American Hybrid Poetics: Gender, Mass Culture, and Form

 American Hybrid Poetics explores the ways in which hybrid poeticsa playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategieshave been the driving force in the work of a historically and culturally diverse group of women poets who are part of a robust tradition in contesting the dominant cultural order.  Amy Moorman Robbins examines the ways in which five poetsGertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen, and Claudia Rankineuse hybridity as an implicitly political strategy to interrupt mainstream American language, literary genres, and visual culture, and expose the ways in which mass culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has had a powerfully standardizing impact on the collective American imagination. By forcing encounters between incompatible traditionsconsumer culture with the avant-garde, low culture forms with experimental poetics, prose poetry with linguistic subversivenessthese poets bring together radically competing ideologies and highlight their implications for lived experience. Robbins argues that it is precisely because these poets have mixed forms that their work has gone largely unnoticed by leading members and critics in experimental poetry circles.


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