Poetry's Afterlife
Verse in the Digital Age
Kevin Stein
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Imprint: University of Michigan Press
Published: 01/2010
Pages: 276
Subject: Literary Criticism - Poetry, Social Science - Media Studies
Print ISBN: 9780472050994
eBook ISBN: 9780472900404
DESCRIPTION
At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's
supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes
the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's
Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey
the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest
where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The
result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible.
Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because
of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as
moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as
Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and
schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its
literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic
daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools,
and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms.
It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground
existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second
life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife , that his book examines and
celebrates.
REVIEWS
"Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century."
—David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University
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