From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-garde Aesthetics offers a comprehensive account of Language Poetry, tracing its origins, evolution, and enduring influence. It demonstrates how a movement that emerged from American experimental writing in the 1970s has become a creative legacy with lasting relevance for twenty-first-century poetics.
Beginning with the modernist transformations and counterculture that reshaped poetic form in the early twentieth century, the study charts the formation of the Language community. While combining literary history, textual analysis, and cultural inquiry, it examines the editorial networks, defining aesthetic principles, and ideological debates that animated the School’s practice. Through the close analysis of major figures, including Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, and Rae Armantrout, Sharma explores the movement’s material and conceptual concerns, as well as the persistence of its ideas in digital and post-digital environments.
Written within Indian academia, this text expands the global contexts, poetic as well as academic, in which Language Poetry holds significance today. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, teachers, and scholars of Literary Studies and American Literature, while also serving as a clear guide to the evolution and contemporary resonance of American experimental poetics for readers beyond academia.
From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies offers a comprehensive account of Language Poetry, tracing its origins, evolution, and enduring influence. It demonstrates how a movement emerging from American experimental writing in the 1970s has become a creative legacy with lasting relevance for twenty-first-century poetics.
Preface
1. Introduction: The Modern Age and the Rise of the Avant-garde
Poetics
2. Tracing the Language Canon: Editorial Projects, Poetic Figures,
and the Formation of a Community
3. Interpreting Language Poetry:
Compositional Poetics, Ideological Grounds, and Practices of Reading
4. The
Continuities of Language Poetics: Material Innovations, Digital Technologies
and Extensions of the Experiment
5. The Experimental Arc: Language Poetry,
Creative Legacies, and the Global Discourse Appendix. Poet Interviews
Amrita Sharma is Assistant Professor of English at Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow. During 20212022, she served as a Fulbright Fellow at the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures, University of Notre Dame, USA. Her research focuses on American avant-garde literature and experimental poetics, with particular interest in how aesthetic, theoretical, and material conditions shape innovative writing practices. She is also the author of the poetry collection titled The Skies published in 2022.
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