Close Listening and the Performed Word brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sounds of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer brilliant and wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors--including Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe--cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of "close listenings"--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and "spoken word" events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems of the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

Jewish art has always been with us, but so has a broader canvas of Jewish imaginings: in thought, in emotion, in text, and in ritual practice. Imagining the Jewish God was there in the beginning, as it were, engraved and embedded in the ways Jews lived and responded to their God. This book attempts to give voice to these diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. A responsive, living covenant lies at the heart of this book-a covenantal reciprocity that actively engages the dynamics of Jewish thinking and acting in dialogue with God. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning, even as they all move us beyond the "text" as foundational for the imagined "people of the book." That people, we submit, lives and breathes in and beyond the texts of poetry, narrative, sacred literature, film, and graphic mediums. We imagine the Jewish people, and the covenant they respond to, as provocative intimations of the divine. The essays in this volume seek to draw these vocal intimations out so that we can all hear their resonant call.

Charles Bernstein is our postmodern jester of American poesy, equal part surveyor of democratic vistas and scholar of avant-garde sensibilities. In a career spanning thirty-five years and forty books, he has challenged and provoked us with writing that is decidedly unafraid of the tensions between ordinary and poetic language, and between everyday life and its adversaries. "Attack of the Difficult Poems," his latest collection of essays, gathers some of his most memorably irreverent work while addressing seriously and comprehensively the state of contemporary humanities, the teaching of unconventional forms, fresh approaches to translation, the history of language media, and the connections between poetry and visual art.

Applying an array of essayistic styles, "Attack of the Difficult Poems "ardently engages with the promise of its title. Bernstein introduces his key theme of the difficulty of poems and defends, often in comedic ways, not just difficult poetry but poetry itself. Bernstein never loses his ingenious ability to argue or his consummate attention to detail. Along the way, he offers a wide-ranging critique of literature's place in the academy, taking on the vexed role of innovation and approaching it from the perspective of both teacher and practitioner.

From blues artists to Tin Pan Alley song lyricists to Second Wave modernist poets, "The Attack of the Difficult Poems "sounds both a battle cry and a lament for the task of the language maker and the fate of invention.

Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as "Girly Man, "which" "features works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking.
Composed of works of very different forms and moods--etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness--the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole.
A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, "Girly Man "is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America's most controversial poets.
"A major achievement. . . . Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should seek out the collection, if only to read one of our most provocative poet-critics writing his most engaging poems to date."--Thomas Devaney, "Philadelphia" "Inquirer" "Charles Bernstein writes both prose and poetry about poetry, sometimes brilliantly, in ways calculated to upset the middlebrow and thwart the bland. The more you like the poetic equivalent of a nice tune, easy to hum, the more Bernstein means to disrupt your complacency."--Robert Pinsky, "Washington Post"

In his most expansive and unruly collection to date, the acclaimed poet Charles Bernstein gathers poems, both tiny and grand, that speak to a world turned upside down. Our time of "covidity," as Bernstein calls it in one of the book's most poignantly disarming works, is characterized in equal measure by the turbulence of both the body politic and the individual. Likewise, in Topsy-Turvy, novel and traditional forms jostle against one another: horoscopes, shanties, and elegies rub up against gags, pastorals, and feints; translations, songs, screenplays, and slapstick tangle deftly with commentaries, conundrums, psalms, and prayers. Though Bernstein's poems play with form, they incorporate a melancholy, even tragic, sensibility. This "cognitive dissidence," as Bernstein calls it, is reflected in a lyrically explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, though the reader is kept guessing which is which at almost every turn. Topsy-Turvy includes an ode to the New York City subway and a memorial for Harpers Ferry hero Shields Green, along with collaborations with artists Amy Sillman and Richard Tuttle. This collection is also full of other voices: Pessoa, Geeshie Wiley, Friedrich Ruckert, and Rimbaud; Carlos Drummond, Virgil, and Brian Ferneyhough; and even Caudio Amberian, an imaginary first-century aphorist. Bernstein didn't set out to write a book about the pandemic, but these poems, performances, and translations are oddly prescient, marking a path through dark times with a politically engaged form of aesthetic resistance: We must "Continue / on, as / before, as / after."

