American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments This book has been a very long time in the making, and many wonderful people have encouraged me along the way. Years ago at the University of Washington I was inspired by the passion and dedication to the field shown by Tom Lockwood, Malcolm Griffith, Ross Posnock, Evan Watkins, and Jack Brenner. At Portland State University I was fortunate to study American feminist literature and Gertrude Stein with the brilliant Francesca Sawaya, and it was at her urging that I embarked on the PhD. Thank you, Francesca. At the University of California, Riverside, I had the greatest good fortune to walk into Steven Gould Axelrod’s postmodern American poetry class on the first day of my first semester, and the conversations Steve opened and expertly guided there form the foundation of everything that has followed. Thank you, Steve. Also at UCR, Traise Yamamoto led me through a rigorous education in feminist discourses and modern poetry, always with the highest of intellectual standards and the deep caring of the truest sort of teacher, and the lessons I learned under her tutelage are with me every day. Katherine Kinney and the late, great Emory Elliott offered brilliant courses in American literature and film and were terrific mentors at every step of the way, and Marguerite Waller’s course in Third World and feminist cinema was crucial to the development of my thinking about American popular culture. Many thanks also to Rise Axelrod, whose encouragement, generosity, and all around goodwill have made a great difference. x / acknowledgments My friends and colleagues in the English Department at Hunter College have supported me in ways I cannot hope to detail in full, but suffice to say that Louise DeSalvo, Jan Heller Levi, and Donna Masini were friends from the first, and our many conversations about writing and teaching have been essential to my professional development but also to my happiness in my department. Marlene Hennessy and Leigh Jones have been faithful and thankfully very funny friends, and Cristina Alfar has provided the strong encouragement and generous support that one hopes for in a department chair but that, sadly, is all too rare in this field. Finally, and not least, the students in my undergraduate and master’s classes at Hunter have been remarkable in their willingness to engage the work of little-known poets with seriousness and genuine excitement, and their questions and observations at times have led to important new threads of inquiry. I am fortunate to work with such vibrant and intellectually curious students, who make teaching a rewarding and generative part of my work. My research and writing have been helped along by Shelly Eversley, whose mentorship in the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program was crucial to the development of my argument in this book. My colleagues in the FFPP during the spring of 2010 were thoughtful readers and engaging interlocutors; sincere thanks to Maria Rice Bellamy, Jason Frydman, Jody Rosen, Charity Scribner, and Vanessa Valdes. Thank you to the City University of New York for that fellowship and for the time off it afforded. I am especially grateful for the two PSC CUNY research grants that allowed me to work at the UC San Diego Archive for New Poetry on two separate occasions. I would also like to thank the curators and staff at the Archive for New Poetry, who were extremely helpful in allowing me access to the archives. Deep thanks to Juliana Spahr and the anonymous reader at Rutgers University Press who offered tremendously helpful comments and raised crucial questions regarding earlier drafts of this manuscript; this book has been shaped by their engagement with my arguments, though of course all faults in the work are my own. Special thanks to Laura Mullen, who graciously granted an interview and who read and commented on an earlier version of the chapter included here. Thank you also to Katie Keeran at Rutgers University Press for her sound advice and guidance. This book could not have been written nor even attempted if not for the strong support of my husband, Dow Robbins. For fifteen years I have taken heart from his unending faith in me, faith that has carried me through years of graduate school and many lonely hours as I researched and wrote first a dissertation and now this book. Dow, this book is for acknowledgments / xi you first. And last but also first, I want to thank...