A Sense of Regard Essays on Poetry and Race / edited by Laura McCullough.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

McCullough, Laura, 1960- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (318 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2015

Place of Publication:

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"McCullough has collected the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the confluence of poetry and race in our time: the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases. The book brings together essays by a range of writers and academics whose work varies in style from personal accounts and lyrical essays to challenging criticisms. McCullough believes this approach allows for more avenues and angles of exploration on this complex topic. She has also strived to be as inclusive as possible, to reach past the black/white perception of race and offer essays from numerous racial backgrounds. The anthology covers many issues that cross racial and ethnic borders and is divided into sections based on these issues: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself"-- Provided by publisher.

"A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, "is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases." The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself. To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are invited, says McCullough, "to be moved from one sense of regard to another: to be provoked and to linger in that state. To query, quarrel, and consider." A Sense of Regard grew out of a recent gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet's comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some urgently needed discussions we too rarely have. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. Racialization &amp

Reimagination: Whitman &amp

the New Americans

1. America Singing: An Address to the Newly Arrived Peoples

2. Song

3. Finding Family with Native American Women Poets

4. Walt and I: What's American about American Poetry?

5. Inaugural Poems and American Hope

6. Refusal of the Mask in Claudia Rankine's Post-9/11 Poetics

7. I Am Not a Man

II. The Unsayable &amp

the Subversive

8. Shut Up and Be Black

9. Unsexing I Am Joaquín through Chicana Feminist Poetic Revisions

10. New Female Poets Writing Jewishly

11. Looking for Parnassus in America

12. The Radical Nature of Helene Johnson's This Waiting for Love

13. Writing between Worlds

14. Letting Science Tell the Story

15. Identity Indictment

III. Imperialism &amp

Experiments: Comedy, Confession, Collage, Conscience

16. Carrying Continents in Our Eyes: Arab American Poetry after 9/11

17. A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black

18. Writing White

19. Writing like a White Guy

20. Whiteness Visible

21. The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

22. No Laughing Matter: Race, Poetry, and Humor

23. The Unfinished Politics of Nathaniel Mackey's Splay Anthem

IV. Self as Center: Sonics, Code Switching, Culture, Clarity

24. Code Switching, Multilanguaging, and Language Alterity

25. New Living the Old in a New Way: The Jazz Idiom as Post-Soul Continuum

26. Arthur Sze's Tesselated Poems

27. Ed Roberson and the Magic Hour

28. Asian Americans: The Front and Back of the Bus

29. One Migh Could Heah They Voice: Conjuring African American Dialect Poems

30. What's American about American Poetry

31. What It Means to Be an American Poet

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8203-4732-9

0-8203-4787-6

OCLC:

903118062