Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site.

Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations—to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyder in his back-to-the-land familial compound, Kitkitdizze; Amiri Baraka in a black nationalist community in Newark; Robert Creeley and the poets of Bolinas, California, in the capacious “now” of their poet-run town. Turning to the work of Robert Smithson—who called one of his essays an “appendix to Paterson,” and who in turn has exerted a major influence on poets since the 1970s—Shaw then traces the emergence of site-specific art in relation both to the poetics of place and to the larger linguistic turn in the humanities, considering poets including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, and Lisa Robertson.

By putting the poetics of place into dialog with site-specificity in art, Shaw demonstrates how poets and artists became experimental explicators not just of concrete locations and their histories, but of the discourses used to interpret sites more broadly. It is this dual sense of fieldwork that organizes Shaw’s groundbreaking history of site-specific poetry.

Lytle Shaw is an associate professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Cable Factory 20, The Lobe, and Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie.

“In Fieldworks Lytle Shaw makes a brilliant case for a site-specific approach to poetry by foregrounding cultural history, community, installation, anthologizing, process, presentation, and context. In his series of detailed studies, Shaw uses the vocabulary and framing of contemporary visual art criticism to illuminate the dynamic role of place in postwar American poetry.”—Charles Bernstein, author of Girly Man and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions

“Fieldworks is inventive, provocative, and readable from start to finish. It is rare to encounter a manuscript that discusses both contemporary poetry and the contemporary visual arts and does so with equal sophistication and creativity.”—Brian M. Reed, author of Hart Crane: After His Lights and Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry