American poetry in performance : from Walt Whitman to hip hop / Tyler Hoffman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hoffman, Tyler, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Performance poetry--United States--History and criticism.

Performance poetry.

Oral interpretation of poetry.

American poetry--History and criticism.

American poetry.

American poetry--African American authors--History and criticism.

Poetry slams--United States--History.

Poetry slams.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 271 pages)

Edition:

First paperback edition

Other Title:

From Walt Whitman to hip hop

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"'Tyler Hoffman brings a fresh perspective to the subject of performance poetry, and this comes at an excellent time, when there is such a vast interest across the country and around the world in the performance of poetry. He makes important connections, explaining things in a manner that remains provocative, interesting, and accessible.'---Jay Parini, Middlebury College American Poetry in Performance: From Walt Whitman to Hip Hop is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America, covering 150 years of literary history from Walt Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene. It reveals how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period and carries its own shifting cultural politics. This book stands at the crossroads of the humanities and the social sciences; it is a book of literary and cultural criticism that deals squarely with issues of 'performance,' a concept that has attained great importance in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and has generated its own distinct field of performance studies. American Poetry in Performance will be a meaningful contribution both to the field of American poetry studies and to the fields of cultural and performance studies, as it focuses on poetry that refuses the status of fixed aesthetic object and, in its variability, performs versions of race, class, gender, and sexuality both on and off the page. Relating the performance of poetry to shifting political and cultural ideologies in the United States, Hoffman argues that the vocal aspect of public poetry possesses (or has been imagined to possess) the ability to help construct both national and subaltern communities. American Poetry in Performance explores public poets' confrontations with emergent sound recording and communications technologies as those confrontations shape their mythologies of the spoken word and their corresponding notions about America and Americanness."-- Title details screen.

Contents:

Introduction

Walt Whitman "live": performing the public sphere

The ordeal of Vachel Lindsay, or the cultural politics of the spoken word

"The Black man speaks": Langston Hughes, the new Negro, and the sounds of citizenship

Beat acoustics, presence, and resistance

"Rappin' and readin'": the frequencies of the Black arts

Slam nation: immediacy, mediatization, and the counterpublic sphere.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780472029631

0472029630

OCLC:

932325310