Sumario: | "This book attempts to provide a context for a poetics of resistance and refuge that predates the Trump Age and will be necessary long after it. In order to survive such moments, we need to glean the present and past for what might sustain us for the work ahead. The Sound of Listening gathers ten years of essays on poetry and builds on Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, since 1941 (2007), staking a claim for the cultural work that a poem can perform--from providing refuge to embodying resistance, from recovering silenced voices to imagining and modeling a more just and peaceful world. Rather than delivering judgments of poetic taste, these essays are experiments in questioning and performances of possibility, an attempt to widen my own (and the reader's) listening and seeing. These essays ask: What if X were poetry? And if poetry were Y? I seek to claim spaces for both "tactical poetry" and "strategic poetry," as Thomas McGrath once termed them. For McGrath, tactical poems are often ephemeral works keyed to immediate events "without falling into political slogans," while strategic poems expand consciousness, untethered to a specific cultural or political moment--yet nonetheless invite us to change.3 While some essays in The Sound of Listening further explore the intersections between poetry and resistance, others inquire into movements in contemporary poetry that draw upon the world (documentary poetics), or literally draw on the world (lang/scape poetry, installation poetry) or draw us out into the world (translation, Arab American poetry, cosmopoetics, etc.)"--
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