Investigative Poetics

In his Beat‐inflected manifesto, Investigative Poetry , Edward Sanders argued that “the essence of investigative poetry” is to create “lines of lyric beauty [that] descend from data clusters,” hence both seducing and empowering readers with “a melodic blizzard of data‐fragments.” As illustrated in America , his epic collection of data‐fragment‐strewn poems, Sanders hoped to merge poetry with the pedagogical imperative to teach his readers their national history and the political goal of empowering them to re‐enliven the great traditions of activism and artistry celebrated in his poems. By interweaving the emotional power of poetry with the pedagogical power of historical scholarship and the political power of fighting for social justice, Sanders's America embodies the theory explored in his Investigative Poetry , thus providing a model for writing layered, historically dense, yet beautiful, political poems

Art · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Themes in Literature Analysis

• Four meditations on the search for grace amidst terror

  Stephen John Hartnett, Stephen Hartnett•Text and Performance Quarterly•1999

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• Symposium of the Whole

  Robert L Berner, Jerome Rothenberg et al.•World Literature Today•1984

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• Reflections

  Michael Carrithers, J Iain Prattis•Man•1987

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