Looking at the circulation of poetry and genres, this panel takes up instead poetry and its publics in the 21^st century. One unifying thread for all four papers on this panel are the myriad challenges facing poetry and its criticism today, including but not limited to the site- and time-specific nature of poetry in the face of the global challenges of the current historical conjuncture. Poetry, whether by adopting the mask of occasional writing or through its self-conscious posture as chronicle of the times, has to address both the singular and unverifiable, on the one hand, and the exemplary and concrete on the other.

Rachel Galvin will speak about a 21^st-c. hemispheric phenomenon in poetry: Cartonera presses, a DIY book publishing model that has rapidly grown into a loose network of small presses spanning Latin America. The first, Eloísa Cartonera, was founded by poets and artists in Buenos Aires in 2003, as a cooperative to produce handmade books from recycled cardboard purchased from cartoneros (forty thousand people who began collecting and sorting waste after the 2001 Argentine economic crash). During the past two decades, dozens of other Cartonera publishing houses have sprung up across Latin America years and the model has further spread to the United States with small publishers such as Cardboard House Press. As a cultural project, Cartoneras provide an alternative, nonprofit, worker-oriented publishing model and recycling collective that throws a sharp light on waste as key to commodity consumption. She will argue that Cartoneras underscore the stigmatization of waste scavenging under neoliberal capitalism; and concomitantly, the aesthetic and cultural values that adhere to the aura of the original object. Moreover, these collaborative, small-press collectives represent a countertendency to centralized, industrialized bookmaking and bookselling and have become a traveling concept in the Americas.

Evie Shockley will present on the relationship between poetry and history in the contemporary moment. She will start from a consideration of what the prominence of Black poetry in the US literary landscape means for US poetry generally (i.e., the ways African American poetry easily stands as exemplary of US poetry) and Black poetry in particular, still supposed to address the concerns of a population at best conditionally incorporated into prevailing understandings of the popular. Shockley will focus on the ways "the archive" and historical subjects have become a privileged topos for the most celebrated and widely circulated poetry of the 21st C and the kinds of pressures this puts on the writing -- and on the history.

Jahan Ramazani will present on Kamau Brathwaite’s late work, arguing that Brathwaite rebuilds elegy on a base of Afro-Caribbean song, spirituality, aesthetics, orature, and funeral rites, creolizing an occasional genre with traditions that remember the deeper, older grief and losses of transatlantic enslavement. Poetic creolizations of genre and language by a writer-historian like Brathwaite aren’t merely stylistic meldings; they’re rooted in the long historical repercussions of enslavement and the Middle Passage. Brathwaite understands creolization to be always, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s multivalent metaphor, in the wake. His elegies exemplify and resume what he identified as the “friction” that originally occasioned creolization (“cruel, but it was also creative”).

Anthony Reed’s presentation on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1978 album Dread, Beat, an’ Blood. Released under the name Poet and the Roots, that album is widely held to be an inaugurator of so-called “dub poetry,” and as such linked to a particular set of familiar contradictions surrounding Black British social identity. Poems such as “Five Nights of Bleeding (for Leroy Harris)” and “All Wi Doin’ is Defendin’” would seem to bear that out. But tracing Johnson’s poetry through his affiliation with the British Institute of Race Relations, on the one hand, and his album’s promotion by Richard Branson’s Virgin Records on the other reveals something of the contradictions of an poetic genre typified by unequivocal critiques of imperialism and neo-imperialism, and the latter’s penetration of aspects of daily life held to be immune from it.

Taken together, these four papers will broach matters of method—how to read poems in light of the genres, publics, and infrastructures of circulation—while also raising some questions about what the study of poetry contributes to larger questions concerning Black Studies, Ecocriticism, Historical Poetics, and the political economies of literary production.