Split-gut song
Subtitle: Jean Toomer and the poetics of modernity
By: Karen Jackson Ford.
Publisher: University of Alabama Press; University Alabama Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Tuscaloosa, Ala
Language: eng
Number of pages: 205
Subjects: Toomer, Jean, 1894-1967 -- Criticism and interpretation.; Modernism (Literature) -- United States.; African Americans in literature.; Race in literature.
Description: "Karen Jackson Ford contextualizes Jean Toomer's poetry, letters, and essays in the literary culture of his period and, through close readings of the poems, shows how they negotiate formal experimentation (imagism, fragmentation, dialect) and traditional African American forms (slave songs, field hollers, call-and-response sermons, lyric poetry). At the heart of Toomer's work is the paradox that poetry is both the saving grace of African American culture and that poetry cannot survive modernity. This contradiction, Ford argues, structures Cane, wherein traditional lyric poetry first flourishes, then falters, then falls silent." "The Toomer that Ford discovers in Split-Gut Song is a complicated, contradictory poet who brings his vexed experience and ideas of racial identity to both conventional lyric and experimental forms as he struggles to articulate his perplexed understanding of race and art in 20th-century America."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [191]-198) and index.
Table of contents: title: The scratching choruses of modernity; title: An everlasting song : Cane, part 1; title: Discordant snatches of song : Cane, part 2; title: Misshapen, split-gut, tortured, twisted words : Cane, part 3; title: Late minstrel of the restless earth : poet and poetry after Cane.