Avant-Garde Pieties tells a new story about innovative poetry; it argues that the avant-garde―now more than a century old―persists in its ability to nurture interesting, provocative, meaningful, and moving poems, despite its profound cultural failings and its self-devouring theoretical compulsions. It can do so because a humanistic strain of its radical poetics compels adherents to argue over the meaning of their shared political and aesthetic beliefs. In ways that can be productively thought of as religious in structure, this process fosters a perpetual state of crisis and renewal, always returning innovative poetry to its founding modernist commitments as a way to debate what the avant-garde is―what it should and does look like, and what it should and does value. Consequently, Avant-Garde Pieties makes way for a radical poetics defined not by formal gestures, but by its debate with itself about itself. It is a debate that honors the tradition’s intellectual founding as well as its cultural present, which includes aesthetic multiformity, racialized and gendered modes of authorship, experiences of the sacred, political activism, and generosity in critical disagreement.

Avant-Garde Pieties: Aesthetics, Race, and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

Literature & Fiction

Bettridge, Joel

History & Criticism

Routledge

Poetry. "In PRESOCRATIC BLUES the presocratics walk among us, obsessed with the everyday: the rain, the bar, the blues. And the poems that result are full of correspondence, of discovery in the Spicerian sense. These are poems that remind us that behind every simple moment is a larger question about the universe and humanities place in it"--Juliana Spahr. "In PRESOCRATIC BLUES, Joel Bettridge takes us back home, back to that poor old actuality at the pre-Socratic horizon of thought and matter. But we are no happier for it. We go down to the river, a Heraclitan flux that just keeps rolling, witness to despair and wicked deeds. These are sharply intelligent poems, full of acerbic wit, absurdity, and heartbreak"--Devin Johnston.

Presocratic Blues

Poetry

Chax Press

Poetry. "In THAT ABRUPT HERE Joel Bettridge proposes an entirely tender yet radical new imagination of the elegy: i.e., a blessing underway; a ceremony in wandering search of its proper and beloved lost occasion. In the deep-root meaning of the word, these poems are momentous."—Donald Revell

That Abrupt Here

The Cultural Society

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Books by Bettridge, Joel