Poetry and Cultural Studies

That sounds like "oil and water" to a lot of people. And my contribution in the new Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (U. of Illinois) explains why. But, really, this project, from Maria Damon and Ira Livingston, has been long anticipated b/c it will fill an enormous gap in the literature - esp. for the classroom. As the table of contents shows, they include everyone from Wordsworth to Frankfurt to Today, giving "cultural studies" a broad purview - and including lots of definitions of poetry in the process. Hopefully this book will make more younger scholars realize that, yes, poetry is a part of the same cultural-historical narrative that fiction critics have been talking about lo these many years.