Crisis and the US Avant-Garde

Crisis and the US Avant-Garde charts the energies and tensions of avant-garde poetics and vanguard politics.

Crisis and the US Avant-Garde examines the politics of poetry through the lens of crisis. A timely commentary on the role poetic culture might play in political struggle going forward into our own various contemporary crises, the book connects major twentieth-century poets and movements, including Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Language Poetry, with their various moments of political upheaval. Reading poems as attempted interventions in 'turning-points' or 'moments of decision' within American culture, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde looks at how poetry seeks to go beyond poetic language, and investigates how experimental American poetry has attempted to responds to imperialism, war, class conflict and capitalism itself.