""Verse is born free but everywhere in chains. It has been my project to rattle the chains."" (from "The Revenge of the Poet-Critic")
In "My Way," (in)famous language poet and critic Charles Bernstein deploys a wide variety of interlinked forms--speeches and poems, interviews and essays--to explore the place of poetry in American culture and in the university. Sometimes comic, sometimes dark, Bernstein's writing is irreverent but always relevant, "not structurally challenged, but structurally challenging."
Addressing many interrelated issues, Bernstein moves from the role of the public intellectual to the poetics of scholarly prose, from vernacular modernism to idiosyncratic postmodernism, from identity politics to the resurgence of the aesthetic, from cultural studies to poetry as a performance art, from the small press movement to the Web. Along the way he provides "close listening" to such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Laura Riding, Susan Howe, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, and Gertrude Stein, as well as a fresh perspective on "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," the magazine he coedited that became a fulcrum for a new wave of North American writing.
In his passionate defense of an activist, innovative poetry, Bernstein never departs from the culturally engaged, linguistically complex, yet often very funny writing that has characterized his unique approach to poetry for over twenty years. Offering some of his most daring work yet--essays in poetic lines, prose with poetic motifs, interviews miming speech, speeches veering into song--Charles Bernstein's "My Way" illuminates the newest developments in contemporary poetry with its own contributions to them.
"The result of [Bernstein's]provocative groping is more stimulating than many books of either poetry or criticism have been in recent years."--Molly McQuade, "Washington Post Book World"
"This book, for all of its centrifugal activity, is a singular yet globally relevant perspective on the literary arts and their institutions, offered in good faith, yet cranky and poignant enough to not be easily ignored."--"Publishers Weekly"
"Bernstein has emerged as postmodern poetry's "sous"-chef of insouciance. "My Way" is another of his rich concoctions, fortified with intellect and seasoned with laughter."--Timothy Gray, "American Literature"

The poems of Recalculating take readers on a journey through the history and poetics of the decades since the end of the Cold War as seen through the lens of social and personal turbulence and tragedy. Formally stunning and emotionally charged, Recalculating makes the familiar strange--and in a startling way, makes the strange familiar. Into these poems, brimming with sonic and rhythmic intensity, philosophical wit, and multiple personae, life events intrude, breaking down any easy distinction between artifice and the real. With works that range from elegy to comedy, conceptual to metrical, expressionist to ambient, uproarious to procedural, aphoristic to lyric, Bernstein has created a journey through the dark striated by bolts of imaginative invention and pure delight.

BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing is the third volume of this annual literary anthology compiling the best experimental writing in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. This year's volume, guest-edited by Charles Bernstein and Tracie Morris, features seventy-five works by some of the most exciting American poets and writers today, including established authors-like Sina Queyras, Tan Lin, Christian Boek, Myung Mi Kim, Juliana Spahr, Samuel R. Delany, and even Barack Obama-as well as emerging voices. Intended to provoke lively conversation and debate, Best American Experimental Writing is an ideal literary anthology for contemporary classroom settings.

Praised in recent years as a "calculating, improvisatory, essential poet" by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics. Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on--or "pitches" for--a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake. Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

Maggie O'Sullivan has been a significant force in the alternative British poetry scene since the 1970s. Her international reputation has continued to grow and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost feminist avant-garde writers working in Britain today. This new volume of essays and interviews locates O'Sullivan in the wider context of contemporary British poetry and draws to light the wide-ranging influences which inform her work and her own influence upon a new generation of feminist avant-garde writing. Tackling textual, visual and sound elements in her work her poetry is complex, challenging and rewarding. O'Sullivan is also a compelling performer of her work. Thematically she is capable of tackling animal vegetable and mineral ideas in her writing, drawing on mythological and even shamanistic components that are provocative and sensual. This volume contains contributions from Charles Bernstein, Mandy Bloomfield, Ken Edwards, Romana Huk, Peter Manson, Nicky Marsh, Peter Middleton, Maggie O'Sullivan, Redell Olsen, Marjorie Perloff, Will Rowe, Robert Sheppard, Scott Thurston and Nerys Williams.

