Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Reading the Difficult
2. Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority: Eliot and Williams
3. Basil Bunting: Poet of the North
4. Parataxis in Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky
5. Writing and Authority in Zukofsky’s: Thanks to the Dictionary
6. Thinking with the Poem: Louis Zukofsky
7. Reading Niedecker
8. “Take Oil / and Hum” : Niedecker and Bunting
9. The Mind as Frying Pan: Robin Blaser’s Humor
10. “Writing on Air for Dear Life” : Richard Caddel
11. “The Tattle of Tongueplay ” : Mina Loy’s 'Love Songs'
12. “Conversation with One’s Peers” : George Oppen and Some Women Writers
13. Momently: The Politics of the Poem, a Note on Robert Creeley
14. Syllable as Music: Lyn Hejinian’s 'Writing Is an Aid to Memory'
15. McCaffery’s Diptych: The Black Debt
16. “Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened ” : How I Read Bruce Andrews
17. Paradise as Praxis: Bruce Andrews’s 'Lip Service'
18. Undoing the Book
19. Poetic Fact
20. Sound Reading
21. Paradise of Letters
Index