The Poetics of Agency: Action and Form in Post-war U.s. Poetry

Focusing on the poetry and poetics of four pivotal authors, this book examines how experimental approaches to poetic form in the post-war United States rejected the model of the indivisible subject as the principal locus of artistic creation, and in so doing reframed period-defining questions surrounding the limits and possibilities of human agency. In the decades following the Second World War, poetry in the U.S. was marked by a resurgence of manifesto culture, where practitioners and scholars from a range of political persuasions debated fiercely the common presumptions underpinning the practice and interpretation of poetry. These debates were all primarily concerned with the agency of poetic writing and performance, including what cognitive or affective processes particular formal arrangements can be said to enact within a reader, or how different approaches to the writing and reading of poetry might encourage more desirable modes of acting in the world. Looking specifically at the work of Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara and Denise Levertov, this book asks what role poetry plays in conceptualising human agency, and what interdisciplinary place the practice of poetry has within questions typically framed by the disciplines of philosophy and the social sciences.

Tymek Woodham is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, UK.

Professor Daniel Katz teaches on the English and Comparative Literary Studies program at Warwick University. His research mostly focuses on modernism and its aftermath extending to the present day, with a special interest in poetry and poetics. His latest book is The Poetry of Jack Spicer with recent articles and chapters including "Translation and the American modernist novel ", "Jack Spicer" and further articles on Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Ben Lerner, and Peter Gizzi. He has been an Executive Board member of the Samuel Beckett Society, and co-director of Warwick's Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. He is the Founding Editor of the book series "Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics" and is currently at work editing a volume of Jack Spicer's uncollected poetry, prose, and drama-much of which is previously unpublished in any form.