In Print: Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy
Publication Title
Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy: A Thirty-Year Creative Reading Workshop
Author
Publisher
Anthem Press
Publication Date
September 2024
About the Book (from the publisher)
Merging autobiography and literary criticism, Daniel Morris illustrates in sixteen essays how he learned to attend to avant-garde contemporary American poets whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education. Morris comments: “My new book combines memoir and literary criticism. I try to tell the story of my development as a teacher and scholar in my ‘30 year creative reading workshop’ — that is, my thirty years as a literature professor at Purdue. In the new book, I organize previously uncollected pieces and introduce them to readers to illustrate my evolution as a thinker about poetry. I show how I have moved on from my training in Boston, where confessionalism was the coin of the realm, to an embrace of experimental modes that, incidentally, flourish in the Midwest.”
In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by “learning twice” about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme.
Morris’s study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls “a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the ‘new historicist’ concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion.” Essays address from multiple perspectives—prophetic, diasporic, ethical—the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics—the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space—to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.
About the Author
Daniel Morris, professor of English and Jewish Studies, focuses his research attention on 20th Century American Literature; American Poetry, 20th Century American Art; Popular Culture; American literature, poetry, and drama; the relationship between American poetry and drama; and Jewish-American literature and visual arts. He is the author or editor of Not Born Digital: Poetics, Print Literacy New Media (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016), Hit Play (Marsh Hawk Review, 2015), Lyric Encounters: Essays on American Poetry from Lazarus and Frost to Ortiz Cofer and Alexie (Bloomsbury Press, 2013), After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photography (Syracuse University Press, 2011), Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz (Rowman and Littlefield/The University of Delaware Press, April 2012), Secular Jewish Culture and Radical Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2009), The New York Public Intellectuals and Beyond (Purdue University Press, 2008), The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction (University of Missouri Press, 2006), Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Allen Grossman (National Poetry Foundation Press, 2004), Bryce Passage (Marsh Hawk Press, 2004), Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors Write on Modern Art (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self (University of Missouri Press, 1995), and If Not For the Courage (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010).