Orpheus in the Bronx : essays on identity, politics, and the freedom of poetry
"A highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation. In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a "resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers." Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and "gifted" status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry."--Pub. desc
Print Book, English, ©2007
University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, ©2007
essäer
199 pages ; 21 cm.
9780472099986, 9780472069989, 0472099981, 0472069985
140109745
By way of introduction
To make me who I am
Other's other : against identity poetry, for possibility
Toward an urban pastoral
Notes toward beauty
One state of the art
On Alvin Feinman's "True night"
On Jorie Graham's Erosion : poetry, perception, politics
What remained of a genet : on the topic of Querelle
Shadows and light moving on water : on Samuel R. Delany
Four gay American poets
On Linda Gregg's Too bright to see
Thirteen ways of looking at a coat : nuances of a theme by Stevens
Why I write