Forms of a World
Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization
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What happens when we think of poetry as a global literary form, while also thinking the global in poetic terms? Forms of a World shows how the innovations of contemporary poetics have been forged through the transformations of globalization across five decades. Sensing the changes wrought by neoliberalism before they are made fully present, poets from around the world have creatively intervened in global processes by remaking poetry’s formal repertoire. In experimental reinventions of the ballad, the prospect poem, and the ode, Hunter excavates a new, globalized interpretation of the ethical and political relevance of forms.
Forms of a World contends that poetry’s role is not only to make visible thematically the violence of global dispossessions, but to renew performatively the missing conditions for intervening within these processes. Poetic acts—the rhetoric of possessing, belonging, exhorting, and prospecting—address contemporary conditions that render social life ever more precarious. Examining an eclectic group of Anglophone poets, from Seamus Heaney and Claudia Rankine to Natasha Trethewey and Kofi Awoonor, Hunter elaborates the range of ways that contemporary poets exhort us to imagine forms of social life and enable political intervention unique to but beyond the horizon of the contemporary global situation.
In a field dominated by the novel, we need smart critics like Walt Hunter to explore and reveal poetry’s very different engagements with politics and economics. In Hunter’s insightful readings, we see contemporary U.S., British, Ghanaian, Iraqi, Irish, Jamaican, and Kashmiri poets turning to longstanding formal traditions—including the ode, the ghazal, and the lyric apostrophe—in order to rethink and remake poetry for our own calamitous moment. From territorial dispossession to denials of citizenship and from financial precarity to environmental devastation, Hunter shows the agonies of globalization emerging to prompt subtle and inventive poetic responses.---Caroline Levine, Cornell University
This smart, engaging, and timely book sets aside old divides like modern/postmodern in order to think periodizing according to the rhythms of capitalism. Finely written, with many moments of startling beauty and poetic nuance, Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of poetry’s importance in the twenty-first century.---Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University
Forms of a World... serves as a model for what should become, for conscientious readers of contemporary poetry, a collective undertaking to remake the field.---ASAP Journal
...Hunter’s Forms of a World remains a major achievement in contemporary criticism: one that advances beyond the national boundaries of American literature to address just how far twenty-first century poetry in the US matters to the planet and its global challenges to come.---American Literary History
This is a book that is keenly aware of the breadth and depth of contemporary poetry, the global conditions that create it, and the shifting terrain of contemporary poetry criticism... a timely and thought-provoking book that will be of interest to scholars of poetry and poets themselves, as well as students and academics looking to navigate 21st century literature through adjacent fields touching on politics, economics, social justice, and the climate crisis.---Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
[Hunter's] synthesis between globalization studies and poetry criticism proves mutually beneficial: as Forms of a World makes clear, an understanding of global capitalism makes poetic innovations of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries newly legible.---Contemporary Literature
...Forms of a World establishes Hunter alongside Jahan Ramazani, Omaar Hena, Robert Stilling, Nathan Suhr-
---Stephanie Burt, Critical Inquiry
Sytsma, and Justin Quinn... as experts on specifically international Anglophone poetic goings-on, who try to contribute to the study of globalization, within and outside literary fields.
Walt Hunter reads a wide range of representative texts, showing an impressive command of many cultural traditions and critical approaches.
---Jeff Westover, American Literature
Forms of a World is a necessary and important addition to monographs engaging with global, post-colonial, and comparative poetics, such as those written by Jahan Ramazani, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Jacob Edmond, and Omaar Hena. Readers of these texts and authors will see that this book is essential for anyone studying the sociopolitical dynamics of global poetry.
---Comparative Literature Studies
...Hunter’s Forms of a World builds his reading of largely contemporary poetry upon the synthesis of economistic Marxism and world-systems theory... Adding a welcome attention to prosody and genre to this body of work, Hunter has authored a politically committed and much-needed defense of poetry in an era defined by neoliberal claims to the “global commons.”---The Georgia Review
Introduction 1
1. Stolen Landscapes: The Investments of the Ode and the Politics of Land 19
2. Let Us Go: Lyric and the Transit of Citizenship 44
3. The Crowd to Come: Poetic Exhortations from Brooklyn to Kashmir 65
4. The No-Prospect Poem: Poetic Views of the Anthropocene 90
Coda 119
Acknowledgments 129
Notes 133
Bibliography 165
Index 183
