Through a dizzying array of references to subjects ranging from engineering to poetry, on-the-job experiences in academia and industry, conflicts between working-class and intellectual labor, the privatization of universities, and the contradictions of the modern environment, Joe Amato鈥檚 Industrial Poetics mounts a boisterous call for poetry communities to be less invested in artistic self-absorption and more concerned about social responsibility.
As Amato focuses on the challenges faced by American poets in creating a poetry that speaks to a public engineered into complacency by those industrial technologies, practices, and patterns of thought that we cannot seem to do without, he brings readers face to face with the conflicting realities of U.S. intellectual, academic, and poetic culture.
Formally adventurous and rhetorically lively, Industrial Poetics is best compared with the intellectually exploratory, speculative, risky, polemical work of other contemporary poet-critics including Kathleen Fraser, Joan Retallack, Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, and Allen Grossman. Amato uses an exhilarating range of structural and rhetorical strategies: conventionally developed argument, abruptly juxtaposed aphorisms, personal narrative, manifesto-like polemic, and documentary reportage. With a critic鈥檚 sharply analytical mind, a poet鈥檚 verve, and a working-class intellectual鈥檚 sense of social justice, Amato addresses the many nonliterary institutions and environments in which poetry is inextricably embedded.
By connecting poetry to industry in a lively demonstration against the platitudes and habitudes of the twentieth century, Amato argues for a reenergized and socially forceful poetics鈥攁n industrial poetics, rough edges and all. Jed Rasula writes, 鈥淚 can't say I pay much attention to talk radio, but this is what I imagine it might be like if the deejay were really smart, enviably well read, yet somehow retained the snarling moxie of the AM format.鈥
鈥淧ioneering a viable interface between poetic practice and scholarly responsibility, Amato鈥檚 is a necessary voice in performative engagement with the labor-intensive underside of academic work. His command of vernacular locutions ranges from impressive to dizzying. Allied to such discerning critical intelligence, such proficiency has the potential to alter鈥攁nd certainly refresh鈥攖he nature of scholarly discourse.鈥濃擩ed Rasula
鈥1. Buy it.
2. Listen up.
3. Deprofessionalize.
4. Buy a copy for a friend.
5. Write a book like this.
6. Industrial Poetics is da bomb.
7. Because the taste is what counts.鈥
鈥擟harles Bernstein, author, My Way: Speeches and Poems and Shadowtime
鈥淭he second 鈥楾rack鈥 (chapter) of this wild, hilarious, learned, irreverent, energetic, nasty, and touching book is called 鈥楾echnical Ex-Communication: How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor.鈥 And that鈥檚 what Industrial Poetics is all about: working-class aspirants for middle-class 鈥榩rofessional鈥 goodies, academic and journalistic hypocrisies, community failures, and the general all-around mayhem we experience at the turn of the twenty-first century. A collage of techniques from anaphoric verse to slangy dialogue, from pop song to scholarly reference, Industrial Poetics will make you laugh and sometimes cry with exasperation. Can life on the assembly line and in the ivory tower really be this absurd? Answer, oh yes, and then some.鈥濃擬arjorie Perloff
Construction Note
Acknowledgments
How to Tell the Difference between Life and Art: A Grant Proposal (Take 1)
Track 1
Industrial Poetics: A Chautauqua Multiplex in Fits and Starts
How to Tell the Difference between Life and Art: A Grant Proposal (Take 2)
Track 2
Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor
How to Tell the Difference between Life and Art: A Grant Proposal (Take 3)
Track 3
Labor, Manufacturing, Workplace, Community: Four Conclusions in Search of an Ending
Notes
Bibliography
Index
