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Essay on Representations of Desire and Sexuality In Poetry
Walter Kalaidjian goes so far as to characterize contemporary American poetry in general as defined by such debates: “The history of contemporary American poetry has typically been staged through critical narratives of dramatic struggle. On one side stands the New Critical verse tradition; on the other are massed its emergent adversaries: 'projectivist,' confessional, neosurrealist, 'deep image,' regional, feminist, Afro-American, and other local schools and movements. (3)
The avant-garde, popular, and working-class texts that Walter Kalaidjian discusses in his new work attempt to revise episodes in American culture that together constitute what he calls "a neglected cultural history" (Kalaidjian 8). Concentrating on such supposedly marginal moments in American culture as the Russian Revolution, the Harlem renaissance, the radical experimentations of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the popular interventions of feminism, Kalaidjian dexterously blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, politics and aesthetics, and academicism and popular forms. Kalaidjian's book is divided into five chapters, each of which is, in turn, nicely divided into subsections dealing with a more specific aspect of the theme that the chapter treats. The first chapter, entitled "Revisionary Modernism," discusses the role of transnationalism during the interwar years as a key episode in the shaping of American culture. Within the chapter, Kalaidjian pays particular attention to the influence of the Russian avant-gardes in the formation of a strong Marxist-socialist consciousness in America.
The second chapter explores how various "subgroups," like the Chicago John Reed Club, the New Negro movement, and the politicized aesthetics of Diego Rivera, Hugo Gellert, and Louis Lozowick, among others, "signaled a communicative difference from the dominant ideological signs of American commodity culture" (Kalaidjian 61). The section on Diego Rivera is perhaps the best part of the whole book. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss feminist concerns and radical movements in poetry respectively.................