Praised in recent years as a "calculating, improvisatory, essential poet" by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, and as "the foremost poet-critic of our time" by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss, Bernstein's first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection's title highlights poetry's ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry-proudly declaring itself "a totally inaccessible poem"-and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism-full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of "our united fates." These poems engage with works by contemporary painters-including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan-and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky. Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

For the last five decades, poets have had a vibrant relationship with computers and digital technology. This book is a documentary study and analytic history of digital poetry that highlights its major practitioners and the ways that they have used technology to foster a new aesthetic. Focusing primarily on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, C. T. Funkhouser analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of today's most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre's prehistoric period. Since 1959, computers have been used to produce several types of poetic output, including randomly generated writings, graphical works (static, animated, and video formats), and hypertext and hypermedia. Funkhouser demonstrates how hardware, programming, and software have been used to compose a range of new digital poetic forms. Several dozen historical examples, drawn from all of the predominant approaches to digital poetry, are discussed, highlighting the transformational and multi-faceted aspects of poetic composition now available to authors. This account includes many works, in English and other languages, which have never before been presented in an English-language publication. In exploring pioneering works of digital poetry, Funkhouser demonstrates how technological constraints that would seemingly limit the aesthetics of poetry have instead extended and enriched poetic discourse. As a history of early digital poetry and a record of an era that has passed, this study aspires both to influence poets working today and to highlight what the future of digital poetry may hold.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing-prose, poetry, and hybrid-from its most significant practitioners and innovators A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature's future. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live. The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can't be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

Emancipating Pragmatism is a radical rereading of Emerson that posits African-American culture, literature, and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. It traces Emerson's philosophical legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics, and poetic discourse. Emerson's pragmatism derives from his abolitionism, Michael Magee argues, and any pragmatic thought that aspires toward democracy cannot ignore and must reckon with its racial roots. Magee looks at the ties between pragmatism and African-American culture as they manifest themselves in key texts and movements, such as William Carlos Williams's poetry; Ralph Ellison's discourse in Invisible Man and Juneteenth and his essays on jazz; the poetic works of Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, and Frank O'Hara; as well as the ""new jazz"" being forged at clubs like The Five Spot in New York. Ultimately, Magee calls into question traditional maps of pragmatist lineage and ties pragmatism to the avant-garde American tradition.

Debut film for everyone's favourite psychotic slasher, Freddy Krueger. When American teenager Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) begins to suffer from nightmares, she discovers that many of her friends are having similarly disturbed nights' sleep. Their dreams are haunted by the hideously scarred former child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) who, it soon transpires, has the power to kill them in their sleep. Freddy is out to exact his revenge on the children of those who burned him alive in retribution for his crimes. The only way to avoid Freddy's reprisals is to avoid sleep, but Nancy knows that she can't stay awake for ever.

Close Listening brings together 17 strikingly original essays, commissioned especially for this volume, on the reading of poetry, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, and offers an indispensable critical base for understanding language in and as performance.

Debut film for everyone's favourite psychotic slasher, Freddy Krueger. When American teenager Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) begins to suffer from nightmares, she discovers that many of her friends are having similarly disturbed nights' sleep. Their dreams are haunted by the hideously scarred former child murderer Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) who, it soon transpires, has the power to kill them in their sleep. Freddy is out to exact his revenge on the children of those who burned him alive in retribution for his crimes. The only way to avoid Freddy's reprisals is to avoid sleep, but Nancy knows that she can't stay awake for ever.

What I Say is an anthology of formally experimental and innovative poetry by black writers in America from 1977 to the present that al­lows readers to map the independent routes by which various poets reached their particular modes of aesthetic experimentation. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day. The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fasci­nating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted non-canonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry. Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and partici­pated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today. Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will ap­peal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in non-narrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.

The Nightmare On Elm Street Collection features seven films across seven discs plus a disc of bonus content.

A Nightmare On Elm Street
Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) is having grisly nightmares. Meanwhile, her high-school friends, who are having the very same dreams, are being slaughtered in their sleep by the hideous fiend of their shared nightmares. When the police ignore her explanation, she herself must confront the killer in his shadowy realm... From modern horror master Wes Craven comes a timeless shocker that remains the standard bearer for terror. Featuring Johnny Depp in his first starring role, this horror classic gave birth to one of the most infamous undead villains in cinematic history: Freddy Krueger.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Five years have passed since Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) was sent howling back to hell. But now, a new kid on Elm Street is being haunted every night by gruesome visions of the deadly dream stalker and if his twisted soul takes possession of the boy's body, Freddy will return from the dead to wreak bloody murder and mayhem upon the entire town.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
The last of the Elm Street kids are now at a psychiatric ward where Freddy haunts their dreams with unspeakable horrors. Their only hope is dream researcher and fellow survivor Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp of the original Nightmare), who helps them battle the supernatural psycho on his own hellish turf.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
Proving there's no rest for the wicked, the unspeakably evil Freddy Krueger is again resurrected from the grave to wreak havoc upon those who dare to dream. As her friends succumb one by one to Freddy's wrath, telepathically gifted Kristen embarks on a desperate mission to destroy the satanic dream stalker and release the tortured souls of his victims once and for all.

