Birte Christ, Stefanie Mueller

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 62 (2017), Ausgabe 2, Seite 149 - 168

Birte Christ

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 62 (2017), Ausgabe 2, Seite 279 - 300

In their book-length works ‘Execution Poems’ (2000) and ‘Habeas Corpus’ (2008), George Elliott Clarke and Jill McDonough engage readers in questions surrounding the death penalty. Both employ the form of the poetic series and confront the reader with historical executions and their contexts. In this essay, I analyze the poetic strategies through which ‘Execution Poems’ and ‘Habeas Corpus’ engage the reader and how, specifically, they use the form of the poetic series to do so. ‘Execution Poems’, I argue, performs a racialized cycle of violence that state killing is part of. The poetic series itself transcends the cycle of ‘physical’ violence, as it replaces actual killing with words that “execute.” ‘Habeas Corpus’ offers readers structures of poetic condensation that allow for epiphanic insights into the humanity of executed men and women and into the inhumanity of capital punishment. Both ‘Execution Poems’ and ‘Habeas Corpus’ use the form of the series to carry past executions into the present and future and to thus impress upon the reader the “ongoingness” of state killing—thereby functioning as propaedeutic to political change.

Veronika Hofstätter, Sarah Schuetze, Wolfgang Helbich, Jonas Anderson, Dominik Nagl, Birte Christ, Christine Gerhardt, Charlotte A. Lerg, Manfred Berg, Sabrina Hüttner

Amerikastudien/American Studies, Jahrgang 60 (2016), Ausgabe 4,