Network Poetics: The Making of Anglophone Poetry

188 pages“Network Poetics: The Making of Global Anglophone poetry” offers a comparative account of the mediums through which Afro-diasporic poets from Africa, the Americas, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean developed literary networks. It argues that Afro-diasporic poets imagined and enacted new relationships to political subjectivity and aesthetic practice through networks of international connections coalesced around specific modes and mediums of engagement. The mediums engaged in this study range from concrete media forms, such as little magazines and the internet, to abstract mediums of engagement, such as conference halls. Utilizing historical archives, close-reading, and digital network modeling and mapping, this dissertation develops a historicization of Anglophone poetry from the 1960s into the 2000s as formed and scaled by specific forms of association to culture and diaspora as formed by Afro-diasporic poetry communities. To facilitate this, the dissertation focuses on the works and life of poets and their interlocutors who navigate beyond nation-state frameworks. As such, this dissertation examines the movements of poets like Derek Walcott and John Pepper Clark between West Africa, the Caribbean, East Africa, and Germany to study the role of institutional support and translation practices in the development of Anglophone poetry; the use of translation and transnationality in the little magazines LOTUS: Afro-Asian Writings; and community formation for the editors and writers of UMBRA as a political and creative conduit for global south relation and the development of literary coteries. The final network studied in the project looks at the internet as a decentralized network in the works of Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Mendi and Keith Obadike. By doing so, I show how they engage with race, nationhood, and racial capital in their work in order to highlight how new media enables a contemporary engagement with questions of global relation and the value of identarian politics to art and poetry. This dissertation asks, what is world poetry, and what mechanisms enabled it to come into being? What if we were to situate Afro-diasporic poets as major catalysts and actors in this development? How did poets imagine and enact a global poetics energized by the emergence of new nation-states and modes of political and cultural organizing? And ultimately, and perhaps most importantly to all this thinking is a question driven by Lucille Clifton, which asks how is poetry “a way of living in the world”?2024-09-0