Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(1)
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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.

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

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.

Reading Maria Damon's book is a poetic experience in itself. Her style allows the reader to listen to her thought processes, which are always fresh, subtle, and insightful. She plays an important role as an interpreter of Bob Kaufman and other poets who for various reasons find themselves in the margins.