Virginia Jackson

Bio

Virginia Jackson is a lyric theorist and historian. Her books include Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric (Princeton University Press, 2023), The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (with Yopie Prins; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton University Press, 2005).

Contributions

The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews

From the Print Journal

The distinction between poetry and theory is academic. I’ve always believed this, so when I finally sat down to read The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University, I was glad that it began with Ron Silliman's infamous 1990 declaration that “the university is the 500 pound gorilla at the party of the poets.” Now, “three decades later,” Quiogue Andrews writes, “the gorilla is still very much in attendance-—one might, in fact, go so far as to say that it’s eaten enough snacks and poured enough drinks to become a proper 800-pound gorilla, the host of the whole affair” (1).

Tags: review poetry