What begins with an unlikely collection of unrelated phenomena--mechanical dolls, weather, atoms, lyric poetry--blossoms in the course of Toy Medium into a subtle and persuasive meditation on one of Western philosophy's biggest puzzles: the relation of mind and matter. What is the role of the imagination in defining material substance? In a dazzling study of the poetics of materialist philosophy and of the materialism of lyric poetry, Daniel Tiffany traces the historical conjunction of matter and metaphor through a remarkable range of topics: automata in classical antiquity and the...
What begins with an unlikely collection of unrelated phenomena--mechanical dolls, weather, atoms, lyric poetry--blossoms in the course of Toy Mediu...
About the origins of Anglo-American poetic modernism, one thing is certain: it started with a notion of the image, described variously by Ezra Pound as an ideogram and a vortex. We have reason to be less confident, however, about the relation between these puzzling conceptions of the image and the doctrine of literary positivism that is generally held to be the most important legacy of Imagism. No satisfactory account exists, moreover, of what bearing these foundational principles may have on Pound's later engagement with fascism. Nor is it clear how figures such as the vortex and the...
About the origins of Anglo-American poetic modernism, one thing is certain: it started with a notion of the image, described variously by Ezra Poun...
In search of the "dateless lively heat" that Shakespeare sourced to Cupid, Daniel Tiffany mounts a Jarmanesque masque of punk pageantry and finds "the infamous promiscuity of things" in broad display. Here is delight in "making up" these poems are trannies, the mind of each earning its costume through misdirection and imposture, enabling fictions that reconcile the cosmetic and the cosmic noise all in a fit. The poet may wear his "wide-awake hat," but the shoes are cruel and the impersonation always off-target. As watchword, you have the poet's "slang for the pink redoubt," the chummy...
In search of the "dateless lively heat" that Shakespeare sourced to Cupid, Daniel Tiffany mounts a Jarmanesque masque of punk pageantry and finds "the...
Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop? "Infidel Poetics" examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture. Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde...
Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ f...
