Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds

Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire

Wendy Xu (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

194 Seiten

2025
The University of Michigan Press (Verlag)
978-0-472-04000-1 (ISBN)

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Pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold

Moving freely between essay, close-reading, ekphrasis, memoir, travelogue, lecture notes, poetry, and even monologue, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds presents a series of “thinking-throughs” of formally innovative and politically oriented poets pushing the boundaries of what poetry can hold. Tracing a personal family history of immigration amidst larger concerns of diaspora, “unsayability,” and absence, Wendy Xu reads the work of poets including Layli Long Soldier, Inger Christensen, Ocean Vuong, Liu Xia, giovanni singleton, Bei Dao, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and others. She explores existential and pedagogical questions in poetry from the point of view of a reader and a teacher. Why write? and why invite the paradoxes of a documentary approach into that writing?

Not an overview or primer, least of all the final word, this free-ranging exploration of contemporary poetry considers larger questions of belonging, diaspora, the violence of language, the allure of the past, genre, witness, and form. It returns to memorable touchstone texts in the author’s life with renewed curiosity about their inner workings. Essays move with restless curiosity across topics, bringing them into conversation with poetry, from considering depictions of Christ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, to the ecstatic illegible texts of Henri Michaux, discomfiting likenesses of agoraphobia and political imprisonment, and the epistolary trouble of fan-mail. Xu is drawn to poetry works of radical hybridity alongside personal experiences of formal intensity, as an immigrant daughter, a parentified child, an occasional agoraphobe, and a writer. Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds is a tour of poetic influences and the futures they’ve made possible.

Wendy Xu is Assistant Professor of Writing at The New School. She is the author of three books, including Phrasis, which New York Times Book Review named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Part One
Reading Wang Wei in a Pandemic
Writing Home: On Diasporic Language, Immigration, and Documentary Praxis
Documentary Traces, Relatability, and the Limits of Witness
Notes from the Writing of an Unwritten Novel
Agoraphobe Logics: On Liu Xia, Agoraphobia, and Doubles
Monologue on Intention: 2014– 2017
Disappear Yourself: Unsayability in Henri Michaux and Chase Berggrun

Part Two
Things to Do with Form
Ghost(s) Of: Life and Death, the Shape of Grief, Selected Ghosts
giovanni singleton’s American Forms (Black Sisyphus; Don’t Shoot)
Three Transformations: Long Soldier, Atiya, and Alexander
The Destruction of the Earth is the Destruction of All Childhoods: A Memory in Second Person of a Discussion of Inger Christensen's Alphabet
What is the Present For?
Mignon, or, Further Notes on the Past
Notes for a Cancelled Short Lecture on Reversible and Coded Form(s)
Wendy Xu and Emily Lee Luan on Return, Form, and Longing

Part Three
“Unfinished is Business”: On Fandom and Stardom, Genre, Playing Your Role, and #9 Celtics Guard Derrick White; Coming to America
Paris Book: Why Write? Sick for the Future; Poem on Notre Dame des Champs
What I Don’t Know About ’89: Meeting My Baba in Poetry
Notes for an Opening (2015-2020)

Part Four
On Teaching
Notes

Erscheinungsdatum	08.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Poets on Poetry
Zusatzinfo	1 color illustration, 5 b&w illustrations
Verlagsort	Ann Arbor
Sprache	englisch
Maße	137 x 203 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-472-04000-6 / 0472040006
ISBN-13	978-0-472-04000-1 / 9780472040001
Zustand	Neuware