About the Book
At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry’s supposed “death,” Kevin Stein’s Poetry’s Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter.The essays of Poetry’s Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry’s spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It’s this second life, or better, Poetry’s Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates.
About the Author
is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is author of numerous books of poetry and criticism.
Watch a video interview with Stein as he embarks on a recent poetry reading tour here, and watch another interview with Stein (by Jonathan Ahl) here.