This book examines the relationship of African American culture to literary modernism.This book explores the impact of African American culture on modernist poetic language by placing black literature and culture at the center of an inquiry into the genealogy of avant-garde poetics. Geoffrey Jacques looks at how blackface minstrelsy, ragtime, vernacular languages, advertising copy, Freud's idea of the Uncanny, vaudeville, the cliche, and Tin Pan Alley - style song all influenced modernist poetry.In a key insight, Jacques points out that the black urban community in the United States did not live in ghettos during the years before World War I, but in smaller enclaves spread out among the general population. This circumstance helped catalyze African American culture's dramatic and surprising impact on the emergent avant-garde. By using a wide range of theoretical tools, Jacques poses new questions about literary, cultural, and social history, the history and structure of modernist poetic language, canon formation, and the history of criticism.This contribution to the ongoing debate over early twentieth-century culture presents modernism as an interracial, cross-cultural project, arguing for a new appreciation of the central role black culture played within it. Writers and artists whose works are discussed include Marianne Moore, Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, James A. Bland, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Gertrude Stein, Bert Williams, Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Beckett, W. C. Handy, Hart Crane, and Clement Greenberg.

This powerful collection of poems draws on American and African- American experimental lyric traditions, pushing language and form to their limits. Geoffrey Jacques's poetry inspires deep thought, taking up themes of music, psychology, and literature. This work embodies the potential of poetry to forge new connections between aesthetic expression and the often onerous facts of human existence. Poems such as "Still Life" and "Detour Ahead" produce a juxtaposition of inspired poetic form and rich, complex realities of life, addressing topics of joy and love, race, class, politics, and the aesthetics of the everyday. With a contemporary and sophisticated tenor, Jacques lends his uniquely moving and provocative perspective to advancing discourse in these critical topics. For all of the social themes they address, these poems equally serve to investigate modes of producing poetry in general. "Ars Poetica," "The Problem of Speech Genres," "The Subject of the Poem," and many others directly challenge traditional notions of form through intentional and intricate reflexive commentary. Through these poems, Jacques has achieved a balance between form and function, allowing readers to embark on a rhythmic journey of expression, language, and human existence.

Geoffrey Jacques is a subtle, sophisticated poet who has read widely and has taken his cue from some of the most important vanguard poets of the past century and a half-Whitman, Breton, Cesaire, Stein, Olson, Baraka, and others. He has digested and assimilated the lessons to be learned from their work while finding a way that is very much his own. The result is a distinctive contemporary voice whose angular mode of address and unerring touch edify as much as they impress. This book presents both in full flower. Techniques of detour and indirection productively encounter an aesthetic of sampling, quotation, and juxtaposition, a language-foregrounding tack that draws a range of domains and discourses into its mix. Song titles, cliches, catch phrases, bureaucratic boilerplate, advertising jargon, office chat, song lyrics, legalese, and other components of the linguistic atmosphere we live in find their way into the work, suggesting an overmediated, gone-before-it-gets-here present. Just for a Thrill is a substantial gathering of Jacques' work of recent years-a welcome breakthrough book by a poet whose work has appeared mainly in little magazines and limited chapbook editions over the past dozen or so years, a poet whose work deserves greater attention. We're fortunate to have so galvanic a collection of Jacques' poetry in an edition that promises to reach a wider audience. -From the foreword by Nathaniel Mackey