Bibliographic record
Abstract
Postliterary America: From Bagel Shop Jazz Micropoetries. Maria Damon (Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2012)Maria Damon is well known in field of Beat studies for creating a more accurate history of Beat movement by recovering black and female poets. For Damon this project is part of a broader cultural studies, offering a useful perspective marginal writers in modem American poetry, a perspective that Beats helped define by embracing marginality as a principle of both poetics and lifestyle. Since time of Beats, however, American literary landscape has lost center of a fixed canon; margins are everywhere. Apparently this is condition that Damon intends designate as Postliterary America in title of her new book. Though pessimistic about current political condition of America, Damon views abundant possibilities of condition in very positive terms, terms that are more commonly associated with postmodernism. With due allowance for valuation of mobility-Damon likes trope of the book as portable homeland (81, 102, 214)-the condition appears as a kind of promised land, which Beats were able point but which they were unable enter.Mapping postliterary America has led Damon expand her attention well beyond range of her previous book, The Dark End of Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry. While four key figures-Bob Kaufman, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Gertrude Stein-continue serve as touchstones in new book, a fifth figure, Robert Lowell, is now dispersed in occasional references confessional writing. In The Dark End of Street, Damon had juxtaposed Lowell's Life Studies with poems by teenagers from a South Boston housing project. The new book presents such work under broad and fluid category of micropoetries, including memorial practices among various countercultural groups and products of e-mail listservs such as briefly controversial Flarf poetry, which mocked poetry journal submission procedures and practices.'A new emphasis category of performance similarly expands Damon's definition of poetry, as well as enlivening her prose style. Ranging from performance art of Canadian feminist Kabbalist Adeena Karasick more popular modes such as Lenny Bruce's nightclub routines, poetry slams of Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, and self-remaking by jazz (Mezz Mezzrow) and pop (Phil Spector) musicians, several of these examples also extend Damon's chronological range. While The Dark End of Street found its center of gravity in modem period, a new vantage point in postmodernism now provides historical distance from which Damon looks back at Beats.The historical view of Postliterary America is articulated most clearly in book's longest essay, whose complex agenda is reflected in title, Loneliness, Lyric, Ethnography: Some Discourses on/of Divided Self. Although history does not feature explicitly among terms of this title, both loneliness and selfdivision are symptoms of a historical condition, in Damon's view: the subject in modernity is de facto traumatized by alienation and double consciousness (163). Damon cites Marx, Freud, Du Bois, and Walter Benjamin for supporting theory, but Beats supply literary case with which she opens her essay. They stand on cusp of what we now consider postmodern (160), Damon asserts, and they anticipate postmodernism in their overcoming of division between life and art. However, their parallel attempt overcome internal division of modem, alienated self is misguided because it depends a belief in a unified, authentic self-what Beat expressionism seeks express. This belief holds Beats back from discovery, namely, that solution modem alienation is not to simply undouble double consciousness (161) but rather multiply number of identities performed by any subject, and embrace activity of performance itself as an immediate pleasure preferable elusive ideal of authenticity. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".