The Other-Conscious Ethics of Innovative Black Poetry

This monograph identifies and investigates the ’other-conscious’ ethics in black avant-garde poetry since the 1980s. Drawing on a long tradition in the African Diaspora of ethical writings that put the Other first, this work shows how black poets writing in an avant garde or experimental vein in the United States push language to its limits to reveal how poetry can address and exemplify ethical postures towards other people. This other-centered vantage allows the poets to incisively comment on some of this period’s most pressing ethical issues, including postcolonial and racialized violence, the history of slavery and segregation in America, and the expansion of human consciousness. The writers involved in this study include Nathaniel Mackey, Erica Hunt, Will Alexander, Harryette Mullen, and Mark McMorris.

Grant Matthew Jenkins is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, USA. His teaching and research specialties include twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, Experimental Poetry and Poetics, Ethnic American literatures, Creative Writing (Poetry), Ethical and Critical Theory, and Composition and Rhetorical Studies. He is the author of Poetic Obligation: Ethics in Experimental American Poetry after 1945 (2008) and has published scholarly essays on poetry in Paideuma, African American Review, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Journal of American Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Sagetrieb: Journal of the Objectivist Tradition, and in Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary.