Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry

Kornelia Freitag

sep. 2015 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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There is no poetry without memory. Recovery and Transgression: Memory in American Poetry is devoted to the ways in which poetic texts shape, and are shaped by, personal, collective, and cultural memory. It looks at the manifold and often transgressive techniques through which the past is recovered and repurposed in poetry. T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Susan Howe’s THIS THAT, Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory, John Tranter’s “The Anaglyph,” Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” and Amy Clampitt’s “Nothing Stays Put” are only some of the texts discussed in this volume by a group of international poetry experts. They specifically focus on the effects of the cultural interaction, mixture, translation, and hybridization of memory of, in, and mediated by poetry. Poetic memory, as becomes strikingly clear, may be founded on the past, but has everything to do with the cultural present of poets and readers, and with their hopes and fears for the future.

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Kornelia Freitag is the Chair of American Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. She is the author of Cultural Criticism in Women’s Experimental Writing: The Poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe (2006), and coedited Another Language: Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America (2008) and Modern American Poetry: Points of Access (2013). Her major areas of research are American poetry and cultural and literary theory.