Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Glaser, Ben
• Jaussen, Paul
• Balkun, Mary Mcaleer
• Gray, Jeffrey

Titel

The Black Quatrain and America's Racialized Poetics

Ist Teil von

• A Companion to American Poetry, 2022, p.199-215

Ort / Verlag

Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library All Obooks

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In this chapter, the author establishes how black poetics counters racialized ideals of embodiment—especially rhythmic presence—by highlighting genre codes and conceiving the four‐beat line and quatrain as “pseudomorphic” form. By treating poetic form and prosody as a space for reflection on sedimented history, he follows Jacqueline Goldsby's articulation of genre and genre aesthetics as “an expression of cognition”. The author's attention to the prosodic cognition of sedimented history draws as well on an Adornian tradition most recently applied to black aesthetics by Brent Hayes Edwards. He emphasizes how a pseudomorphic idea of prosody negates the version of medium specificity that exiles black poets from modern mediums into “performance,” orality, and atavistic literary historical positions. The author argues that black poetics, in marking the quatrain as formally and thematically alienated, deracinates the broader racialized ecology of American poetry and poetics.