The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time
Author: Nicholas Nace
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0810136074

The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time offers original readings of poems composed in this century—poems that are challenging to follow, challenging to understand, challenging to discuss, and challenging to enjoy. Difficult poetry of the past relied on allusion, syntactic complexity, free association, and strange juxtapositions. The new poetry breaks with the old in its stunning variety; its questioning of inherited values, labels, and narratives; its multilingualism; its origin in and production of unnamed affects; and its coherence around critical and social theorists as much as other poets. The essays in this volume include poets writing on the works of a younger generation (Lyn Hejinian on Paolo Javier, Bob Perelman on Rachel Zolf, Roberto Tejada on Rosa Alcalá), influential writers addressing the work of peers (Ben Lerner on Maggie Nelson, Michael W. Clune on Aaron Kunin), critics making imaginative leaps to encompass challenging work (Brian M. Reed on Sherwin Bitsui, Siobhan Philips on Juliana Spahr), and younger scholars coming to terms with poets who continue to govern new poetic experimentation (Joseph Jeon on Myung Mi Kim, Lytle Shaw on Lisa Robertson). In pairings that are both intuitive (Marjorie Perloff on Craig Dworkin) and unexpected (Langdon Hammer on Srikanth Reddy), The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time illuminates the myriad pathways and strategies for exploring difficult poetry of the present.

Leaving the Atocha Station

Leaving the Atocha Station
Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2011-08-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1566892929

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

All the Whiskey in Heaven

All the Whiskey in Heaven
Author: Charles Bernstein
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre:
ISBN: 9781907773303

All the Whiskey in Heaven brings together Charles Bernstein’s best work from the past thirty years, an astonishing assortment of different types of poems. Yet despite the distinctive differences from poem to poem, Bernstein’s characteristic explorations of how language both limits and liberates thought are present throughout. Modulating the comic and the dark structural invention with buoyant soundplay, these challenging works give way to poems of lyric excess and striking emotional range. This is poetry for poetry’s sake, as formally radical as it is socially engaged, providing equal measures of aesthetic pleasure, hilarity, and philosophical reflection. Long considered one of America’s most inventive and influential contemporary poets, Bernstein reveals himself to be both trickster and charmer.

The Value of Poetry

The Value of Poetry
Author: Eric Falci
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108621554

Eric Falci's The Value of Poetry offers an evaluation and critique of the literary, cultural, and political value of poetry in the twenty-first century. Falci claims that some of the most vital, significant, and enduring human notions have been voiced and held in poems. Poems marble civilizations: they catch courses of thought, tracks of feeling, and acts of speech and embed these shapes in language that is, in some fashion, poised toward the future. Falci argues that poetry is a vital medium in addressing and understanding some of the most pressing issues of our time. Ranging widely across canonical and contemporary poetry, The Value of Poetry shows how poems matter, and what poetry offers to readers in the contemporary world.

Cartesian Poetics

Cartesian Poetics
Author: Andrea Gadberry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022672316X

What is thinking? What does it feel like? What is it good for? Andrea Gadberry looks for answers to these questions in the philosophy of René Descartes and finds them in the philosopher’s implicit poetics. Gadberry argues that Descartes’s thought was crucially enabled by poetry and shows how markers of poetic genres from love lyric and elegy to the puzzling forms of the riddle and the anagram betray an impassioned negotiation with the difficulties of thought and its limits. Where others have seen Cartesian philosophy as a triumph of reason, Gadberry reveals that the philosopher accused of having “slashed poetry’s throat” instead enlisted poetic form to contain thought’s frustrations. Gadberry’s approach to seventeenth-century writings poses questions urgent for the twenty-first. Bringing literature and philosophy into rich dialogue, Gadberry centers close reading as a method uniquely equipped to manage skepticism, tolerate critical ambivalence, and detect feeling in philosophy. Helping us read classic moments of philosophical argumentation in a new light, this elegant study also expands outward to redefine thinking in light of its poetic formations.

The Connected Condition

The Connected Condition
Author: Yohei Igarashi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 150361073X

The Romantic poet's intense yearning to share thoughts and feelings often finds expression in a style that thwarts a connection with readers. Yohei Igarashi addresses this paradox by reimagining Romantic poetry as a response to the beginnings of the information age. Data collection, rampant connectivity, and efficient communication became powerful social norms during this period. The Connected Condition argues that poets responded to these developments by probing the underlying fantasy: the perfect transfer of thoughts, feelings, and information, along with media that might make such communication possible. This book radically reframes major poets and canonical poems. Igarashi considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a stenographer, William Wordsworth as a bureaucrat, Percy Shelley amid social networks, and John Keats in relation to telegraphy, revealing a shared attraction and skepticism toward the dream of communication. Bringing to bear a singular combination of media studies, the history of communication, sociology, rhetoric, and literary history, The Connected Condition proposes new accounts of literary difficulty and Romanticism. Above all, this book shows that the Romantic poets have much to teach us about living with the connected condition and the fortunes of literature in it.

Barely Composed: Poems

Barely Composed: Poems
Author: Alice Fulton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 93
Release: 2015-02-02
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 039324489X

"Fulton is exactly the kind of poet Shelley had in mind when he said 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.' " —Verse In this eagerly awaited collection of new poems—her first in over a decade—Alice Fulton reimagines the great lyric subjects—time, death, love—and imbues them with fresh urgency and depth. Barely Composed unveils the emotional devastations that follow trauma or grief—extreme states that threaten psyche and language with disintegration. With rare originality, the poems illuminate the deepest suffering and its aftermath of hypervigilance and numbness, the "formal feeling" described by Emily Dickinson. Elegies contemplate temporal mysteries—the brief span of human/animal life, the nearly eternal existence of stars and nuclear fuel, the enduring presence of the arts—and offer unsparing glimpses of personal loss and cultural suppressions of truth. Under the duress of silencing, whether chosen or imposed, language warps into something uncanny, rich, and profoundly moving. Various forms of inscription—coloring book to redacted document—enact the combustible power of the unsaid. Though "anguish is the universal language," there also is joy in the reciprocity of gifts and creativity, intellect and intimacy. Gorgeous vintage rhetorics merge with incandescent contemporary registers, and this recombinant linguistic mix gives rise to poems of disarming power. Visionaries—truth tellers, revelators, beholders—offer testimony as beautiful as it is unsettling. Shimmering with the "good strangeness of poetry," Barely Composed bears witness to love’s complexities and the fragility of existence. In the midst of cruelty, a world in which “the pound is by the petting zoo,” Fulton’s poems embrace the inextinguishable search for goodness, compassion, and "the principles of tranquility."

Reading Experimental Writing

Reading Experimental Writing
Author: Colby Georgina Colby
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-11-06
Genre: Electronic books
ISBN: 1474440401

Explores the challenges and significance of experimental writing Offers a forum for reflecting on the significance of avant-garde writing for the twenty-first century Explores the way in which contemporary experimental writers engage with socio-political issues Utilizes unpublished archive materials bringing to light a number of previously unpublished worksIncludes innovative readings of significant avant-garde writers previously neglected in the critical canonBringing together internationally leading scholars whose work engages with the continued importance of literary experiment, this book takes up the question of 'reading' in the contemporary climate from culturally and linguistically diverse perspectives. New reading practices are both offered and traced in avant-garde writers across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including John Cage, Kathy Acker, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joan Retallack, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Uljana Wolf, Samantha Gorman and Dave Jhave Johnston, among others. Exploring the socio-political significance of literary experiment, the book yields new critical approaches to reading avant-garde writing.

Beauty is a Verb

Beauty is a Verb
Author: Jennifer Bartlett
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2011
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1935955055

Chosen by the American Library Association as a 2012 Notable Book in Poetry. Beauty is a Verb is a ground-breaking anthology of disability poetry, essays on disability, and writings on the poetics of both. Crip Poetry. Disability Poetry. Poems with Disabilities. This is where poetry and disability intersect, overlap, collide and make peace. " BEAUTY IS A VERB] is going to be one of the defining collections of the 21st century...the discourse between ability, identity & poetry will never be the same." --Ron Silliman, author of In The American Tree "This powerful anthology succeeds at intimately showing...disability through the lenses of poetry. What emerges from the book as a whole is a stunningly diverse array of conceptions of self and other."--Publishers Weekly, starred review From "Beauty and Variations" by Kenny Fries: How else can I quench this thirst? My lips travel down your spine, drink the smoothness of your skin. I am searching for the core: What is beautiful? Who decides? Can the laws of nature be defied? Your body tells me: come close. But beauty distances even as it draws me near. What does my body want from yours? My twisted legs around your neck. You bend me back. Even though you can't give the bones at birth I wasn't given, I let you deep inside. You give me--what? Peeling back my skin, you expose my missing bones. And my heart, long before you came, just as broken. I don't know who to blame. So each night, naked on the bed, my body doesn't want repair, but longs for innocence. If innocent, despite the flaws I wear, I am beautiful. Sheila Black is a poet and children's book writer. In 2012, Poet Laureate Philip Levine chose her as a recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship. Disability activist Jennifer Bartlett is a poet and critic with roots in the Language school. Michael Northen is a poet and the editor of Wordgathering: A Journal of Poetics and Disability.

Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes

Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes
Author: A. J. Carruthers
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre:
ISBN: 1399526847

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.