Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
I. Shorter Essays
1. Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and
Including the Excluded 3
2. Poetry and Identity 9
3. Kinky Quatrains: The Making of Muse & Drudge 13
4. Telegraphs from a Distracted Sibyl 18
5. If Lilies are Lily White: From the Stain of Miscegenation in Stein’s “Melanctha” to the “Clean Mixture” of White and Color in Tender Buttons 20
6. Nine Syllables Label Sylvia: Reading Plath’s “Metaphors” 29
7. Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem: Wislawa Szymborska in the Dialogue of Creative and Critical Thinkers 35
8. Theme for the Oulipians 44
9. When He Is Least Himself: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Double Consciousness in African American Poetry 49
10. Truly Unruly Julie: The Innovative Rule-Breaking Poetry of Julie Patton 57
11. All Silence Says Music Will Follow: Listening to Lorenzo Thomas 60
12. The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Stretching the Dialogue of African American Poetry 68
II. Longer Essays
13. African Signs and Spirit Writing 79
14. Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved 102
15. Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness 130
16. Phantom Pain: Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook 155
17. A Collective Force of Burning Ink: Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti 162
18. Incessant Elusives: The Oppositional Poetics of Erica Hunt and Will Alexander 173
III. Interviews
19. “The Solo Mysterioso Blues”: An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Calvin Bedient 185
20. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Daniel Kane 204
21. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Elisabeth A. Frost 213
22. An Interview with Harryette Mullen by Cynthia Hogue 233
23. “I Dream a World”: A Conversation with Harryette Mullen by Nibir K. Ghosh 258
Bibliography 267
