Poetry in General

Reviews / Votes

Poetry rarely gets to be general, but Keegan Cook Finberg blasts past misconceptions of marginality, framing it as a vibrant, interdisciplinary, public practice. What a relief to see this truth so clearly stated: Poetry-when at its weirdest!-is uniquely positioned to contest the state's facilitation of capital. -- Sarah Dowling, author of <i>Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form</i> Keegan Cook Finberg takes poems seriously enough to see their claims on expanding the genre of poetry itself. Recognizing ambitions beyond individual expression, Poetry in General reads poems not as private refuges from social politics but as urgent interlocutors in a world of increasing privatization and politically managed bodies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of <i>Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography</i> What a generous and generative study of contemporary American poetry. This is a serious work of materialist criticism in which "poetry in general" is imagined through and with our most important economic and discursive formations, from infrastructure to accumulation to the public sphere itself. Finberg demonstrates throughout an ability to locate in poetry a social archive of our present, and this book will be of interest to all scholars concerned with twenty-first century literary form and philosophical aesthetics. -- Leigh Claire La Berge, author of <i>Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and the Claims of Decommodified Labor</i> With Poetry in General, Keegan Cook Finberg advances a notion of the public as a practical fiction enacted in and through social forms that exist not despite the atomized and bureaucratized forms of daily life, but through the extensive paper trails those forms generate. Poetry becomes a way of bearing witness to and living with changing social forms. With wit and verve, Finberg conceptually remaps postwar US poetry. -- Anthony Reed, author of <i>Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production</i>