Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (American Culture) [Paperback]

Maria Damon (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (February 5, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816619875
• ISBN-13: 978-0816619870
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,344,063 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine Prose from a Poet, November 30, 2003

By 

Raymond L. Bianchi (Oak Park, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (American Culture) (Paperback)

The beauty of the Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry is the fact that with fine prose, almost poetic prose, Maria Damon enlightens areas of modern and post modern poetics that are not seen even in esoteric academic circles.
The construction of the book is of course center left with a feminist bent but it brings new light and new heat to these issues along with placing them in a context that is more akin the Kenner's Pound Era, or Bernstein's Content Dream than the normal academic study-- it is a must read for anyone interested in the vanguard of poetry in the USA.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good Grief!, November 30, 2003

By 

Alan Sondheim (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dark End Of The Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (American Culture) (Paperback)

I've read Maria Damon's book and have used it in teaching and as a resource in my own work - and I hardly fall into either academia or a feminism of the type espoused in the other review. I don't even recognize the book from it!

Needless to say the book is important; it covers, literally, the margins of literary culture, recuperating women, Judaism, and other issues from the so-called vanguard. It's frankly too bad that such recuperation is needed - one only has to look, for example, at the usual adulation of Gertrude Stein to see the necessity.

Now what is of most interest here for me - that even the vanguard has margins - that there's a conservative core or backbone to what's generally considered 'avant-guard.' But there is, and it operates with the usual exclusionary principles...

Anyway, highly recommended - as I said above, I use the work.

- Alan Sondheim

11 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars high-end pc drivel, April 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry (American Culture) (Hardcover)

The usual preoccupations of the usual feminist critic are somewhat alleviated here by an apparent intelligence that rises somewhat above the usual drivel of the usual feminist critic. Still, these usual preoccupations are here: justice, inclusion, the sainthood of all minorities and women. Save your money. Even when this critic tries to be fair, it's all so much posing, as she attempts to get through the narrow labyrinth of thought permitted to feminists by other feminists. A completely awful book that is somehow made more awful by the obvious fact that this writer probably has intelligent things to say but is corralled by the Agenda.