WRPR 169: Imagining Other Futures: Art, Poetry, and Social Change (HC)

With passion, critical questioning, and humor, Adrienne Rich suggests how poetry has actually been lived in the world, past and present. In this essay, which was the basis for her speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she ranges among themes including poetry's disparagement as "either immoral or unprofitable," the politics of translation, how poetry enters into extreme situations, different poetries as conversations across place and time. In its openness to many voices, offers a perspective on poetry in an ever more divided and violent world.

A series of essays from a discussion that occurred at the New School for Social Research in New York. The discussion mines the relationship between poetic composition and political expression. Poetry's relationship to public policy typically has a questionable margin of relation. Not only does this volume posit that poetry is a dynamic medium for the consideration of political ideas, it focuses on the ideological weight specific formal innovations bring to poetry. Some of the writers include Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein.

Provides an overview of the historical development of art with ideas of social and political change, from utopian imaginings to active engagement. Incorporating artists' writings and public statements, as well as critical and theoretical texts, the volume also highlights developments outside established Western art history.

This collection of interviews, poetry, and essays of the much-loved anti-apartheid leader is the first book of its kind to bring together the full, forceful range of his work. Brutus, imprisoned along with Nelson Mandela, is known worldwide for his unparalleled eloquence as an opponent of the apartheid South African regime. Since its fall, he has been a voice for justice and humanity, speaking and writing extensively on issues of debt, poverty, war, racism, and neoliberalism. Dennis Brutus is a lifelong human rights activist and poet. He was imprisoned with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in South Africa and became an eloquent spokesperson for the anti-apartheid movement. He currently teaches African studies and literature at the University of Pittsburgh.

Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance (1920-1929) relied heavily upon traditional rhetorical devices, specifically irony and paradox. In contrast, their counterparts of the sixties adopted a more radical approach, employing instead street idiom and other modes of Black discourse. While the poets' strategies of the two periods differ, one element remained constant - the theme of protest. It is this similarity in purpose that marks the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance as a precursor of the revolutionary poetry of the sixties.

Since the cultural conflicts over the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, poets and poetry have consistently raised questions surrounding public address, social relations, friction between global policies and democratic institutions, and the interpretation of political events and ideas. In "Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960," Dale Smith makes meaningful links among rhetoric, literature, and cultural studies, illustrating how poetry and discussions of it shaped public consciousness from the socially volatile era of the 1960s to the War on Terror of today.