Voices of the Vanguard: Modernist Roleplaying

Early versions of Ezra Pound’s game mechanics and powers for Voices of the Vanguard.

I’ve received a Summer Scholar Fellowship from Siena University to playtest my Modernist Roleplaying game, Voices of the Vanguard. The game will immerse students in the cultural, historical, and literary contexts of early 20th-century Modernist aesthetics by allowing them to roleplay key figures such as Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Langston Hughes, and William Carlos Williams. Players will respond in character to pivotal events like World War I, the Harlem Renaissance, and industrialization, while grappling with themes of artistic revolution. Through storytelling, poetry reading, and debates, students explore each poet’s stylistic innovations and ideological conflicts, composing original works inspired by historical prompts and their character's literary style. Mechanics, inspired by tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, provide structure for creativity, blending historical analysis with imaginative engagement. Players navigate scenarios, such as H.D. critiquing feminist discrimination in Poetry Magazine’s publications, Langston Hughes critiquing artistic appropriation of Black American theater, or Ezra Pound arguing American art’s role in a fractured world. This game deepens students’ engagement with Modernist principles, critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity.

Early versions of the Epiphanies game mechanics for Voices of the Vanguard.

Early versions of the Abilities game mechanics for Voices of the Vanguard.

New Review: Writing In Real Time

Writing in Real Time

Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital. Cambridge UP, 2017. 226 pp. $105.00 hardback.

I just finished a review of Paul Jaussen’s excellent Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital for the Journal of Modern Literature. I highly recommend it! With the Covid Pandemic, I’m not sure when this will be published, but I’ll keep you posted.

Abstract

In Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital, Paul Jaussen reconsiders the formal idiosyncrasies of the American long poem through contemporary systems theories. Jaussen claims that the immutable architectures that support long poems from Walt Whitman to Nathaniel Mackey cannot be reduced to the play of lyric intensities, nor are they productively approached through extensive genre categorization. Instead of these two methodologies, he argues that their forms interactively emerge; they unfold in real time as adaptive systems with the capacity to critique, rework, and respond to their changing material environments. To read the diversity of the American long poem through systems theoretical discourse is to reveal what Jaussen calls “interactive emergence,” the poet’s sustained creative/critical improvisation with the material dynamism of time.