Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry
- 2 Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry
- 3 Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry
- 4 Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry
- 5 Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets
- 6 The Nearly Baroque in Contemporary Poetry
- 7 Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice
- 8 Queer Poetry and Bioethics
- 9 Trauma and the Avant-Garde
- 10 Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene
- 11 Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
- 12 Anti-capitalist Poetry
- 13 Of Poetry and Permanent War in the Twenty-First-Century
- 14 Poetry in the Program Era
- 15 The Future of Poetry Studies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
12 - Anti-capitalist Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2021
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry
- 2 Traditions of Innovation in Asian American Poetry
- 3 Locations of Contemporary Latina/o Poetry
- 4 Sovereign Poetics and Possibilities in Indigenous Poetry
- 5 Changing Topographies, New Feminisms, and Women Poets
- 6 The Nearly Baroque in Contemporary Poetry
- 7 Disability Aesthetics and Poetic Practice
- 8 Queer Poetry and Bioethics
- 9 Trauma and the Avant-Garde
- 10 Blockade Chants and Cloud-Nets: Terminal Poetics of the Anthropocene
- 11 Give Me Poems and Give Me Death: On the End of Slam(?)
- 12 Anti-capitalist Poetry
- 13 Of Poetry and Permanent War in the Twenty-First-Century
- 14 Poetry in the Program Era
- 15 The Future of Poetry Studies
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
- References
Summary
This chapter examines the emergence of an emphatically anti-capitalist poetry in the decade since the global financial crash of 2008. There is a turn away from private, meditative poetry to a lyric speech that is public and willing to tackle rifts in the social body. It explores links among kinds of violence (racial, sexual, economic) and depredation (colonial, environmental) that liberal political language has tended to grasp in parallel rather than as part of a totality. Jasmine Gibson’s “Black Mass” coordinates the anguish of racial violence with on-the-ground relations between bosses and workers, sexuality, and geopolitics. Daniel Borzutzky’s The Performance of Becoming Human parallels contemporary police violence against black people with torture under Pinochet in Chile, making clear that the basis for the parallel is the global reach of capitalist accumulation. Allison Cobb’s After We All Died shows a willingness to let go of matter itself, in order to see how it de- and re-composes under conditions of capitalist crisis. Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction depicts the loss of the “fictions,” including beloved ones, through which we live under capitalism.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry , pp. 180 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021
References
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