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Overview
"A stunning performance! . . . Aldon Nielsen's work reminds one of how adventuresome and delightful an experience reading can be. His criticism offers fresh perspectives informed by a wide range of contextual data. Presented with wit and clarity, Dr. Nielsen's commentary sends readers back to the literary works he analyzes with renewed enthusiasm and broadened horizons."—Lorenzo Thomas, author of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry
Integral Music extends the terms of the studies begun in Black Chant through a more in-depth look at the work of key writers and poets in the decades following the Second World War. While Nielsen examines anew such key figures as Amiri Baraka, he also provides the first extended studies of significant but often overlooked figures in African American poetry, such as Russell Atkins and Stephen Jonas. His essay on Bob Kaufman points toward the critical intersection of poetry and jazz in African American letters, as does his essay on performance poet Jayne Cortez. Nielsen's studies in this volume affirm the importance and centrality of African American poets to American intellectual life and international, modernist, and postmodernist poetry today.
Aldon Lynn Nielsen is Kelly Professor of American Literature at Pennsylvania State University and author of several books, including Black Chant: Languages of African American Postmodernism and Reading Race.