The history of Iranian modernism is inseparable from the history of literary translation. In most accounts of Iranian literary history, the translation of European literary works played a formative role in the redefinition of poetic discourse as well as in the introduction of new literary genres, such as the short story and the novel, to modern Persian literature. In his landmark study of Iranian literary modernism, Mohammad Reza Shafiʿi-Kadkani rejects the ascription of originality to Iranian...

In 1951, Tristan Tzara looked back upon Dada and its works and attempted to summarize the breadth of their aggression: “Dada took the offensive and attacked the social system in its entirety.” [1] For Tzara, however, this had a specific goal: to “direct . . . [their] attacks against the very fundaments of society, language as the agent of communication between individuals, logic as the cement” (Tzara, “Introduction,” 404). [2] In many ways, Dadaist poetry uniquely embraced and embodied these...

In twenty-first century poetry about the millennial wars in Iraq, the deities and heroes of ancient Mesopotamia are congregating. Dunya Mikhail’s “Inanna” imagines the eponymous Sumerian goddess decrying the sight of “antiquities / scattered / and broken / in the museum.”

This summer, the modernist scholar Johanna Winant and I found ourselves working on a number of converging projects, from book chapters to essays on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy and Donald Hall’s poetry. Below we reflect on the process of writing together, sharing work, and discovering the kinds of friendship that collaboration makes possible

Major advances in modernist poetics have long occurred through contact with experiments in the visual and plastic arts: one need only think of the “cubist” poetics of Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Gertrude Stein, of the New York School’s links to Abstract Expressionism, or, most recently, of conceptual writing’s regular citation of Brion Gysin’s claim that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” [1] Poets would find their community amongst artists; but also, the poetics...

My farewell post for the “Process” column is a brief conversation with Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and a scholar whose work I admire greatly and follow closely. He gives serious attention to strong poets who aren’t always read with such insight, as well as leveling powerful arguments about how verse frames identity, feeling, and nation. In short, his labors help me think through scholarly problems and build syllabi...

An early letter from Willa Cather to Zoë Akins in 1914 consists almost entirely of blunt feedback to the aspiring writer. Some representative lines, "This story, my dear Zoe is written to be smart. . . . There’s either got to be real feeling in a story, or an intellectual interest of the highest order. . . .

Brazilian Modernist Oswald De Andrade adapts a line from Shakespeare, “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question,” in his 1928 “Cannibalist Manifesto.” [1] The rest of the manifesto is in Brazilian Portuguese. Is this recycling of Shakespeare part of the search for cultural identity—a sign of the fraught relationship of the indigenous to the nation—or is it just wordplay? I asked this question in my seminar “Law of the Cannibal: Trans-American Poetics” to launch a discussion about poetic origin...

In modern poetry courses and American literature surveys, I’ve often used Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice Denied in Massachusetts” (1927) to begin a unit on protest poetry focused mostly on the 1930s. [1] Among my central goals in such courses are to explore the richly varied forms of social engagement found in modern American verse, and to establish that every poem has some degree of sociopolitical resonance. Thus I try to avoid segregating protest poems as if they belonged to a different...

Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical, she said, I mean altruistically bugbearish —Lyn Hejinian, My Life [1] I’d like to begin this essay with an experimental “deformance” of a literary text, reversing Lyn Hejinian’s terms in the epigraph above to ask “Isn’t the pedagogical always avant-garde?” By posing this question, I certainly don’t mean to imply that all pedagogy is inherently innovative. I agree with Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr who find that “[c]ontemporary literary pedagogy is...