Race and Time: American Women's Poetics from Antislavery to Racial Modernity

Acknowledgments

I’ve dreamed of a three-hundred-page acknowledgments section accompanying a ten-page book, but that would be another story. A. Walton Litz showed me the door out of high male Modernism and into the hushed sepulchers of dead white women poets. Elaine Showalter pointed me toward several passages, one of which led directly to my previous book, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. The research staff at Firestone Library helped me illuminate obscure corners. U. C. Knoepflmacher nurtured my enthusiasm for nineteenth-century women’s poetry and pored over countless pages, urging them to speak. Deborah Nord showed me shadowy women on nineteenth-century streets, falling out of or breaking into modernity. Bill Gleason joined me on a porch when I was puzzling about poetry and racial modernity and coaxed bridges across the gaps. Pat Crain woke a late burst of joy in my hunches, and Juda Bennett and Michael Robertson offered discipline to my retrospective sensemaking. The teachings of Cathy Davidson, Jonathan Freedman, Diana Fuss, Sandra Gilbert, Allan G. Johnson, John Shoptaw, Andrew Ross, and Bryan Wolf echo through these passages. In the three-hundred-page acknowledgments , chapters would be devoted to teachers from longer ago, especially Mrs. Buggs, who let me be the Ghetto Witch in the school play. I exchanged energies with companions, as one says, “too numerous to list.” John Whittier-Ferguson read like a dream reader and led me into historical trauma. Ruth Bonner showed me how earlier academic women patrolled the fortresses of English. Deborah Meadows taught me about teaching. Paula Bennett has been a parallel universe. With Molly Weigel and Bill Piper, I hauled forgotten heritages out to the lawn. I turned to Bruce Simon and Lee Talley because I knew they would know if I had something. Acknowledgments In the unpredictable convalescence from beginning a life of scholarship, there are those who simply stick with you. My sisters Marie Cashion and Bobbi Gray repeatedly bought the story that I was writing a book and carried on as if that were normal. My stepson Brandon Mahlberg swapped thoughts with me about race, writing, and difference. Robert and Gladys Gray have been my other New Jersey, the wide, generous ground reaching away from narrowness. And George Mahlberg: artman, byteman, nonsense , and first reader. Special thanks to the people at the University of Iowa Press for their patient welcome, and to the press’s readers for their generous grasp of my aims, and to Gail Zlatnik for her joyful companionship into the last summer of the journey. And thank you, the College of New Jersey, for money to finish this book. viii Acknowledgments ...