American poetry in performance : from Walt Whitman to Hip Hop

Summary: Annotation American Performance Poetry is the first book to trace a comprehensive history of performance poetry in America from Whitman through the rap-meets-poetry scene and to show how the performance of poetry is bound up with the performance of identity and nationality in the modern period. This book 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. In doing so, American Performance Poetry 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.

Record details

ISBN: 9780472035526
ISBN: 0472035525
ISBN: 9781299763845
ISBN: 1299763847
ISBN: 0472029630
ISBN: 9780472029631
Physical Description: 1 online resource
remote
Publisher: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	""Acknowledgments""; ""Contents""; ""Introduction""; ""Chapter 1 -- Walt Whitman "Live": Performing the Public Sphere""; ""Chapter 2 -- The Ordeal of Vachel Lindsay, or The Cultural Politics of the Spoken Word""; ""Chapter 3 -- " The Black Man Speaks": Langston Hughes, the New Negro, and the Sounds of Citizenship""; ""Chapter 4 -- Beat Acoustics, Presence, and Resistance""; ""Chapter 5 -- "Rappin' and Readin' ": The Frequencies of the Black Arts""; ""Chapter 6 -- Slam Nation: Immediacy, Mediatization, and the Counterpublic Sphere""; ""Afterword""; ""Notes""; ""Index""
Restrictions on Access Note:	NLC staff and students only.
Source of Description Note:	Print version record.