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10 pages, 200 KiB

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“I Have All the Time in the World”: Bernadette Mayer’s Being in Time

by Amy Moorman Robbins

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 147; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070147 - 11 Jul 2025

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for [...] Read more.

This essay argues that several of Bernadette Mayer’s major works foreground and develop experiences of subjective time as moments of resistance to the standardizing force of objective clock and calendric time that governs daily material existence. Basing my argument on a framework for subjective time developed in the field of linguistics, I show how Mayer’s play with duration, temporal recursiveness, and moments of stopped time in works including Memory, Midwinter Day, Works and Days, and Milkweed Smithereens function as subversions of the normative material every day, and I argue that throughout her work Mayer is preoccupied with not merely representing time, its content, and its passage, but rather with gaining mastery over objective time and subverting its authority altogether. This essay joins the scant research on time and temporality in Mayer’s work and offers an invitation to further study of subjective time as a mode of resistance in contemporary poetry. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

17 pages, 1063 KiB

Open AccessArticle

In More Than Words: Ecopoetic Hybrids with Visual and Musical Arts

by Lynn Keller

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070145 - 8 Jul 2025

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Abstract

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character [...] Read more.

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character of environmental writing and its attachment to material conditions of planetary life particularly invite the use of visual and/or audio technologies as documentation or as prompts toward multisensory attention that may shift readers’ perceptions of the more-than-human world. This essay examines four recent works of ecopoetry from the US to explore some of the diverse ways in which, by integrating into volumes of poetry their own visual and musical art, poets are expanding the environmental imagination and enhancing their environmental messaging. The visual and musical elements, I argue, offer fresh perceptual lenses that help break down cognitive habits bolstering separations of Western humans from more-than-human realms or dampening awareness of social and cultural norms that foster environmental degradation and violations of environmental justice. The multi-modal works discussed are Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray, and Jonathan Skinner’s “Blackbird Stanzas.” Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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16 pages, 2159 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Towards a Poetics of Interruption: The Influence of North American Mixed-Genre Poetries on Recent Irish Poetry

by Julie Morrissy

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 142; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070142 - 4 Jul 2025

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Abstract

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies [...] Read more.

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies in a number of exemplary texts, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip in the North American context and ISDAL by Susannah Dickey, The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell, and MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello, among others. This comparative approach encompasses close readings and analysis of particular compositional approaches evident in both national contexts, in addition to the use of archival sources, news-reporting, and aesthetic strategies of interruption. The article suggests that “a poetics of material interruption” is at play in poetries on both sides of the Atlantic, gesturing towards marginalising forces of gender and colonisation, thus linking to themes prevalent in the above poetries in both Irish and North American contexts. The author poses a “poetics of material interruption” in the aesthetics and composition of the above mixed-genre poetries, perhaps arising from their interactions with the material conditions to which they respond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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12 pages, 211 KiB

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Hybridity in Joshua Whitehead’s Full Metal Indigiqueer

by Heather Milne

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070140 - 4 Jul 2025

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Abstract

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through [...] Read more.

This essay reads Oji-Cree poet Joshua Whitehead’s full metal indigiqueer in relation to hybridity. Whitehead’s poems are both lyrical and experimental, offering a hybrid poetics that resonates with existing critical discussions of hybridity, but he also extends hybrid poetics in new directions through his engagement with posthuman and Indigenous futurism and through his development of Zoa, the hybridized trickster figure who combines the technological and the biological, who features so prominently throughout the collection. Indigiqueerness emerges in these poems as a hybrid identity positioned not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first century and beyond. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

13 pages, 208 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Against Erasure: Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead

by Jeannine Marie Pitas

Humanities 2025, 14(7), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14070139 - 3 Jul 2025

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Abstract

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and [...] Read more.

