Articles

In Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, I discuss at length Harryette Mullen’s book-length blues epic, Muse & Drudge. Mullen is an African American poet whose work has been unreservedly embraced across a range of audiences as exemplary of black innovative poetics. Muse & Drudge — along with others of her books — is taught in courses designed to illuminate modernist and postmodernist genealogies within US poetry and, likewise, in courses surveying the tradition(s) of African American poetry. My analysis of Muse & Drudge identifies and problematizes the tendency for both of these contexts to produce (differently) skewed readings of this complex, polyvocal text.

Brenda Hillman’s poetry circumnavigates around the overarching interest of spirit, matter, and everything in between. Even though Hillman’s work is often uncategorizable, she works within a vein that combines traditional lyric as well as more experimental forms. In addition, she incorporates various theologies and esoteric philosophies in her writing. Hillman has said of herself, “I think of myself as a mystic in a practical way.”[1] Hillman blends cultural references, nature, and the spiritual with an open lyric form that leaves room for mystical experiences to occur on the page. Hillman’s poetry can be read as enacting an alchemical process where spirit is turned into matter and matter into spirit.