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America! Review introduction to focus: Poetics: Demonstrations For and Against Joe Amato, Focus Editor And for starters, a caveat: this group of exemplary reviews was assembled, by and large, after the fact. I'd felt it essential that ABR address the substantial body ofwork coming out ofthe University of Alabama series on Modern and Contemporary Poetics , but as I continued to make review assignments, I noticed other reviews—Roger Mitchell's was the first (assigned by Rochelle Ratner)—that prompted me to consider poetics as a focus. It probably does little good to observe, at this point, that the result, thanks to my scattershot effort, hardly addresses poetics as other than a primarily North American pursuit; or that it fails decidedly in "mapping" any "comprehensive" state of this (meta)art, or of the presses responsible for bringing such articulations to their rarefied publics (Wesleyan UP is nowhere in sight, for instance); or that it reveals the stubborn preponderance of white male authors and reviewers that continues to perplex, even in this new century, our more expansively conceived initiatives. But more is at stake here, finally, than might be remedied by any gesture toward the international (if not globalized) or the historical (if not historicized). It's commonly, if tacitly, understood that when poets and writers talk poetics, Horace may be sipping his coffee across from you even while Watten is dunking his chocolate glazed. (Oops—two more white males.) Sure, the last few decades of attempts to bring the material conditions of production and consumption, including the materiality of symbol-making, to bear on the conceptual assumptions underwriting, or extending from, such conditions have complicated, perhaps, any easy rapprochement twixt the Roman of yore and his Motor City peer. (And if you're put off by a lingo that many of us learned in Theory for NonTheory Majors, that says something too.) Yet along with the interdiction not to neglect times and places and writing technologies has come a strategic and, in some ways, necessary forgetfulness—necessary, that is, to granting poetics its full share ofpoiesis. Not to mention which, any statement ofpoetics, as an assertion of methodological rationale, takes time to sink in—assuming that it doesn't simply sink, as is far more likely. Some language communities, included among which are numerous MFA programs, can be downright hostile to the notion that poetics can be a vital pursuit (aside from those tried and true varieties of fifty and sixty years ago). All ofwhich is to say—and here comes my lead, buried—that a certain free-spirited inertia prevails among poetry tribes, whether mainstream or avant (a tired binary), especially when it comes to advising wordsmiths how best to pin the shaggy tail on the ever-discontented donkey. Pragmatically speaking, few who regularly use a word like "poetics" are not intimately familiar both with specific literary-critical histories as well as with those more publicized histories that drive the noisy discourse of news, current events, and the like. And I wouldn't even be able to point to these competing histories were it not for the work, say, of New Historical historians in pulling out the narratological implications of historiography. Let me try another ten-gallon word, then: interventions. I'm intervening here at a specific moment of intellectual—some would observe, an//-intellectual—history; thus a history of interventions is at stake in all of this, as well. A certainfree-spirited inertia prevails amongpoetry tribes when it comes to advising wordsmiths how best to pin the tail on the ever-discontented donkey. Imagine my dismay, then, at discovering that, here, in this digressive bit of whatever, I would implicitly propose a dialectic of sorts between multinational , multicultural dislocations and inclusions and historical amnesia, with its selective remembrances. (See Horace and Watten, above.) I'm prone to rattling on, and on, about how the US public sphere comes up distressingly short when assessed in terms of historical aptitude, and I have no intention of ceasing and desisting anytime soon. But what if we really are in the midst of some epistemic shift, catalyzed by transnational whynot, digital whatnot, and bipartisan naught? What if Foucault was right, that is...

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