MACMILLAN Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Poetry and Work offers a timely and much-needed re-examination of the relationship between work and poetry. The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely. The book interrogates whether poetry and avant-garde and experimental writing can provide models for work that is less alienated and more free. In this major new collection, sixteen scholars and poets draw on a lively array of theory and philosophy, archival research, fresh readings, and personal reflection in order to consider work and poetry: the work in poetry and the work of poetry. Individual chapters address issues such as the many professions, occupations, and tasks of poets beyond and around writing; poetry’s special relationship with ‘craft’; work's relationship with gender, class, race, disability, and sexuality; how work gets recognised or rendered invisible in aesthetic production and beyond; the work of poetry and the work of political activism and organising; and the notion of poetry itself as a space where work and play can blur, and where postwork imaginaries can be nurtured and explored. Review “This volume represents an outstanding contribution to current debates in contemporary poetry. It examines the poetry of work and the work that poetry does in a highly original, theoretically sophisticated and analytically nuanced manner. The essays engage with work and labour across a range of poetries and constituencies and provide a timely address to the place of work in the context of a post-work future and the privatised digital market. It is likely to be seen as a major, paradigm-shifting work in relation to contemporary poetry.” (Robert Hampson, Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and author of Seaport (2008)  “To think poetry and work together is to question poetry’s standing both against and as work, to hypothesize what poetry itself might be in the world of those who wish to end all we have hitherto known as labor. The essays in this collection engage fearlessly with the permutations, consequences and destructive capacities of this questioning. They represent a new generation – perhaps, we hope, the last generation – of those who will even speak the words poetry and work as if they were commensurate. That the book speaks to such a hope is the highest possible form of recommendation.” (Anne Boyer, Associate Professor, Kansas City Art Institute, USA, and author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018) and Garments Against Women (2015))   “In a time when there is virtually no subjectivity that hasn’t found its ‘voice,’ no ‘topic’ that hasn’t been duly treated, no ‘issue’ that’s not been confronted, the concept and reality of work in poetics remains elusive at best; at worst, a near censorship of it reigns. But upon close examination, it becomes clear that overtly flushing out the phenomenon of work from aesthetic acts, embarrasses aesthetic discourse in general. Idealism collapses unto materialism. And it is from this humbling and renewed state of awareness that we must begin. In this riveting new collection, the three intertwined aspects of work – the symbolic, the productive, and the distributive – are explored thoroughly. The essays themselves stand as authentic poetic acts. Cultural archeologists of the future might well regard this volume as an essential guide to the ever expanding horizon of that strange human productive activity we call poetry.” (Rodrigo Toscano, author of Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008) and Explosion Rocks Springfield (2016))   “This collection of essays rigorously explores how capitalism, reproductive labor, the falling rate of profit, and acts of working are represented in post-war poetry. Poets are unacknowledged day job workers of the cultural production