Andrew Epstein

Andrew Epstein is an Associate Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and received his BA in English from Haverford College in 1992. He received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 2000. He has been teaching at Florida State since 2001, and he lives in Tallahassee with his wife, Kara Gross, and their two children. Epstein specializes in twentieth-century American literature, with particular emphasis on poetry and post-World War II American literature and culture. His research and teaching interests center on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics; issues in modernism and postmodernism; theories and practice of the avant-garde; twentieth-century experimental fiction; and theories and debates about everyday life and twentieth-century writing.

In addition to the book Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), which focuses on Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, his critical work has appeared in various journals and book collections, including Raritan, Lingua Franca, Contemporary Literature, Jacket, Keats-Shelley Journal, Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, Boston Review, and American Book Review. His poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, Western Humanities Review, Notre Dame Review, Verse, and other journals. He is currently working on a book about the representation of everyday life in contemporary literature and culture.

Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary “Song of Myself,” much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the “New American Poetry” that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets – the “New York School” poets John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka – Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde’s commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate.

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