In reading the materials for this week I found my recent research of post-identity to be relevant to the discussions we will have in class this week about hybrid poetry and the diversity of black identity in poetry. I have been looking through the archives of the now out-of-print journal Post Identity and have found it […]
Archive | Context / Archival
Life as Art, Olds as Muse
The ways in which personal life seeps into art has always been a subject that’s compelled me. This semester has granted the opportunity to study the work of authors participating in these veins. In light of the confessional and post-confessional poets we’ve read from, I’ve become even more intrigued by how our lives affect poetry and fiction […]
Pink-Collar Poetic Resistance and A Day Without Women
Karen Kovacik describes in “Between L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Lyric: The Poetry of Pink-Collar Resistance” how a category of female poets has been largely unnamed and thus, ignored because of their refusal to restrict their writing to any one category. Kovacik explains that a “group of working-class writers who borrow frequently from the aesthetic approaches of both […]
Maxine Hong Kingston and New American Poetry
James Edward Smethurst’s “Foreground and Underground: the Left, Nationalism, and the Origins of the Black Arts Matrix” intrigued me to read more into the Asian American constituent, specifically Maxine Hong Kingston. Born and raised in California’s Central Valley to Chinese parents, Kingston attended Berkeley in the 1950s where she studied English and became exposed to the […]
Dr. Dax Seeks to Legitimize Music Therapy
“Psychotherapy and Confessional Poetry” by Michael Thurston discusses the shift in mental health practices from psychoanalysis to psychotherapy in mid-century America. This included medicating patients through use of “tranquilizers, electroconvulsive therapy [and] insulin shock therapy” (148). Successful results yielded “docility and compliance” that brought “the mind to a socially acceptable orderliness (or at least the appearance […]
Jazz Breath: How Jazz Influenced Beat Poetics
Culturally, jazz and Beats are often linked through a variety of similar characteristics, but the influence jazz had on Beat poetry cannot be overstated. Beat poets were overwhelmingly influenced by moves made by jazz musicians in the 1940s and ‘50s. Aspects of jazz are easily identifiable within Beat poetics: the focus on the breath of […]
The “Uncertain Promise” of Jewish Youth During the Great Depression
The Objectivist poets, a title they reluctantly assumed, led me into deeper research of an era I have previously taken great interest in due to the writings of David Brooks. Raised in Manhattan by two liberal Jewish parents of the bohemian culture, he was educated at a traditional Jewish school in the city and developed […]
The Rise and Fall of The Harlem Renaissance
The literary and artistic influencers of the Harlem Renaissance were facing a similar theme to one that was central to the greater modernist art movement. Many of the modernists explored life through the lens of greater global reach, and the frequent melding of cultures the world round. The Great Migration that resulted in the Harlem […]
Blog Post 1: Gertrude Stein and Picasso (Context/Archival)
The contextual readings for this week brilliantly provided an overlapping picture of what many of our poets for the week were all about, from their manifestos on society to their hard and fast but also accommodating rules for poetry. I do not know, however, if in any one or a number of the readings, was […]