Places in the making

Places in the Making maps a range of twentieth-and twenty-first century American poets who have used language to evoke the world at various scales. While other poetic traditions tend toward more idealized and transcendent lyric registers, this study traces a poetics centered upon more particular and situated engagements with actual places as pivotal axis of identification and heralds emplacement as crucial model for cultural, intellectual, and political activity in a period marked and imperiled by a tendency toward dislocation. Focusing on poets of international reputation, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, and William Carlos Williams, Places in the Making also considers works by more recent figures, including Kamau Brathwaite, Joy Harjo, Myung Mi Kim, and Craig Santos Perez. In its larger comparative, multiethnic, and transnational emphases, this book addresses questions of particular moment in American literacy and cultural studies and aspires to serve as a catalyst for further interdisciplinary work connecting geography and the humanities.