In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound defined literature as a means of communication and declared:

“Literature is news that STAYS news.”

Welcome to News that Stays News, a site for organizing and sharing Susanne E. Hall’s research and teaching on U.S. literature and culture.

My current research project examines the turn to performance in U.S. poetry during the 1960s and shows the extent to which anxiety over the growing power of mass media shaped both confessional poetry and New Left politics. I show how a critical evaluation of the mass media led poets to develop acts of poetry—public performances of poetic texts—that sought to rival, destroy, or evade mass media technologies of communication which they saw as threatening not only the cultural relevance of poetry, but also the sanctity of the individual mind. My broader research interests include twentieth-century poetics, the New Left, theories of ideology, print culture, and contemporary fiction and verse.

My teaching interests include 19th and 20th-century U.S. literature and culture, poetics, critical theory, and composition.