School/Period

Michael Brownstein is a poet, a novelist, and an activist. Often associated with Beat writing and both the New York School and a second generation of New York School poets, Brownstein moved to New York City...

Affrilachian is a word coined by the poet Frank X. Walker to describe African American people of regions in and near the Appalachian Mountains in North America. Walker founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective in 1991, whose members include poets and fiction writers such as Nikki Finney, Kelly Ellis, Paul Taylor, Crystal Wilkinson, Gerald Coleman, and Shana Smith among others. He coined the term to confront the assumed whiteness associated with the definition of the Appalachian region and its residents…

Marc Kelly Smith, an American poet born in 1949 in Chicago, is considered the founder of the slam poetry movement. A graduate of James H. Bowen High School, Smith spent his early years as a construction worker…

Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s.

An artistic movement founded in 1848 by the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the painters John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who is often credited with the group’s name, which indicates not a dismissal of the Italian painter Raphael, but rejection of strict aesthetic adherence to the principles of composition and light characteristic of his style. The Pre-Raphaelites’ commitment to sincerity, simplicity, and moral seriousness is evident in the contemplative but uncomplicated…

Italian term for “theater of professional artists.” A theater form that emerged in northern Italy in the 15th century and spread throughout Europe. Commedia dell’arte relied on masked stock characters who improvised dialogue within a basic, often familiar plotline or story (such as the struggles of young lovers or marital infidelity). The commedias were performed by itinerant troupes of actors who could respond to contemporary events through extemporized commentary and impromptu asides. Stock characters…

An artists group formed in 1987 by Boston poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange and musician Janice Lowe  after they attended the funeral of James Baldwin. Based in a Victorian house near Harvard Square in Cambridge, they were inspired to celebrate living artists of color and to establish a reading series and to create comraderie and mentorships between black writers. Other members included poets Major Jackson, Natasha Trethewey, Kevin Young, Nehassaiu deGannes, and John Keene, among others…

The Fireside poets were a group of 19th-century American poets, mostly situated in the Northeast United States. Also referred to as the schoolroom or household poets, they wrote in conventional poetic forms to present domestic themes and moral issues. The “fireside” moniker arose out of their popularity, as families would read their books by the fire in their homes. Highly popular among both general readers and critics, the Fireside poets deeply shaped their era until their decline in popularity…

A school of poetry that resists an ableist tradition of body representation in favor of explicitly turning to lived disabled experiences.

New Narrative is a literary and aesthetic movement that originated in San Francisco in the late 1970s with writers and novelists Robert Glück and Bruce Boone that moved toward a hybrid aesthetic.

An avant-garde aesthetic movement that arose in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century. Its proponents—predominantly painters and other visual artists—called for a rejection of past forms of expression, and the embrace of industry and new technology. Speed and violence were the favored vehicles of sensation, rather than lyricism, symbolism, and “high” culture. F. T. Marinetti, in his futurist Manifesto (1909), advocated “words in freedom”—a language unbound by common syntax and order that, along…

A strain of Romanticism that took root among writers in mid-19th-century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson laid out its principles in his 1836 manifesto Nature, in which he asserted that the natural and material world exists to reveal universal meaning to the individual soul via one’s subjective experiences. He promoted the poet’s role as seer, a “transparent eyeball” that received insight intuitively through his or her perception of nature. Henry David Thoreau was an early disciple of Emerson’s …

An artistic philosophy that took hold in 1920s Paris, affirming the supremacy of the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than reason and logic.

A competitive poetry performance in which selected audience members score performers, and winners are determined by total points.

A constellation of writers and artists active in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of World War II, including Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Michael McClure.

An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), a group of writers and mathematicians formed in France in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. Unlike the Dada and surrealist movements, OuLiPo rejects spontaneous chance and the subconscious as sources of literary creativity. Instead, the group emphasizes systematic, self-restricting means of making texts. For example, the technique known as n + 7 replaces every noun in an existing…