In the 1990s, the US poetry academy sought to create scholarship that represented diverse identities and appealed to public audiences. However, the poetry establishment misses a crucial opportunity to reconsider who might be said to count as a scholar, even as new forms of scholarship simultaneously flourished in nonacademic (or, vernacular) spaces. In response, this dissertation highlights a previously unacknowledged body of responses to poetry: vernacular poetry scholarship between the 1990s and early 2000s. This dissertation examines vernacular poetry scholarship that is highly creative, multimodal, and grows out of the excitement of cultural spaces that emerged at the end of the last millennium. Anglophone nonacademic critics connected to one another in order to share and interpret works of poets like Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath. This dissertation’s analysis of nonacademic poetry scholarship helps to illuminate how humanities research emerges and evolves in community contexts.
Each chapter of this dissertation explores a different environment of vernacular research and exchange. Chapter one, “Performing ‘Other People’s Poetry:’ Sampling and Covering as Spoken Word Study,” features embodied poetry criticism by spoken word artists including Tish Benson, Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, and Edwin Torres. Chapter two, “Poetry Scholarship for the Taking: Zine Textuality and Tactical Anthologizing,“ focuses on the criticism of “zinesters” who performatively explicate poems through writing and, frequently, collages that situate a poem’s text next to writing and other cut-and-paste media. Chapter three, “‘Lady Lazarus’ and Me: Web 1.0 Poetry Criticism,” focuses on early online criticism of Sylvia Plath’s 1963 poem, “Lady Lazarus.”
My findings attest to the vibrancy and diversity of Anglophone poetry criticism as a community embedded practice and invites the study of poetics to value and revisit the historical work of nonacademic scholars.