Forms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political, social, and historical context.
In Gawker's wry estimation, most of the U.S. simply didn't "get" Richard Blanco's inaugural poem "One Today." In the Washington Post's absurd trollgazing account, Blanco's poem merely signals the "death of poetry."
In her recent post about a conference on Futurism at SFMOMA, Marjorie Perloff raises several important literary-historical questions. One of them: To what extent do a writer's noxious political opinions require us to construe as suspicious his or her activities and affiliations earlier in life?
For the last week, I've been thinking about poetry and politics in mid-nineteenth century Russia. Writers then faced a situation similar to today in the United States, at least in one respect: critics kept prodding them to demonstrate their commitment to revolutionary social change. Good politics did not make a poem good, but it was for many readers a sine qua non.