries Everybody’s Authenticity Job #6 Autobiography from The Lust of Unsentimental Waters Rita Hayworth: Double Agent Patria from MyOTHER TONGUE Paramour Voice Activation Dear María Poetics Statement Poetics of Not-Mother Tongue Rosa Alcalá’s Aesthetics of Alienation, by John Alba Cutler BRIAN BLANCHFIELD Poems from Not Even Then One First Try and Then Another If the Blank Outcome in Dominoes Adds a Seventh Side to Dice from A Several World According to Herodotus Edge of Water, Nimrod Falls, Montana Pferd Eclogue Onto an Idea from series “The History of Ideas, 1973–2012,” A Several World Education Ut Pictura Poesis Eclogue in Line to View The Clock by Christian Marclay Open House Edge of Water, Moiese, Montana Poetics Statement from “On Abstraction, Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source” In the Dark with Brian Blanchfield, by Chris Nealon DANIEL BORZUTZKY Poems from The Book of Interfering Bodies The Book of Interfering Bodies from In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy Decomposition as Explanation Illinois from The Performance of Becoming Human Let Light Shine Out of Darkness The Performance of Becoming Human Poetics Statement the continuum: a broken introduction Pardon Me Mr. Borzutzky / If, by Kristin Dykstra CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH Poems from Odalisque in Pieces Prepartum from Goodbye, Flicker Hungry Office Hans Hated Girls from Milk & Filth (Llorona Soliloquy) (And the Mouth Lies Open) from “Parts of an Autobiography” from Be Recorder from “Post-Identity” Poetics Statement “The Call for Reversal is Native”: The Paradox of the Mother Tongue in the Work of Carmen Giménez Smith, by Joyelle McSweeney ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE Poems from Off-Season City Pipe The Change from Blood Run Skeletons Ghosts Skeletons from Streaming We Were in a World America, I Sing You Back Poetics Statement Quipu: a poetic Resurrecting the Serpent, Reactivating Good Earth: Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run, by Chadwick Allen CATHY PARK HONG Poems from Dance Dance Revolution Roles from series “St. Petersburg Hotel,” Dance, Dance Revolution 1. Services Song That Breaks the World Record from Engine Empire Ballad in O Ballad in A Market Forces Are Brighter Than the Sun Notorious Poetics Statement Building Inheritance: Cathy Park Hong’s Social Engagement in the Speculative Age, by Danielle Pafunda CHRISTINE HUME Poems from Musca Domestica A Million Futures of Late from Alaskaphrenia Comprehension Questions Hume’s Suicide of the External World from Shot I Exhume Myself Induction Poetics Statement Hum Utter Wilderness: The Poetry of Christine Hume, by Molly Bendall BHANU KAPIL Poems from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers from Incubation: A Space for Monsters from Humanimal, a Project for Future Children from Schizophrene from Ban en Banlieue Poetics Statement Perpetual Writing, Institutional Rupture, and the Performance of No: The Poetics of Bhanu Kapil, by Eunsong Kim MAURICIO KILWEIN GUEVARA Poems from Postmortem Postmortem from Poems of the River Spirit A City Prophet Talks to God on the 56C to Hazelwood The Easter Revolt Painted on a Tablespoon from Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose Self-Portrait Mirror, Mirror A Tongue Is a Rope Bridge The American Flag from POEMA Against Metaphor At rest Pepenador de palabras Poema without hands Poetics Statement Mauricio Kilwein Guevara’s Scavenger Infrapoetics, by Michael Dowdy FRED MOTEN Poems from Hughson’s Tavern Rock the party, fuck the smackdown five points, ten points from B Jenkins gayl jones william parker/fred mcdowell frank ramsay/nancy wilson from The Feel Trio from series block chapel [whenever I listen to cornelius I think of cecily] [welcome to what we took from is the state] from I ran from it and was still in it [I burn communities in shadow, underground, up on the] [I often amount to no more than a stylistics. airrion] [I am foment. I speak blinglish. at work they call me] from The Little Edges the gramsci monument from The Service Porch it’s not that I want to say Poetics Statement Sounding the Open Secret: The Poetics of Fred Moten, by Brent Hayes Edwards CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ Poems from from unincorporated territory [saina] from aerial roots from aerial roots from aerial roots from aerial roots from aerial roots ginen aerial roots from aerial roots ginen aerial roots Poetics Statement Tidal Poetics: The Poetry of Craig Santos Perez, by J. Michael Martinez BARBARA JANE REYES Poems from Poeta en San Francisco [objet d’art: exhibition of beauty in art loft victorian claw tub] [Kumintang] [why choose pilipinas?] [why choose pilipinas, remix] [galleon prayer] [ave maria] [prayer to san francisco de asís] ( zh f l) from Diwata The Bamboo’s Insomnia Polyglot Incantation The Villagers Sing of the Woman Who Becomes a Wave Who Becomes the Water Who Becomes the Wind In the City, a New Congregation Finds Her Aswang Poetics Statement To Decenter English Acts of Poetry in Troubled Times: Barbara Jane Reyes’s Anticolonial Feminist Voicings, by Martin Joseph Ponce ROBERTO TEJADA Poems from Exposition Park Debris in Pink and Black from Full Foreground Untitled [Not a word of my surrounding] Untitled [Impulse in the great organism of terror] from Why the Assembly Disbanded Kill Time Objective Poetics Statement The Acoustic Uncanny Marginal Erotics: Roberto Tejada’s Sexiness, by David Colón EDWIN TORRES Poems from The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language Dirtspeech The Theorist Has No Samba! Barrio/Barrier from Yes Thing No Thing Of Natural Disasters And Love from Ameriscopia And In Trying Viva La Viva from “Dome” Poetics Statement Bodycatch/Mindtrap: No Edge But In Things The Us Is Porous: Edwin Torres in Other Words, by Urayoán Noel Contributors Index
About the Author :
Award-winning poet, critic, and activist CLAUDIA RANKINE is the author of five collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, and she edits the American Poets in the Twenty-First Century series. She is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. MICHAEL DOWDY is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization and Urbilly. He is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina.
Review :
"It's not about what to do next so much as it's about what we can imagine, and what our social positions and personalities.let us imagine, given the carnage outside. These poets help us think, not about vote tallies, not about one or another incident of injustice, but about the society we have, the way that identities form within and against it, the attitudes we can examine if we want to know how to stand up, or see more clearly, or fight back."--Stephanie Burt, professor of English, Harvard University
"Dowdy and Rankine have provided a poetics of recognition as well as of disobedience. Their excellent selection of poets and critical commentary offers a screen shot on an era of economic inequality and racial violence, but also of new alliances and resurgent activism. Poets in this important volume testify to the fact that poetry makes something happen by imagining a new plural subject--resistant and disobedient in equal parts."--Michael Davidson, author of Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body
