Introduction: Affect and History and in Postwar Experimental Poetry -- Chapter 1. Frank O'Hara's Twentieth Century -- Chapter 2. LeRoi Jones, Editor: Kulchur Magazine and the Poetry of Cultural Politics -- Chapter 3. Di Prima's Hipsters: Experimental Poetry at the Birth of the Cool -- Chapter 4. Howl and Other Poems: Is There Old Left in These New Beats? -- Epilogue: Meditations in an Emergency, Catastrophes of the Present.
Summary:
"Experimental poetry responded to historical change in the decades after World War II with an attitude of such casual and reckless originality that its insights have often been overlooked. And yet, Benjamin Lee argues, to ignore the scenes of self and the historical occasions captured by experimental poets of the 1950s and 1960s is to overlook a rich and instructive resource for our own complicated transition into the twenty-first century. In Poetics of Emergence, Lee shows that poets like Frank O'Hara, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Diane di Prima, and Allen Ginsberg offer perceptive responses to Cold War culture: lyric meditations on consequential changes in U.S. social life and politics, including the decline of the Old Left, the rise of white-collar work, and the emergence of vernacular practices like hipsterism and camp. At the same time, they offer us opportunities to anatomize our own desire for historical significance and belonging, a desire we may well see reflected and then reconfigured in their poems"-- Provided by publisher.
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