1 Coming To Terms With The American Long Poem— Introduction 1
· Defining the American Long Poem
· Reading the American Long Poem
· Phenomenology and American Poetics
· Charles Olson’s Phenomenological Poetics
· Acts of Poetic Extension
2 Finding A Word For Ourselves — George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous 42
· Letting The World Be Encountered: Oppen, Heidegger and Curiosity
· The Thing Seen Each Day: Seeing and Actualness
· We Live Among: Articulating Numerousness
3 A Huge Companionship —Robin Blaser’s Image-Nations 72
· A Continuum of Utterance: Self, Exteriority and ‘The Chiasm’
· Interchange Is A Constant Folding: Seriality, Cosmology and ‘The Fold’
· In Company With The Messenger: A Phenomenology of Coterie
4 A Grand Essay On Perception — Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino’s Sight 106
· Occurrence and Description: Envisioning Collaboration
· The Sight/Site of Poetry: An Epistolary Seriality
· Downcast Eyes: Ocularcentrism and Visionary Poetics
5 A Massive System of Urgency — Susan Howe’s Pierce Arrow 144
· Retrospective Excursions: History and The Margin
· A Stumbling Phenomenology: Peirce and Husserl
· Ethics is an Optics: Howe and Levinas
6 Adumbration Bound Our Book — Nathaniel Mackey’s Song of Andoumboulou 181
· Andoumboulouous Liminality: Hybrid Serialities
· Improvisation is already an improvisation of improvisation: Improvised Form and Jazz Poetics
· A Long Song Of Wandering: A Phenomenology of Song
7 Inside The Middle Of The Long Poem — Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 222
· Trace Elements: Derrida and the Phenomenology of the Trace
· The Work a Gigantic Memory Of Itself:Drafting, Gridding and Folding
· Reading the line of “It”: Deixis and Dispersal
8 An Ever-Renewed Experience Of Its Own Beginning — Conclusion
Matthew Carbery is an Early Career Researcher currently living in Cambridge, UK. He is also an editor of EPIZOOTICS! literary magazine, and his poetry has been published in Tears in the Fence, Blackbox Manifold, CTRL+ALT+DEL, Otoliths, Stride and Dead King Magazine.
Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem reads major figures including Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe and Rachel Blau DuPlessis within a new approach to the long poem tradition. Through a series of contextualised close readings, it explores the ways in which American poets developed their poetic forms by engaging with a variety of European phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Consolidating recent materials on the role of Continental Philosophy in American poetics, this book explores the theoretical and historical contexts in which avant-garde poets have developed radically new methods of making poems long. Matthew Carbery offers a timely commentary on a number of major works of American poetry whilst providing ground-breaking research into the wider philosophical context of late twentieth-century poetic experimentation.