The essays in Phenomenal Reading entice readers to cross accepted barriers, and highlight the work of poets who challenge language-as-usual in academia and the culture at large.Phenomenal Reading is comprised of essays that are central to how best to read poetry. This book examines individually and collectively poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Why do their words appear in unconventional orders? What end do these arrangements serve? Why are they striking? Brian Reed focuses on poetic form as a persistent puzzle, using historical fact and the views of...
The essays in Phenomenal Reading entice readers to cross accepted barriers, and highlight the work of poets who challenge language-as-usual in ...
The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen's own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women's voices, and the future of poetry.
Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen's work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.
The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen's own work, metho...
The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectively investigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonplace notions of the contemporary in the field of poetics.In the eleven essays of The Darkness of the Present, poet and critic Steve McCaffery argues that by approaching the past and the present as unified entities, the contemporary is made historical at the same time as the historical is made contemporary. McCaffery s writings work against the urge to classify works by placing them in standard literary periods or disciplinary...
The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectively investigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonp...
Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site.
Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent...
Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a sit...
Stubborn Poetries is a study of poets whose work, because of its difficulty, apparent obduracy, or simple resistance to conventional explication, remains more-or-less firmly outside the canon.The focus of the essays in Stubborn Poetries by Peter Quartermain is on nonmainstream poets--often unknown, unstudied, and neglected writers whose work bucks preconceived notions of what constitutes the avant-garde. Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority: T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams opens the collection and sounds a central theme: Quartermain argues that Williams,...
Stubborn Poetries is a study of poets whose work, because of its difficulty, apparent obduracy, or simple resistance to conventional explicatio...
The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry. Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a re-staging of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). The tenets of new poetry abound. But what of the new reading that such poetry demands? Essays in Reading...
The bold essays that make up Reading the Difficulties offer case studies in and strategies for reading innovative poetry. Definitions of wh...
This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics. Laura Riding s "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a compelling account by turns personal, by turns historical of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry. Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of...
This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics. <...
Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supposedly enervated "late-Romantic" poetry of the nineteenth century. The original essays in Active Romanticism challenge this interpretation by tracing the fundamental continuities between Romanticism's poetic and political radicalism and the experimental movements in poetry from the late-nineteenth-century to the present day. According to editors July Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson, "active romanticism" is a poetic response, direct or...
Literary history generally locates the primary movement toward poetic innovation in twentieth-century modernism, an impulse carried out against a supp...
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry. In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical...
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his ...
In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial development, and pollution. He posits that the curious failure of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethic was a deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission. In his opening passage, Schuster boldly invokes lines from Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which echo as a paean to pollution: "Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys cast black shadows at nightfall " Schuster labels this theme "regeneration through pollution"...
In The Ecology of Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the relationships of key modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial de...
