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This article addresses the experimental Detroit-based publisher known as the Alternative Press, which published eccentric works of art and poetry—in the form of bumper stickers and postcards, among other useful objects—between 1969 and 1999. While the Alternative Press is largely unknown to scholars, this article traces its influences on poets, including Victor Hernández Cruz, Robert Creeley, Diane di Prima, Ted Berrigan, and Alice Notley. It suggests that although these poets (and additional Press contributors) are generally grouped according to other geographical or formal tendencies, involvement with the Alternative Press produced an aesthetics of intermedia experimentation that traversed poetic schools, eras, and allegiances in the late twentieth-century United States. It situates the Alternative Press in the context of better-known art-world movements, such as Mail Art and Fluxus, and links the Press's founders—Ann and Ken Mikolowski—with other influential publishers and artists of the time, notably Dick Higgins. This article introduces substantial new archival research conducted at the University of Michigan Special Collections, and prompts scholars to consider how a Detroit-based publisher can remap the geographical and generic contours of late-twentieth-century US poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with poet Menka Shivadasani is presented. Topics include she was encouraged by a young freelance journalist Rajika Kirpalani, who asked to see her work and then convinced a newspaper editor to publish it, she discussed the role of religion in Indian English poetry, and she conveyed the meaning of her first collection Nirvana at Ten Rupees.

The article discusses the idea of reprinting eighteenth-century autobiographies by war poet and literary critic Edmund Blunden. It describes the reprinting of English poet and dramatist Mary Darby Robinson's life story as recorded in her book "Memoirs." It includes her life events, including inclination towards poetry and theater performance, marriage at a young age, publication of a book of poetry to ease her husband's debts, and working in theater professionally.

This section presents the English translation of the afterword to American poet Charles Bernstein's book "Renflouer la poésie," that was initially published in French language. Topics discussed include the introduction of Bernstein's poetry collection to the French audience, the publication of his works in various magazines and chapbooks in France, and the significant role of Bernstein in the Language poets literary movement.

