Pragmatist Improvisations

Michael Magee's Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing and Nathaniel Mackey's Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews expand our sense of what is at stake in a pragmatist poetics and increase our understanding of American pragmatism (Magee), its implicit affiliations with different cross-cultural projects (Mackey), and its continuing relevance to contemporary poets and writers. Emancipating Pragmatism traces a rhetorically experimental and socially democratic aesthetic beginning with Emerson's anti-slavery essays and running concurrently through improvisational jazz; the writings of William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, and Frank O'Hara; and the contemporary innovation of poets such as Susan Howe and Harryette Mullen. And while the writings and interviews collected in Paracritical Hinge do not explicitly reference the philosophical discourse of American pragmatism, the various forms of liminality that permeate Mackey's poetry, his jazz-influenced prose, and his criticism further demonstrate the ongoing processes of transformation that Magee ascribes to an Emersonian/African-American pragmatism.