“Know that in place of a heart I carry a tongue,” writes the unnamed poetic speaker of Mexican poet Balam Rodrigo’s Central American Book of the Dead. This documentary poetic text alternates between the voices of Central American immigrants journeying north and a subtle yet bold revision of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, with some words from the Friar’s 1552 text replaced by other words that reflect the realities of twenty-first century immigrants traveling north. Interspersed with de la Casas’s texts are persona poems in which we are invited to listen to the ghosts of immigrants who have suffered tragic deaths. This essay explores the ways that, crossing borders between time and space while drawing strength from his Christian faith, Rodrigo resists the erasure of Indigenous peoples, honors their journeys, and invites readers into solidarity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

16 pages, 262 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Way Poets Read Now

by Elizabeth Sarah Coles

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 133; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060133 - 19 Jun 2025

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Abstract

The way literature scholars read now has been under scrutiny for over a decade. The same long decade has seen an explosion in experimental literatures that make reading in the literary-critical sense a matter for poets: a poet’s hybrid, whose disturbance of [...] Read more.

The way literature scholars read now has been under scrutiny for over a decade. The same long decade has seen an explosion in experimental literatures that make reading in the literary-critical sense a matter for poets: a poet’s hybrid, whose disturbance of genre is claimed by publishers as the writing’s main attraction. This paper explores the disturbance of literary criticism in the work of contemporary North American poets, Maureen N. McLane and Lisa Robertson. Asking how these poets read now, the paper argues that an exchange of powers between analysis and performance reorients criticism toward a hybrid ‘dramatic’ mode, activist in its sensibilities and committed to a redistribution of agencies by style and form. Far from deepening the divide between creative and academic criticism, these poets model the significance of composition, prosody, and voice for critical writing of all kinds. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

16 pages, 1049 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ritual and Assemblage: Reading Hybrid Elegy Through Changing American Death Practices

by Anastasia Nikolis

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060127 - 11 Jun 2025

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Abstract

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and [...] Read more.

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and other genres. This is most notable in the ever-increasing interest in the lyric essay but also in the constant revision of contemporary elegy as anti-elegy. In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani defines anti-elegy in terms of its refusal of consolation and instead its seeking of more melancholic mourning. Subsequently, as noted by Bardazzi, Binetti, and Culler, “Elegy remains a poetic genre and yet, it has also developed a ‘mode of discourse’ that moves beyond its literary borders and finds its expressions in entangled intra-actions between the most diverse range of elegiac objects”. In the early 21st century, hybrid elegy represents the collision of two major changes in American culture: the changing nature of American death rituals and the increasingly intermedial literary landscape. Drawing on examples from Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed in assemblages of images and text on the page. When read as a personalized American death ritual, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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15 pages, 219 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Unbearable Birth: Natality in Louise Glück’s Averno

by Reena Sastri

Humanities 2025, 14(6), 122; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14060122 - 9 Jun 2025

Viewed by 324

Abstract

This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion [...] Read more.

This essay argues for the importance of the overlooked theme of natality in the poetry of Louise Glück. In its guise as mortality, human finitude causes pain through the permanence of death; in its guise as natality, finitude can also be an occasion for wonder at the unlikely chance of having been born, and the contingency and possibility for beginning something new associated with natality by Hannah Arendt and others. In Glück’s work, the theme of natality comes across in poems concerning pregnancy, birth, infants, children, and mothers. Several of her poems feature a hybrid identification as child and as mother, a hybridity that enables the apprehension of natality and that leads to a mode of poetic speech that originates in, and is imbricated with, listening as an alternative to knowing. This essay examines some of Glück’s earlier poetry in these terms before turning to her 2006 volume Averno, which retells the myth of Persephone. Undeniably preoccupied with death, Averno is, I argue, equally concerned with birth, mindful that human finitude itself is double or hybrid. Although many poems cast Demeter as a smothering, possessive mother, Averno, at key moments, takes into account a mother’s perspective as well as a child’s. This hybrid identification gives rise to the emergence of an unexpected lyric voice that both listens and sings. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Hybridity and Border Crossings in Contemporary North American Poetry)

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