From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies

From Experimental Poetics to Creative Legacies: Language Poetry and its American Avant-Garde Aesthetics offers a comprehensive account of Language Poetry, tracing its origins, evolution, and enduring influence. It demonstrates how a movement that emerged from American experimental writing in the 1970s has become a creative legacy with lasting relevance for twenty-first-century poetics.

Beginning with the modernist transformations and counterculture that reshaped poetic form in the early twentieth century, the study charts the formation of the Language community. While combining literary history, textual analysis, and cultural inquiry, it examines the editorial networks, defining aesthetic principles, and ideological debates that animated the School’s practice. Through the close analysis of major figures, including Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, and Rae Armantrout, Sharma explores the movement’s material and conceptual concerns, as well as the persistence of its ideas in digital and post-digital environments.

Written within Indian academia, this text expands the global contexts, poetic as well as academic, in which Language Poetry holds significance today. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, teachers, and scholars of Literary Studies and American Literature, while also serving as a clear guide to the evolution and contemporary resonance of American experimental poetics for readers beyond academia.