Ebook: A sense of regard: essays on poetry and race

"A Sense of Regard, says Laura McCullough, "is an effort to collect the voices of living poets and scholars in thoughtful and considered exfoliation of the current confluence of poetry and race, the difficulties, the nuances, the unexamined, the feared, the questions, and the quarrels across aesthetic camps and biases." The contributors discuss issues as various as their own diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Their essays, which range in style from the personal and lyrical to the critical, are organized into four broad groupings: Americanism, the experience of unsilencing and crossing borders, interrogating whiteness, and language itself. To read them is to listen in as the contributors speak what they know, discover what they do not, and in the process often find something new in themselves and their topic. As a reader you are invited, says McCullough, "to be moved from one sense of regard to another: to be provoked and to linger in that state. To query, quarrel, and consider." A Sense of Regard grew out of a recent gathering of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), where a poet?s comments on the work of another sparked impassioned and contentious conversations in person, in print, and online. Though race is often thought of as an age-old topic in poetry, McCullough saw clearly that there is still much to discuss, study, and tease apart. Moving the conversation beyond the specificity of those initial AWP encounters, with their mostly black/white focus on race, these essays provide a context and a safe starting place for some urgently needed discussions we too rarely have. "--;Carrying continents in our eyes: Arab American poetry after 9/11 / Philip Metres -- A mystifying silence: big and black / Major Jackson -- WRiting white / Martha Collins -- Writing like a white guy / Jaswinder Bolina -- Whiteness Visible / Tess Taylor -- The gentle art of making enemies / Ailish Hopper -- No laughing matter: race, poetry, and humor / Tony Hoagland -- The unfinished politics of Nathaniel Mackey's Splay anthem / Patrick S. Lawrence -- IV. Self as center: sonics, code switching, culture, clarity -- Code switching, multilanguaging, and language alterity / Mihaela Moscaliuc -- New living the old in a new way: the jazz idiom as post-soul continuum / Adebe Derango-Adem -- Arthur Sze's tessellated poems / Gerald Maa -- Ed Roberson and the magic hour / Randall Horton -- Asian Americans: the front and back of the bus / David Mura -- One migh could heah they voice: conjuring African American dialect poems / Charles H. Lynch -- What's American about American poetry / Kazim Ali -- What it means to be an American poet / Rafael Campo.;Introduction / Laura McCullough -- I. Racialization & reimagination: Whitman & the new Americans -- America singing: an address to the newly arrived peoples / Garrett Hongo -- Song / Sara Marie Ortiz -- Finding family with Native American women poets / Ravi Shankar -- Walt and I: what's American about American poetry? / Ken Chen -- Inaugural poems and American hope / Jason Schneiderman -- Refusal of the mask in Claudia Rankine's post-9/11 poetics / Joanna Penn Cooper -- I am not a man / Camille T. Dungy -- II. The unsayable & the subversive -- Shut up and be black / Matthew Lippman -- Unsexing I am Joaquin through Chicana feminist poetic revisions / Leigh Johnson -- New female poets writing Jewishly / Lucy Biederman -- Looking for Parnassus in America / Tim Liu -- The radical nature of Helene Johnson's This waiting for love / Hadara Bar-Nadav -- Writing between worlds / Timothy leyrson -- Letting science tell the story / Paula Hayes -- Identity indictment / Travis Hedge Coke -- III. Imperialism & experiments: comedy, confession, collage, conscience