A major contribution to Ashbery studies and to poetics in general.Andrew DuBois assesses John Ashbery s career as a poet in the context of changes in 20th-century aesthetics, the rise of the information age, and the proliferation of aural and visual stimuli. The issue of attention, he argues, is useful not only for understanding the problems of perception and concentration in an age of information overload but also for understanding how Ashbery s poetry and poetry in general contend with those issues.Ashbery s art, DuBois demonstrates, embodies the conflicts between traditional and postmodern...

In the first expansive study of American pastoral since Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden , Mikkelsen reinvigorates discussion of this literary mode as a form of cultural commentary whose subjects extend beyond the simple or rustic life to encompass the major social, economic, and political transformations of the past century.

Using a critical examination of the collage poetics of Ronald Johnson, this book sets out to understand Johnson's poetry in the context of the "New American" collage tradition, stretching from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky and beyond.