The Small Press, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and the Politics of Disidentification

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-270
Author(s):  
Georgina Colby
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press

Appraising Newness: Whiteness, Neoliberalism & the Building of the Archive for New Poetry

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunsong Kim
Keyword(s):  
San Diego ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Collection Development ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Archival Practice ◽  
Small Press ◽  
The University

The Archive for New Poetry (ANP) at the University of California San Diego was founded with the specific intention of collecting alternative, small press publications and acquiring the manuscripts of contemporary new poets. The ANP’s stated collection development priority was to acquire alternative, non-mainstream, emerging, “experimental” poets as they were writing and alive, and to provide a space in which their papers could live, along with recordings of their poetry readings. In this article, I argue that through racialized understandings of innovation and new, whiteness positions the ANP’s collection development priority. I interrogate two main points in this article: 1) How does whiteness—though visible and open—remain unquestioned as an archival practice? and 2) How are white archives financed and managed? Utilizing the ANP’s financial proposals, internal administrative correspondences, and its manuscript appraisals and collections, I argue that the ANP’s collection development priority is racialized, and this prioritization is institutionally processed by literary scholarship that linked innovation to whiteness. Until very recently, US Experimental and “avant-garde” poetry has been indexed to whiteness. The indexing of whiteness to experimentation, or the “new” can be witnessed in the ANP’s collection development priorities, appraisals, and acquisitions. I argue that the structure of the manuscripts acquired by the ANP reflect literary scholarship that theorized new poetry as being written solely by white poets and conclude by examining the absences in the Archive for New Poetry.

scholarly journals “It Isn’t Race or Nation Governs Movement”: New Writers’ Press and the Transnational Scope of Irish Experimental Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 178
Author(s):  
Will Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Small Press ◽  
The Press ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Contemporary Irish Poetry ◽  
The Many ◽  
Editorial Decisions

In this paper, I seek to contribute to the resurrection from critical obscurity of an overlooked tradition in contemporary Irish poetry: namely, that of small-press poetic experimentalism. Taking as a case study the Dublin-based New Writers’ Press (NWP, established 1967), I will interrogate the absence of virtually any mention of small Irish experimental presses in critical narratives of late modernist poetry of the British Isles in the 1960s and 1970s. By using an array of insights gleaned from the many letters, typescripts and other ephemera in the NWP archive housed at the National Library of Ireland, such absences in scholarship are explored in the context of what the press’ founding editors faced in navigating the small Irish poetry market of the mid-twentieth century. Through this archival lens, the reasons why a cohesive avant-garde network of British and Irish poetic experimentalists never materialised are analysed, and an argument for how Irish poetic experiments of the last half century have not received anywhere near the same degree of critical attention as those of their British counterparts will emerge. In the first half of this paper, I focus on the Irish commercial poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s, ultimately illustrating how narrow and competitive it was in comparison to the British market, as well as the peculiar individual context of an Irish campus magazine, Trinity College’s Icarus (1950-). This will in turn suggest that the absence of presses such as NWP from critical accounts of late modernist poetic experimentalism may well be due to editorial decisions made by those Irish presses themselves. In the second half of this paper, I foreground some important archival evidence to review a number of instances in NWP’s history in which it comes close to forging alliances with presses within the more cohesive British experimental scene, though it never manages to do so. Drawing on this evidence, I present an archival basis for counterarguments to the possible conclusion that the responsibility for the general absence of Irish presses from narratives of small-press experimentalism lies with those Irish presses themselves.

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Lorine Niedecker ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.

Cunard, Nancy (1896–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denell Downum
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
The Hours ◽  
Radical Intellectual

A poet, journalist, publisher, radical intellectual, and political activist, Nancy Cunard operated at or near the centre of multiple modernist discourses. Her early poetry, especially the long poem Parallax, was deeply engaged with experimental forms and themes characteristic of high modernism. In 1928, she became a noteworthy figure in the small press movement, establishing the Hours Press and publishing work by avant-garde and modernist writers including Samuel Beckett, Laura Riding, and Ezra Pound. Cunard conceived the Negro anthology in 1930, eventually closing her press to focus on compiling this monumental exploration of transnational black culture. Published in 1934, the oversized volume included key figures of the Harlem Renaissance among its 150 contributors, but it proved controversial and sold poorly. As war threatened Europe, Cunard joined the anti-Fascist struggle, exposing atrocities as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, publishing a political pamphlet called Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, and working during World War II as a translator and publisher for the French Resistance.

Reverberation

2020 ◽  
pp. 192-222
Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Corporeal Body

Chapter 5 explores—from the direction of non-mainstream poetics—the politics of embodiment and reception in Denise Riley’s poetry. Its focus is her late-twentieth-century avant-garde pamphlets and small press publications. What is at stake in Riley’s poetic emphasis on the punctured, uncertain, and wounded textual-corporeal body? Why do her poems invite readers to witness the traces of their physical making/printing? The chapter examines what Riley’s use of unmarked space can teach readers about their role in the politics of production and reception. It explores how sparse type energizes gaps between words (giving them a fugitive figuration) and draws attention to the conflict involved in acts of listening and receiving, inking and uttering. The chapter considers whether such effects are compromised when larger, more commercial houses republish the works.

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