If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

This essay explores the ways in which the genre of medieval lyric illuminates womenߣs literary culture. Lyrics offer insights into attitudes to women and creative engagements with gender; sacred lyrics find special inspiration in the figure of the Virgin Mary. As Fuller shows, straightforward readings are likely to be simplistic: lyrics may both speak vividly to female readers and seem distanced from the lives of actual women; the context of virginity may be as relevant to male as female religious readers; and lyrics may address complex theological questions. Romance conventions are taken up in secular lyrics, as are conventions familiar from fabliau and anti-feminist satire: women speakers are repeatedly used to voice male stereotypes. Finally, the essay demonstrates the challenges of reading the womanߣs voice in relation to the ߢFindernߣ manuscript, a fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century provincial miscellany which includes the names of five women, who, it has been argued, composed and copied a number of the lyrics written in it. Fuller demonstrates that the manuscript raises complex questions concerning the relationship between art and life which resonate across the genre.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.