Appearing Beside Text: Uprisings of In-Difference in Post-1945 American Poetry

Appearing beside Text introduces how the negative space between print can appear as another type of text. If indeed text is any perceived material with a sense of meaning, then underlying pages may also enter the textual surface when visibly materializing for our reflection. But that movement involves not only perceiving different materials but conflicting senses of each. It raises a level of play long outlawed by common-sense theory, since blank pages are meant to epitomize the most repressed or radically excluded. Yet frameworks based on such hierarchies or absolute alterity are unsettled when paginal bodies start appearing inside and outside ‘the work’ of art. This transitioning into aesthetics, and its historico-political implications, are mapped here across the landscape of post-1945 American poetry, through poems and prose, novels and nonfiction, by poets as diverse as Claudia Rankine, Ronald Johnson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest, Susan Howe, and Charles Olson.

Joseph Shafer teaches American Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany, and publishes on poetry, critical theory, and aesthetics. He has also edited Meditations: The Assorted Prose of Barbara Guest and co-edited a new Selected Poems of Barbara Guest.