The muse in the machine : essays on poetry and the anatomy of the body politic / by T.R. Hummer.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hummer, T. R.

Series:

Life of poetry.

Life of poetry

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Politics and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Politics and literature.

Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.

Literature and society.

Poetry--Authorship.

Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (224 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Music, race, politics, and conscience. In these eight essays written over the span of a decade and a half, T. R. Hummer explains how, for him, such abiding concerns revolve around the practice of poetry and the evolution of a culturally responsible personal poetics. Hummer writes about the suicide of poet Vachel Lindsay, the culture wars at the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the divided soul of his native American South, and the salving, transcendent practice of musicianship. Inevitably entwined with a personal or cultural component, Hummer's criticism is thus grounded in experience that is always familiar and often straight to the heart in its rightness. In one of those statements of "poetic purpose" that goes hand in hand with a residency, guest editorship, or lecture tour, Hummer once wrote that "poetry inhabits and enunciates an incommensurable zone between individual and collective, between body and body politic, an area very ill-negotiated by most of us most of the time. Our culture, with its emphasis on the individual mind and body, teaches us very little about how even to think about the nature of this problem.... E pluribus unum is a smokescreen: what pluribus; what unum? And yet this phrase is an American mantra, as if it explained something." This is a quintessential Hummer moment: a writer has just given himself a good reason to quit. What Hummer knows must happen next is what The Muse in the Machine is all about.

Contents:

An audience

Laughed off : canon, kharakter, and the dismissal of Vachel Lindsay

"Sen-sen," censorship, obscenity, secrecy : slapping the face of the body politic

Inside the avalanche

Ex machina : reading the mind of the South

Revenge of the American leviathan

"Christ, start again" : Robert Penn Warren, a poet of the South?

The mechanical muse.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786613253118

9781283253116

1283253119

9780820342788

0820342785

OCLC:

759160196