Before it became a leading poetry publisher, Carcanet was a student magazine set up by undergraduates who wanted to link Oxford and Cambridge. This article sheds light on the forgotten history of Carcanet magazine, focusing particularly on women and ethnic minorities. Prior to Michael Schmidt's takeover of the magazine in late 1967, Carcanet offered opportunities to writers from India and ex-colonies (including Adil Jussawalla and Edward Brathwaite) to publish their work, before moving on to more mainstream venues. Carcanet magazine can be seen as a site of struggle between various players: between the Oxford and Cambridge literary sets, and between British/European and postcolonial groups. Drawing on extensive archival work in neglected collections, as well as oral history interviews, this article tells an alternative history of Carcanet magazine as a case study for the larger literary field of post-war Britain. The story is less focused on Michael Schmidt, without diminishing his accomplishment in transforming a student magazine into an enduring publishing enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the contradictions of the contemporary literary field that appears both increasingly capacious and more exclusionary than in the past. Discussing the expansion of publishing enabled by digital and online technologies, we note that these changes did not reshape the demographics of most published works in the US, which remain overwhelmingly white authored. We then turn to literary prizes as an indicator of who writes prestige literature, narrating the twentieth-century formation of a racially segregated field and its slow changes against the backdrop of publishing overproduction. Combining a history of prestige literary culture with a demographic analysis of prizewinning writers (1918–2019), we discuss how a mostly white, New Critic-dominated field became the much more diverse and wide-ranging scene of the present. While this area has importantly opened up to writers of different backgrounds, our data show that the inequities of earlier prizegiving now take shape as drastic educational barriers to entry. Observing that a great deal of contemporary literature dramatizes the peculiarity of performing racial difference—often under the auspices of white audiences—we argue that the path to "excellence" has never been more narrow for writers who are not white, and Black writers in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1937, the Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever published a long poem entitled "Shtern in shney" ["Stars in the Snow"] in Warsaw. Over a decade later, the text was revised, refined, and republished in Jerusalem, where it appeared as the stand-alone book Sibir [ Siberia ]. Published first in Hebrew (1952) and then Yiddish (1953), the volumes boasted original drawings by Marc Chagall. Nearly ten years later, the work was translated into English in London, this time with the support of UNESCO and alongside a new preface by Chagall and a translator's note by Jacob Sonntag. Finally, it appeared as the opening poem of Sutzkever's collected works in 1963. The work would go on to be praised across languages as the signature text of Sutzkever's career. Yet while praise for each iteration was uniform, the texts themselves diverged in form, scope, and agenda. The following article examines the relationship between these complementary and competing iterations of Sutzkever's work—referred to here collectively as "Sibir." Doing so reveals "Sibir" to be a reflection of the poet's strategic modes of self-fashioning and the vicissitudes of the publishing process that both permitted and denied Sutzkever interpretive control. The history of "Sibir," I demonstrate, is the history of multiple visions and re-visions of what it means write as, publish under, and garner fame through the name "Sutzkever"—in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining Hart Crane's engagements with his editors and magazine publishers enables a reappraisal of his poetry and its critical reception. This reassessment pioneers an author study through methodologies associated with periodical studies with a close focus on the early stages of Crane's career, highlighting developments that were prompted by his reading of contemporaneous experiments in 'post-Decadence' in Greenwich Village journals of the late 1910s. This article examines the influence on his poetry of their particular brand of 'post-Decadent' modernism by looking at the shift from Crane's imitative efforts in fin-de-siècle poetics with 'C33' (Bruno's Weekly) and 'Carmen de Boheme' (Bruno's Bohemia) to later publications 'Echoes' and 'Modern Craft' in The Pagan that showcased his 'yellow book sympathies' using Imagistic forms, revealing Crane to be an 'Imagist in amber' (in Genevieve Taggard's suggestive phrase). Crane distanced himself from Village journals in 1919, and this article posits that this move marked an aesthetic shift from the sincere experiments in 'post-Decadence' and Imagism that characterize his early verse to the cosmopolitan, 'machine age' aesthetic of his later work. Finally, this article demonstrates how patterns established in his immediate reception are reproduced in later criticism – and may even explain his relative critical neglect. For his contemporary reviewers, who set the tone of his reception, he never quite escaped his association with Greenwich Village post-Decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Each week, for one whole year, the young German poet Lydia Daher produced one poem using only the words and illustrations found in a single literary review of that week's newspaper. In this way, Daher composed poetry consisting of words and phrases sampled from literary reviews that themselves contained quotes sampled from the literary works being reviewed. In this essay, I show how Daher's collages represent not only a practical application of what she terms the recontextualizing function of poetry, but also how closely they conform to the theories of musical sampling outlined by Pelleter and Lepa. 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term 'Hindustani' itself—must be taken on their own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Vittorio Bodini’s journal L’esperienza poetica (1954-1956). It does so by locating its critical interventions within a cultural juncture characterized on the one hand by the end of hermeticism, and on the other by the consolidation of neo-realism as the dominant literary discourse. The study evaluates not only the affinities that link L’esperienza poetica to the journal Officina, but also the differences with other journals in the field. The article analyses the journal’s support for up-and-coming poets that did not conform to the dominant paradigms (post-hermeticism; neo-realism). In particular, the study demonstrates how the support and visibility given to the poetry of Umberto Bellintani and other minor figures can illuminate Bodini’s ideas on poetic language in the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines critical editions of Máj by Karel Hynek Mácha in the period after the discovery of the poem manuscript in 1916. Hence it focuses primarily on publishing procedures in the ten editions (1919-1949) by František Krčma and the eleven editions (1936-1959) by Karel Janský, while also examining other important parallel editorial undertakings, editions from the previous period and editions that came out after the last critical edition in the Knihovna klasiků series (1959). This exposition focuses primarily on how both prominent Mácha editors set out their conception of the chronology of both primary sources: the first printing (1836) and the poem manuscript. It subsequently analyses which method of working with both sources they developed from this conception, and it focuses on a detailed analysis of the editing process, i.e. on determining the phenomena which the editors considered to be errors within the text of the poem, their correction and what is known as the linguistic preparation of the text. The study shows developments in the approaches of both editors, the changes in the extent and method both sources were contaminated and in the application of the diplomatic approach, while also following the ongoing application of a methodologically different editing process method, which aimed to modernize and harmonize the published text. This process is observed within the context of the domestic discussion at that time on the extent and method for correcting the texts of the classics. The present description of changes in the text of critical editions of Máj is one of the bases for the forthcoming new edition of the poem in the Hybrid Scholarly Edition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Fred D'Aguiar's use of ottava rima in his novel in verse Bloodlines. It considers poetry as a minority genre within postcolonial writing and ottava rima as a minority form within the genre of poetry. D'Aguiar's choice of form can be examined in relation to his subject, which is the rape of a black slave by a white man, the love that follows the rape and the consequences of their relationship. The article approaches the form of the poem from two perspectives. First, it contends that the deliberate foregrounding of form emphasizes the literary connection to the past, using figures of rhetoric to express the paradoxical nature of slavery; second, it calls upon the concept of voice, used in psychoanalysis as a notion covering both sound and sense, to show how D'Aguiar mobilizes the resources of sound and rhyme to explore the emotional impact of his story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with African American poet Etheridge Knight is presented. He discusses the state of poetry publishing, the them of speech in poetry and other literary genres, and the relationship between creator and audience.

The article explores the identity of the man named Thomas Tickell who authored the 18th century poem "To a lady before marriage." Topics discussed include printing of the said poem in the December 1761 issue of "Gentleman's Magazine," the submission of the poem by Mary Stevenson for publication, and the distinction between Thomas Tickell, uncle of Stevenson, and the poet Thomas Tickell.