American Poems Standing in the Way

Advocating a discipline he calls “Object-Oriented Philology”, Harald Zapf looks at verbal art objects from an unusually wide variety of American verse cultures – both official and unofficial ones. These individual poems, most of which were published between the early 1960s and the late 2010s, are approached intrinsically and extrinsically. Zapf’s interpretive and analytical endeavors center around Amiri Baraka as a seminal figure of the American poetic canon. In slow and scrupulous readings, he calls attention to key aspects of verse in general and contemporary American verse in particular: form, performance, voice, and play as well as history, ideology, identity, ethnicity, and authority. All in all, this book is an apologia for aesthetic autonomy and a defense of a philologically appropriate treatment of literary objects.