Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The expatriate poet has occupied a recognizable position in American literary culture: the writer abroad produces work shaped by the binary of home and elsewhere. This was the model for Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, which described the American writers in Paris of the 1920s. A century later, this figure shows its staying power in the popular imagination. For the North American poets gathered in this special issue who are currently living and working in Berlin, however, the neat binary of home and elsewhere may be obsolete. What has superseded the expatriate lyric, written abroad but looking back towards home, is not a single new form but a range of practices: multilingual, diasporic, translingual, and formally experimental, asking different questions of the poem than the expatriate tradition was built to answer.