"Progressive lit.": Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the politics of the lyric "I".
| Publisher | African American Review |
| Publication | African American Review |
| Subject | Ethnic, cultural, racial issues/studies |
| Format | Magazine/Journal |
| ISSN | 1062-4783 |
| Issues per Year | 4 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2-3 |
| Published | 2003-06-22 |
| Role | Type | Name |
| Person | n/a | Bruce Andrews |
| Person | n/a | Amiri Baraka |
| Author | n/a | Joseph Lease |
Bruce Andrews's poetry and criticism have done much to establish the assumptions about dissent that became standard for readers of Language poetry during the seventies and eighties. For many readers, Andrews's position made oppositional poetry in the tradition of Whitman impossible to believe in: Beat poetry, (1) for example, seemed politically unselfconscious. Andrews assumes that the lyric poet's freedom to dissent is only the freedom to say "yes" to the American ideology--individualism. (2) Calling poems that fail to explode the lyric "I"--in other words, false...
[This journal article is 5558 words long]
Join eNotes
The above is a free excerpt. Get complete access to our library of journals with the: