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...