Examines how twentieth-century American poets' European travel shaped the terrain of modern American poetry.

Eva Ström’s poetry in Utskuret ur ett större träd (2013) and Jag såg ett träd (2022) frequently includes references to trees. This article examines how Ström’s poetry negotiates the boundaries between humans, nature, materiality, and aesthetics. It also suggests that Ström’s poetic method can be seen in light of Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction, as it invites us to read phenomena of various kinds and scales through one another.  Ström’s poetry collections share certain features, such as the preoccupation with trees and contemporaneous news, including disasters and extreme weather. Taken together, they also focus on the sculptural, art history, medicine, and religious rituals. The latter collection details the Covid-19 pandemic, which foregrounds interconnectivity and the difficulty of maintaining a separation between the human body and the environment, something which posthuman materialist criticism has long recognized. In addition, the emphasis on deep time brought on by the invocation of dendrology emplaces the human in a larger, geological time frame. Similar concerns likewise emerge in the previous collection. The question of where a human begins or ends is asked, which reverberates with the later collection’s preoccupation with porosity, interconnectivity, and enmeshment. With its blurring of foreground and background, Ström’s poetry emerges as a poetics of diffraction, reading events and occurrences through one another, ranging from materials to religious artefacts, current news items, art works, and the quotidian. With its emphasis on trees, sculptures, art, and religious rituals, her poetry foregrounds material and posthuman concerns, but these are always paired with—troubled by just as they themselves in turn trouble—older, humanistic understandings of what it means to be human.  

In the structurally and thematically elaborate novel Memories of the Future (2019), Siri Hustvedt foregrounds the relationship between poetry and the novel. Two poets stand out as especially important to matters of plot, theme, and narrative: the modernist avant-garde poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and the New York School poet John Ashbery. These poets belong to different, but similarly pivotal moments in the evolution of American literature, one being a prescient—now recognized as iconic—modernist and the other an established, leading postmodernist. Despite their many differences, their output within poetry and the arts point to a collage aesthetics that provides a new way of probing the relationship between poetry and prose, as well as to a focus on the Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, polyphony, and voice, which inform the novel's structure and themes.

This article revisits a talk at a William Carlos Williams panel that would come to have a major impact on discussions of poetry and poetics, but which also made clear the problematic critical divide between the Williams of the short lyric and the Williams of genre-defying, experimental work, such as Spring and All. The panel took place at the 1983 MLA Convention in New York City, and the speaker was Charles Bernstein. This introductory article to this special issue discusses the original event as well as the talk itself—“The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA”—which has since been published in essay form. In addition, this introduction considers the lasting importance of Spring and All, which was also the topic of a 2023 MLA Williams panel in which Bernstein participated with Bob Perelman and Juliana Spahr to provide their perspectives on the 100th anniversary of Spring and All and the fortieth anniversary of “The Academy in Peril.”

Within children’s and young adult literature, movement betweendifferent places is often intricately linked to the agency of the characters.The Nancy Drew series is no exception, as it is characterized by a widegeographical area and a high level of mobility for the characters, who alsohave substantial agency. This article examines how places, geographies,cartographies, and spatial movements inform the plot in four Swedishtranslations of Nancy Drew mysteries where travel and place constitutea substantial part of the plot:Mystery of the Winged Lion(1982), andthe 1992 trilogy comprisingSwiss Secrets,Rendezvous in Rome, andGreek Odyssey. Informed by spatial literary theory, the analysis focuseson the aspects of place, artifacts closely linked to a specific place, andagency, respectively. The article shows that place, travel, and artifacts arecentral to the mysteries, which depend on touristic, well-known sites, andon the transformations which occur when these sites become potentiallydangerous. At the core of the mysteries, we encounter iconic, at timeshistoric artifacts that sometimes situate the detective series in a realm ofhistory. At times these artifacts even direct the story, and can thus be seen asto some extent agentic. Finally, the travelogue-informed genre, with its tiesto the historic (predominantly male) Grand Tour, creates new possibilitiesfor character development and reflection in the detective series.