{"id":47398,"date":"2023-07-25T10:17:36","date_gmt":"2023-07-25T14:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.uga.edu\/news\/?p=47398"},"modified":"2023-11-20T10:58:10","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T15:58:10","slug":"poetry-in-motion-advocacy-for-artists-put-rasula-on-path-to-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.uga.edu\/news\/poetry-in-motion-advocacy-for-artists-put-rasula-on-path-to-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry in motion: Advocacy for artists put Rasula on path to academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A wonderful thing about advocating for others is that sometimes you hone your own talent and influence along the way.<\/p>\n

Jed Rasula, a poet in the University of Georgia\u2019s Department of English and 2023 winner of the Albert Christ-Janer Award for Creative Research<\/a>, has produced a dozen scholarly books, three poetry collections and two omnibus anthologies, held an assortment of editorial positions, and earned multiple prestigious awards and honors. Still, he maintains one clear priority of his work.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight from the beginning, I found myself playing an advocacy role for overlooked and under-appreciated poets,\u201d Rasula said.<\/p>\n

That advocacy started for Rasula at 20 years old when he and a friend, Mike Irwin (who tragically died in 1974), conducted a series of interviews with a group of established and small-press poets, including A. R. Ammons and Charles Tomlinson. After publication in the early 1970s, those interviews garnered the attention of editors and set Rasula on a steady, but not entirely intended, career trajectory toward academia.<\/p>\n

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Believe it or not…<\/h2>\n

Rasula had an early stop in Hollywood, of all places, working as a researcher for the television series \u201cRipley\u2019s Believe It or Not.\u201d He secured the job by impressing a producer with the story of Dante Gabriel Rosseti, an English poet who exhumed his wife\u2019s coffin to reclaim and publish the only copy of a poetry manuscript he placed there when she died. His efforts to discover bizarre\u2014but family-appropriate\u2014true stories for the series resulted in one segment about several poets he knew who did \u201csound poetry,\u201d best characterized as \u201cnon-semantic performance pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe host Marie Osmond introduced the segment, explaining the origin of sound poetry at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1916, by Hugo Ball,\u201d Rasula said. \u201cShe then recited from memory\u2014startling everybody in the studio\u2014a sound poem by Ball. Later on, rock critic Greil Marcus contacted me to arrange using her performance for a CD he was putting together, and it\u2019s since been a permanent fixture on YouTube<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

After \u201cRipley\u2019s,\u201d he continued exploring connections among his interests in the arts, part of what he described as \u201ca natural milieu of people who existed outside academia.\u201d He hosted a radio program on cultural history at KPFK in Los Angeles and published essays on jazz, drawing upon an appreciation that began in 10th<\/sup> grade at military school.<\/p>\n

Rasula, who taught himself to play piano and write music but considers himself more listener than practitioner, once declined an invitation to join a punk band.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was based on the kind of performance I did with poetry, with pretty precise verbal acrobatics and a knack for nonsense,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

While championing poetry, the Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor in the Department of English<\/a> has also written plenty of his own. He spent the past year archiving his work\u201443 boxes, five of which are poems\u2014which he\u2019ll sell to a special collections library. The project gave him a panoramic perspective of his career.<\/p>\n

There is his intermedia work with calligraphy and visual art\u2014a 1986 collection \u201cTabula Rasula: Being a Book of Audible Visual Matters\u201d\u2014as well as \u201cquasi-theatrical\u201d work exploring colloquial and idiomatic expressions, ultimately avoiding the prevalent \u201cfirst person, personal\u201d mode of lyric poetry.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a way, that was liberating to see,\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t feel that I was aspiring to be a poet or to forge a path toward being a poet because I was spending just as much time doing other things. The poetry was kind of wrapped up in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other ways, Rasula has favored less traditional academic protocol, resisting (or avoiding) a degree in literature or an MFA in creative writing. Instead, he pursued a doctorate in \u201cthe history of consciousness\u201d from the University of California-Santa Cruz. He planned to be a Civil War historian and not a writer, but now prefers the latter term over scholar or poet. He doesn\u2019t see any division in his body of work.<\/p>\n

\u201cRasula’s multi-channel version of creative-intellectual life weaves together many facets of living and searching, which are often divided from each other in academic culture,\u201d said Ed Pavli\u0107, a Distinguished Research Professor of English at UGA. \u201cThe modernist and the activist, the improvisational and the methodical, the historical and ecological, the anarchic, the surreal and the rational-systematic, as well as what [philosopher and political\/civil rights activist] Cornel West used to call \u2018the sheer fun in the life of the mind.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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A critical exploration of modernism<\/h2>\n

Prompted, in part, by an early appreciation of poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Rasula\u2019s scholarly work focuses on modernism and is, as he calls it, \u201cpolymathic.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve tried to set an example of how anyone addressing the subject needs to be as curious and multi-faceted as the figures we called modernists,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d contrast this with the English department tendency to speak of modernism strictly as a literary affair, whereas for me it necessarily includes music, art, film, photography, dance, urban and industrial design, and much more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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His most recent book, \u201cWhat the Thunder Said: How \u2018The Wasteland\u2019 Made Poetry Modern,\u201d (Princeton University Press, 2022), for example, is more a background to the poem and modernism itself than it is an analysis of Eliot\u2019s tour de force.<\/p>\n

Among his scholarly books, Rasula has his favorites. \u201cHistory of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism<\/em>,<\/em>\u201d published by Oxford University Press in 2016, was \u201ca joy\u201d to write and won the Matei Calinsecu Award from the Modern Language Association. He is also particularly proud of its successor, \u201cAcrobatic Modernism, from the Avant-Garde to Prehistory,\u201d published by Oxford University Press in 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n

However, he cites 1996\u2019s \u201cThe American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940-1990,\u201d which he wrote while teaching at Queens University in Ontario, as evidence of his \u201cdeep research\u201d and long-standing advocacy for poets.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the book I wrote to get tenure, and the title came from a polemical essay published in the early 1980s as an expos\u00e9 of what I thought was a fraudulent coverage of American poetry,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I was teaching in Canada and never expected to leave, I did not tone down the vitriol in my book, figuring I could really lay it all on the line and back it up with about 80 pages of appendices itemizing the damage.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy book broke the back of a longstanding but moribund status quo in the market for reputations of post-World War II American poets.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was welcomed by many, Rasula said, because it opened the field for broader research and publishing opportunities. For graduate students, it meant they were no longer under the yoke of reading poets X, Y and Z.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it was like all the rest of the letters of the alphabet were legitimized,\u201d Rasula said.<\/p>\n

Whether impact or achievement, Rasula isn\u2019t sure, but he likes to think that his work will continue to be recognized for its originality.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t write \u2018normal\u2019 scholarly prose,\u201d he said. \u201cMany reviewers of my book, \u2018This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry\u2019, called it a veritable work of poetry in its own right. Reviews of all my books have made a point of drawing attention to my writing\u2014my \u2018style,\u2019 except few call it that\u2014recognizing it\u2019s not something that decorates an underlying component but is, instead, what drives my attention and sensibility even before there\u2019s any writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text el_class=”text-container first-paragraph”] A wonderful thing about advocating for others is that sometimes you hone your own talent and influence along the way. Jed Rasula, a poet in the University of Georgia\u2019s Department of English and 2023 winner of the Albert Christ-Janer Award for Creative Research, has produced a dozen scholarly books, three poetry collections … <\/p>\n

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