About the Book:This volume is the first of its kind to collect classic and contemporary work focused on the intersection of poetry and cultural studies, reaching from Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” and W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Of the Sorrow Songs” to present-day essays on rap lyrics, queer poetry, folk poetry, and beyond. Rethinking notions of poetic experiences and their roles in popular or mass culture, these essays effectively delineate the relationship between poetry–a stereotypically private endeavor in the post-Enlightenment West–and the public social culture in which it is engendered. The writings in Poetry and Cultural Studies also acknowledge the major contributions of both the Frankfurt School, with its close analyses of reading and writing lyric poetry as social practices, and of the Birmingham School’s major contributions toward broadening the field of artifacts permissible for serious study with the primarily literary tools of close reading of textual/textural detail. It is a volume that speaks to students, academics, poetry enthusiasts, and those interested in social movements, including slammers, academics, workshop leaders, and poetry theorists.Table of Contents: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION 1Maria Damon and Ira LivingstonPrecursors 1 Preface to Lyrical Ballads 21 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 2 Two Essays on Poetry and Society 25 THEODOR ADORNO 3 On Some Motifs in Baudelaire 37 WALTER BENJAMIN 4 What Is a Minor Literature? 56 GILLES DELEUZE AND FELIX GUATTARI 5 Of the Sorrow Songs 61 W. E. B. DU BOIS 6 A Theory of Discourse 67 ANTONY EASTHOPEEthnography 7 Some Aspects of Folk Poetry 77 AMERICO PAREDES 8 The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning 90 HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. 9 Shifting Politics in Bedouin Love Poetry 116 LILA ABU-LAUGHOD 10 The Poetric Construction of Self 133 STEVEN C. CATON 11 Tell Them about Us: Some Poems from Southie 147 MARIA DAMONMass Culture/Cultural Politics 12 The Bride of the Assembly Line: Radical Poetics in Construction 163 BARRETT WATTEN 13 Assembly Poetics in the Global Economy: Nicaragua 177 BRUCE CAMPBELL 14 Black Texts/Black Contexts 195 TRICIA ROSE 15 Kickin’ Eality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles 199 ROBIN D. G. KELLEY 16 Poetry for the People 213 AMITAVA KUMAR 17 La Douceur de foyer: Lyric Poetry of the Year1857 as a Model for the Communication of Social Norms 226 HANS ROBERT JAUSSNational (De)Formations 18 Smoke Rings: Worker-Poets in the France of Louis-Philippe 237 JACQUES RANCIERE 19 Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space 248 KRISTIN ROSS 20 Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics 266 JOSEPH HARRINGTON 21 Nation and Imagination 285 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY 22 Angel Island and the Poetics of Error 301 YUNTE HUANG 23 “HOO, HOO, HOO”: Some Episodes in the Construction of Modern Male Whiteness 310 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSISSubject (De)Formations 24 A Poem Is Being Written 333 EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 25 A Musician Is Being Beaten 340 JOHN MOWITT 26 Poetry and Anthropology 347 TRINH T. MINH-HA 27 Poetry Is Not a Luxury 355 AUDRE LORDE 28 A Blow Is Like an Instrument 359 CHARLES BERNSTEIN 359Reinventing Tradition 29 Sappho Is Burning: Fragmentary Introduction 375 PAGE DUBOIS 30 Genocide, Modernism, and American Verse: Reading Diana Der-Hovanessian 390 WALTER KALAIDJIAN 31 The Forms of Things Unknown 406 STEPHEN HENDERSON 32 History of the Voice, 1979=1981 417 KAMAU BRATHWAITE 33 Of Poetry and Power: Maya Angelou on the Inaugural Stage 428 ZOFIA BURR 34 Nuyorican Language 437 MIGUEL ALGARIN INDEX 447