Spatial Poetics

Yasmine Shamma enjoys, reads, and teaches a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and her research examines the relationship of environments to literary forms. She earned her BA from the American University of Beirut, her MA from Georgetown University, and her DPhil from the University of Oxford. In between these academic pursuits, she worked as a writer, editor, and researcher for an array of institutions throughout the US and Middle East.

What is the relationship between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we create? Does living in a messy downtown New York City apartment automatically translate to writing a messy New York School poem? This volume addresses the 'environment' of the urban apartment, illuminating the relationship between the structures of New York City apartments and that of New York School poems. It utilizes the lens of urban and spatial theory to widen the possibilities afforded by New Critical and reader-response readings of this postmodern American poetry. In drawing this connection between consciousness and form, it draws on various senses of the environment as informing influence, inviting avant-garde American poetry to be reconsidered as uniquely organic in its responsiveness to its surroundings.

Focusing exclusively and comprehensively on Second Generation New York School poetry, this is the first book-length study to attend to the poetry of this postmodern American movement, encouraging American poetry scholars to resituate New York School poetry within larger critical narratives of postmodern innovation.

Focusing on Second Generation New York School poetry from 1960 to the present day, this volume explores the poets who lived and wrote from or about New York, the forms of their poems, and the a relationship between the structures they inhabited and the structures they created.