The Poetry of Disturbance

David Bergman is Professor of English at Towson University and the author or editor of more than twenty books, including Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature and The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. He is also the editor of John Ashbery's Reported Sightings and The Violet Quill Reader. Bergman has won the Lambda Literary Prize for Men on Men 2000 and the George Elliston Poetry Prize for Cracking the Code, the first of four books of poetry. His essays have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, and Raritan.

1. Poems that disturb; 2. Disturbing modernism; 3. Orality and copia; 4. Disturbing voices; 5. A queer directness; 6. The long poem.