New black aesthetics: contemporary African American poetry and the poetics of form

Abstract

This dissertation, "New Black Aesthetics: Contemporary African American Poetry and the Poetics of Form," examines how Terrance Hayes, Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, and Amanda Gorman transform poetic form into a site of racial and cultural negotiation. Drawing on Caroline Levine’s New Formalism, the study argues that poets of the New Black Aesthetics reimagine form as a political and historical instrument. Through lyrical forms, such as the sonnet, erasure, documentary, and visual poetry, they reclaim the aesthetic space of American verse as a democratic forum for racial recognition and historical recovery. The dissertation proposes the concept of a "poetics of recognition" to describe how these poets curate and reinterpret the African American archive, confronting historical erasure and reasserting Black cultural memory. Through a New Formalist lens, the study shows how formal experimentation enables Black poets to merge the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the political, transforming poetry into an agent of social change. Ultimately, this dissertation contends that the New Black Aesthetics articulate a new vision of American democracy through form—one grounded in inclusivity, interracial dialogue, and the continual reformation of the poetic tradition.