Photography and meditation are known to facilitate reflection and introspection. They teach us to see both the outer world and the mysterious landscape within. In Nowhere in Place, photographer Christopher Jordan explores the meeting place between meditation and photography and how this mirroring of outer and inner worlds plays upon both the surface of his consciousness and the sensor of his digital camera. Before Jordan ventures outside to make pictures, he spends time in quiet meditation. This is an important process of switching gears from the everyday noise of the cluttered mind to a more serene state of awareness. This reset allows Jordan to see the world in fresh ways, appreciating overlooked details that might escape a mind preoccupied with business-as-usual. The book starts in Tuscaloosa, where Jordan lives. For many, T-town is a place of Southern charms and Alabama football, but, for Jordan, it becomes a visual play of textures, colors, and abstract planes with nary a person in sight. The pictures reveal a placeless solitude within the frame of his camera. The book moves west to Boulder, another college town, where his contemplative eye continues to fix upon unusual shapes, colors, and textures while intersecting with an occasional figure. The book reaches full bloom in India, where the interplay between inner and outer landscapes knows no bounds, as his camera reveals a kaleidoscopic interplay of people, places, and things. Within each locale, Jordan photographed "nowhere" in particular, because, for him, the photograph becomes a place of its own being: a sanctuary for meditation, a record of what is seen and heard and felt, an opportunity to see a place and an image right now. For Jordan, the photograph is a medium of meditation and transcendence, providing a point of intersection where one recognizes our shared, common humanity.

This selected--the first compilation of essays by Hank Lazer following his ground-breaking and much revered two-volume Opposing Poetries--offers twelve years of incisive writing at the intersection of two of the more contentiously debated topics in current letters. Drawing on poetic traditions as seemingly disparate as Language writing and Buddhist poetry, Lazer pursues a way of reading that is rich in the music and spirit of the word, attuning readers to the pleasures and range of possibilities for innovative poetry. In a very accessible writing style, and with flashes of brilliance, Lazer explores and identifies new approaches to the lyric and to the writing of spiritual experience in American poetry of the past one hundred years. In this book of essays, interviews, reflections, and more, Lazer focuses on two topics central to the poetry of our time: the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways of embodying spirituality. By bringing a wide range of perspectives to his readings--from the jazz of Monk and Coltrane to the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida--Lazer's essays inspire readers to enter into a renewed and renewing relationship with poetry.

"The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be "forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen's own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women's voices, and the future of poetry.

Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen's work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer's taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, "to recreate the heart of poetry itself." Linking elegies to extended journal-like meditations, Elegies & Vacations asks "what the day may mean." At the heart of the book is a long poem, "Deathwatch for My Father," which tracks the poet's father's final months, testing out the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead - from the poet's father, to John Cage, to Kenneth Burke, to George Oppen - while also, through family vacations, projecting forward to ask "to what are we ancestral." The opposed or apposed guiding lights of the book - John Ashbery and George Oppen - like the juxtaposed elegies and vacations, offer divergent modes of verbal and ethical grace. Informed by a Buddhist sensibility, as well as by the relativistic thinking of reform (and mystical) Judaism, Lazer's poems move through varying terrains of form, textuality, and geography, from Suzhou (China) to the Abacos (the Bahamas), from Diamond Head (Oahu) to Orono (Maine), from an extended portrait to a journal, from children's stories to a two-columned composition on the nature of literary history.

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 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.

This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.

The Alphabet is a remarkable and notorious literary achievement, decades in the making, one continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments of it first appeared in the 1970s. Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared - in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes - its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry.Ron Silliman, a founder of the language poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in ""The Alphabet"" the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.""The Alphabet"" is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices - historical and private - that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.

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.

In this book, Jerome McGann argues that contemporary language-oriented writing implies a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition on one hand and in the future of criticism on the other. He focuses on Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as important intellectual resources because both see the history of poetry as a crisis of the present rather than as a legacy of the past. The crisis appears as a poetic deficit in contemporary culture, where values of politics and morality are judged prima facie more important than aesthetic values. McGann argues for the fundamental relevance of the aesthetic dimension and the contemporary relevance of cultural works of the past. McGann moves through several broad categories in his examination of contemporary poetry, including the ways in which poetry must be abstract, change, and give pleasure. The author draws on sources ranging from the poetry of Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan to Looney Tunes cartoons. The experimental move in contemporary poetry, McGann contends, is an emergency signal for readers and critics as much as it is for writers and poets, a signal that calls us to rethink the aesthetics of criticism. The interpretation of literary works has been dominated by enlightenment models - the expository essay and monograph - for almost two hundred years. With the emergence of new media, especially digital culture, the limitations of those models have grown increasingly apparent. ""The Point Is To Change It"" explores alternative critical methods and provides a powerful call to reinvent our modes of investigation in order to escape the limitations of our inherited academic models. The goal of this process is to widen existing cracks or create new ones because, as McGann points out via the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, ""That's how the light gets in.

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.

"Another South" is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness, represents the direction of a new breed of southern writing that is at once universal in its appeal and regional in its flavor.

Focusing on poets currently residing in the South, the anthology includes both emerging and established voices in the national and international literary world. From the invocations of Andy Young's "Vodou Headwashing Ceremony" to the blues-informed poems of Lorenzo Thomas and Honoree Jeffers, from the different voicings of )ohn Lowther and Kalamu ya Salaam to the visual, multi-genre art of Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts, and Bob Grumman, the poetry in "Another South" is rich in variety and enthusiastic in its explorations of new ways to embody place and time. These writers have made the South lush with a poetic avant-garde all its own, not only redefining southern identity and voice but also offering new models of what is possible universally through the medium of poetry.

Hank Lazer's introductory essay about "Kudzu textuality" contextualizes the work by these contemporary innovators. Like the uncontrollable runaway vine that entwines the southern landscape, their poems are hyperfertile, stretching their roots and shoots relentlessly, at once destructive and regenerative. In making a radical departure from nostalgic southern literary voices, these poems of polyvocal abundance are closer in spirit to "speaking in tongues" or apocalyptic southern folk art--primitive, astonishing, and mystic.