Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization - Paperback

by Walt Hunter (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

"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 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, author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network

"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

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.

Walt Hunter is Assistant Professor of World Literature at Clemson University.

Author Biography

Walt Hunter is Associate Professor of World Literature at Clemson University. He is co-translator of Frédéric Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism.