A new survey of twentieth-century U.S. poetry that places a special emphasis on poets who have put lyric poetry in dialogue with other forms of creative expression, including modern art, the novel, jazz, memoir, and letters. Contesting readings of twentieth-century American poetry as hermetic and narcissistic, Morris interprets the lyric as a scene of instruction and thus as a public-oriented genre. American poets from Robert Frost to Sherman Alexie bring aesthetics to bear on an exchange that asks readers to think carefully about the ethical demands of reading texts as a reflection of how we metaphorically "read" the world around us and the persons, places, and things in it. His survey focuses on poems that foreground scenes of conversation, teaching, and debate involving a strong-willed lyric speaker and another self, bent on resisting how the speaker imagines the world.

Chapter 1: IntroductionChapter 2: "Go Home And Write A Page Tonight": Subversive Irony and Resistant Reading in Langston Hughes's "Theme For English B"Chapter 3: The Erotics of Close Reading: Williams, Demuth, and "The Crimson Cyclamen" Chapter 4: Queering Time: Allen Ginsberg, "America," and the Cold War Chapter 5: Active and Passive Citizenship in Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" and Judith Ortiz Cofer's "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica" Chapter 6: Homosocial Black Male Desire As Mediated Through the Horn and the Pen: Elegy as Love Letter or Love Letter as Elegy in Michael S. Harper's "Dear John, Dear Coltrane"Chapter 7: Frank Bidart's Voice and the Erasure of Jewish Difference in "Ellen West"Chapter 8: "The Word Gets Around": Leslie Marmon Silko's Theory of Narrative Survival in The Delicacy and Strength of Lace Chapter 9: Before and After the Fall: Tribalism, Individualism, and Multicultural Poetics in Sherman AlexieChapter 10: Coda: Robert Frost's "Mending Wall": The Case for the Humanities Classroom Works Cited Index