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    Line Break
    Poetry As Social Practice

    James Scully (Author)

    9781931896184

    Paperback / softback, published 30 August 2005

    180 pages
    21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm, 0.265 kg

    "James Scully's essays, like his poems, refuse to soothe or simplify, to shortchange either poetry or the imperative for social revolution. His fiercely demystifying intelligence is grounded in hope and realism for poetry in itself along with other forms of dissident engagement."

    —Adrienne Rich


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    "Scully's brilliance is mesmerizing, radicalizing, a power plant producing synapses in the 'mind politic' that may well allow Americans, finally, to write and discourse with our kind around the globe. If American poets have a role to play in preserving free speech in the 21st century, this book belongs in our every backpack."

    —Linda McCarriston


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    "Line Break is a powerful and internally consistent argument that literature, that poetry in particular, can and must fulfill its ancient duty to register and judge the conduct of human beings. Line Break extrapolates and updates Plato: a poem that does not examine life critically is not worth writing."

    —Robert Bagg

    Line Break is the major work on poetry as social practice and a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary criticism or poetry. For many years, James Scully, along with others, quietly radicalized American poetry—in theory and in practice, in how it is lived as well as in how it is written. In eight provocative essays, James Scully argues provocatively for artistic and cultural practice that actively opposes structures of power too often reinforced by intellectual activities.

    Foreword by Adrienne Rich
    Prefactory Notes
    Remarks on Political Poetry
    In Defense of Ideology
    Demagogy in the Musée
    The Dream of an Apolitical Poetry
    Scratching Surfaces
    Review
    Poetic Freedom and "Cuba"
    Line Break
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