A Nightmare On Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
Unable to overpower the Dream Master who vanquished him in A Nightmare On Elm Street 4, Freddy haunts the innocent dreams of her unborn child and preys upon her friends with sheer horror. Will the child be saved from becoming Freddy's newest weapon or will the maniac again resurrect his legacy of evil?

A Nightmare On Elm Street 6: Freddy's Dead - The Final Nightmare
They tried to burn him, bury him, wash him away with holy water. Freddy hitches a ride inside some poor soul's dream to the nearest town and hey, quicker than you can say "Nine, ten, never sleep again", the dreamstalker's back in business...

A Nightmare On Elm Street 7: Wes Craven's New Nightmare
In a frightening new twist in the terror on Elm street, Wes Craven (director of the original film) finds that his dreams have begun to dictate real-life horrors for the stars of the film.

Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays, published first in 1967 and then in an expanded edition in 1981, was a definitive set of critical statements by Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important poets of the 20th century. These central expositions of Zukofsky's own poetics, and enduring examinations of the art of poetry, range over the entire length of Zukofsky's career and include sensitive and prescient readings of Henry Adams, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, and others.
Prepositions + brings this essential collection back into print, and adds generous selections of Zukofsky's uncollected prose, most notably the crucial 5 Statements for Poetry. Published in a small edition in 1958 and out of print ever since, 5 Statements gathers the essays that Zukofsky felt best presented his own poetics. Among them are the three essays, in their original and expansive forms, that crystallized the "Objectivist" movement of the early 1930s. Prepositions + also includes an extended in-depth interview in which Zukofsky discusses his poetry and poetics.

This rich collection is far more than an important work of criticism by an extraordinary poet; it is a poetic intervention into criticism. "Artifice of Absorption," a key essay, is written in verse, and its structures and rhythms initiate the reader into the strength and complexity of the argument. In a wild variety of topics, polemic, and styles, Bernstein surveys the current poetry scene and addresses many of the hot issues of poststructuralist literary theory. "Poetics is the continuation of poetry by other means," he writes. What role should poetics play in contemporary culture? Bernstein finds the answer in dissent, not merely in argument but in form--a poetic language that resists being easily absorbed into the conventions of our culture.

Insisting on the vital need for radical innovation, Bernstein traces the traditions of modern poetry back to Stein and Wilde, taking issue with those critics who see in the "postmodern" a loss of political and aesthetic relevance. Sometimes playful, often hortatory, always intense, he joins in the debate on cultural diversity and the definition of modernism. We encounter Swinburne and Morris as surprising precursors, along with considerations of Wittgenstein, Khlebnikov, Adorno, Jameson, and Pac-Man. "A Poetics" is both criticism and poetry, both tract and song, with no dull moments.

The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an envi ronmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics, given its keen concern with an ecological esthetic. Joshua Schuster explains why American modernism was never green. In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the rela tionships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution. He posits that that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission. In his opening passage, Schuster boldly invokes lines from Walt Whit man's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which echo as a paean to pollution: "Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at night fall!" Schuster labels this theme "regeneration through pollution" and demonstrates how this motif recurs in modernist compositions. This tolerance for, if not actual exultation of, the by-products of industri alization hindered modernist American artists, writers, and musicians from embracing environmentalist agendas. Schuster provides specific case studies about Marianne Moore and her connection of fables with animal rights; Gertrude Stein and concepts of nature in her avant-garde poetics; early blues music and poetry and the issue of how environmental disasters (floods, droughts, pestilence) affected black farmers and artists in the American South; and John Cage, who extends the modernist avant-garde project formally but critiques it at the same time for failing to engage with ecology. A fas cinating afterword about the role of oil modernist literary production rounds out this work. Schuster masterfully shines a light on the modernist interval between the writings of bucolic and nature-extolling Romantics and the emer gence of a self-conscious green movement in the 1960s. This reward ing work shows that the reticence of modernist poets in the face of resource depletion, pollution, animal rights, and other ecological traumas is highly significant.