In 1949, Montreal poet Louis Dudek circulated a package of poetry manuscripts through a decentralized network of writers working in the U.S. and Canada that he called the “Poetry Grapevine.” In the manifesto-like instructions for the project, Dudek declares that “THERE IS A LOT MORE HAPPENING IN OUR DAILY LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS (NOT TO SPEAK OF UN…[Read more]

In the centuries since William Shakespeare’s death, numerous stage and, more recently, film and television adaptations of his work have emerged to inspire, comfort, and provoke audiences in far-flung corners of the globe. As early as 1619, for example, Hamlet was performed in colonial Indonesia to entertain European expatriates. In 1845, U.S. Army…[Read more]

This essay identifies four major factors responsible for the use of vernacular in Anglophone Caribbean poetry. Analyses of selected texts by Lorna Goodison, Louise Bennett, Kendel Hippolyte, and DerekWalcott illustrate that these four factors include the representation of working class characters, subversive protests against the imposition of…[Read more]

In a 1972 poem about Vancouver Island, Mexican writer José Emilio Pacheco wonders, “Acaso fue el Aztlán de las mexicas / De allí partieron siete tribus.” Though Pacheco spent several years living in Vancouver during the late 1960s and early 1970s—and was published in a 1971 anthology of poetry “From Canada’s Unofficial Languages”—h…[Read more]

Recent scholarship has focused on the flowering of poetry that engaged with geographic and spatial logics in the United States in the years following the Second World War, notably in Lytle Shaw’s 2013 study Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics. Alongside such works as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maxim…[Read more]

To move global Shakespeare studies beyond the more limiting scope of nation-state and cultural profiling, I would like to propose we consider a number of critical concepts as methodology. These concepts critique the limitations of cartographic imagination, and connect the performance site to spaces of knowledge production: (1) the site of…[Read more]

An introduction to a newly published edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Christina Rossetti, sexuality, narrative poems

This paper analyzes Walt Whitman’s American Civil War poems in his collection Drum-Taps
in comparison with the poetry written by British soldier-poets of WWI. These poems present
Whitman as a problematic model for future generations of war poets since he hardly ever
questions the meaninglessness of bloodshed in the battlefield, a trait which i…[Read more]

How does our daily mindreading—that is, our attribution and misattribution of mental states (such as thoughts, feelings, and intentions) to ourselves and others—differ from the mindreading we engage in when we read fiction? I have argued elsewhere (e.g., “Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA, 2015) that drama, novels, and narrative poetry play and exp…[Read more]