Description
Book SynopsisPublic Poetics is a collection of essays and poems that address some of the most pressing issues of the discipline in the twenty-first century. The collection brings together fifteen original essays addressing "publics," "poetry," and "poetics" from the situated space of Canada while simultaneously troubling the notion of the nation as a stable term. It asks hard questions about who and what count as "publics" in Canada. Critical essays stand alongside poetry as visual and editorial reminders of the cross-pollination required in thinking through both poetry and poetics. Public Poetics is divided into three thematic sections. The first contains essays surveying poetics in the present moment through the lens of the public/private divide, systematic racism in Canada, the counterpublic, feminist poetics, and Canadian innovations on postmodern poetics. The second section contains author-specific studies of public poets. The final section contains essays that use innovative renderings of "poetics" as a means of articulating alternative communities and practices. Each section is paired with a collection of original poetry by ten contemporary Canadian poets. This collection attends to the changing landscape of critical discourse around poetry and poetics in Canada, and will be of use to teachers and students of poetry and poetics.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Public Poetics; Public Poet, Private Life: 20 Riffs on the Dream of a Communal Self; The Threat of Black Art, or, On Being Unofficially Banned in Canada; The Counter/Public in Pain: The Making & Unmaking of Poetry in Canada; Writing the Body Politic: Feminist Poetics in the 21st Century; Rewriting & Postmodern Poetics In Canada: Neo-Haikus, Neo-Sonnets, Neo-Lullabies, Manifestoes; The Ingeminate Eye: Peter Sangers Public Poetics; Reading for a Civic Public Poetic: Toronto in Raymond Sousters Ten Elephants on Yonge Street & Dennis Lees Civil Elegies; To the Bone: The Instrumental Activism of Dionne Brands Ossuaries; Rearticulate, Renovate, Rebuild: Sachiko Murakamis Architectural Poetics of Community; "We jimmied the radio": Gillian Jerome, Brad Cran, & the Lyric in Public; Formal Protest: Reconsidering the Poetics of Canadian Pamphleteering; Radio Poetics: Publishing & Poetry on CBCs Anthology; The Public Reading: Call for a New Paradigm; We Are the Amp: A Poetics of the Human Microphone; Canadian Public Poetics: Negotiating Belonging in a Globalizing World; Nota Bene; or, Notes toward a Poetics of Work...
