A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.

Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.

The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.

Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.

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.

Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.

Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.

In Volume Two, Lazer presents a series of sustained readings of important experimental texts. Included are the poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and James Sherry. Lazer places these poets in the context of contemporary literary theory, and inspects both the successes and failures of said theory to interpret these works.

Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis collects nearly two decades of work on poetics by one of the pioneers of the "language poetry" movement.

Addressing poetics from a poet's perspective, Andrews focuses on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged. His essays aim "to map out opportunities for making sense (or making noise)--both in reading and writing contemporary literature. At the center has been a desire to explore language, as up close as possible, as a material and social medium for restagings of meaning and power." Andrews analyzes poetics and the production of meaning; alternative traditions and canons; and innovative contemporary poetry, particularly its break with many of the premises and constraints of even the most forward-looking modernisms.

An enlightening examination of the relationship between poetry and the information technologies increasingly used to read and write it

Many poets and their readers believe poetry helps us escape straightforward, logical ways of thinking. But what happens when poems confront the extraordinarily rational information technologies that are everywhere in the academy, not to mention everyday life?

Examining a broad array of electronics—including the radio, telephone, tape recorder, Cold War–era computers, and modern-day web browsers—Seth Perlow considers how these technologies transform poems that we don’t normally consider “digital.” From fetishistic attachments to digital images of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts to Jackson Mac Low’s appropriation of a huge book of random numbers originally used to design thermonuclear weapons, these investigations take Perlow through a revealingly eclectic array of work, offering both exciting new voices and reevaluations of poets we thought we knew.

With close readings of Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, and many others, The Poem Electric constructs a distinctive lineage of experimental writers, from the 1860s to today. Ultimately, Perlow mounts an important investigation into how electronic media allows us to distinguish poetic thought from rationalism. Posing a necessary challenge to the privilege of information in the digital humanities, The Poem Electric develops new ways of reading poetry, alongside and against the electronic equipment that is now ubiquitous in our world.

Poetic Investigations studies five contemporary writers whose radical engagements with poetic form and political content shed new light on issues of race, class, and gender. In a detailed reading of three American poets—Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, and Lyn Hejinian—and two African-Caribbean poets, Kamau Brathwaite and M. Nourbese Philip, Paul Naylor argues that these writers have produced new forms of poetry that address the "holes," or erasures, in history that more traditional poetry neglects.

The fourteen essays that make up this collection have as their common theme a reconsideration of the role historical and cultural change has played in the evolution of twentieth-century poetry and poetics. Committed to the notion that, in John Ashbery's words, "You can't say it that way anymore," Poetry On & Off the Page describes the formations and transformations of literary and artistic discourses, and traces these discourses as they have evolved in their dialogue with history, culture, and society. The volume is testimony to the important role that contemporary artistic practice will continue to play as we move into the twenty-first century.

A preeminent critic maps the frontier of contemporary poetry.

In this book, Jerome McGann argues that contemporary language-oriented writing implies a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition on one hand and in the future of criticism on the other. He focuses on Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as important intellectual resources because both see the history of poetry as a crisis of the present rather than as a legacy of the past. The crisis appears as a poetic deficit in contemporary culture, where values of politics and morality are judged prima facie more important than aesthetic values. McGann argues for the fundamental relevance of the aesthetic dimension and the contemporary relevance of cultural works of the past.

McGann moves through several broad categories in his examination of contemporary poetry, including the ways in which poetry must be abstract, change, and give pleasure. The author draws on sources ranging from the poetry of Bruce Andrews and Robert Duncan to Looney Tunes cartoons. The experimental move in contemporary poetry, McGann contends, is an emergency signal for readers and critics as much as it is for writers and poets, a signal that calls us to rethink the aesthetics of criticism. The interpretation of literary works has been dominated by enlightenment models—the expository essay and monograph—for almost two hundred years. With the emergence of new media, especially digital culture, the limitations of those models have grown increasingly apparent.

The Point Is To Change It explores alternative critical methods and provides a powerful call to reinvent our modes of investigation in order to escape the limitations of our inherited academic models. The goal of this process is to widen existing cracks or create new ones because, as McGann points out via the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, "That's how the light gets in."

In Racial Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau—who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing, in particular the language of identity politics, which tends to challenge political marginalization without contesting more fundamental assumptions about the construction of racial form. In the poets’ various treatments of things (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of heretofore discrete factors: the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification.

 

By refashioning avant-garde investigations of things into questions about how American discourse visualizes race in and on the body, these poets implicitly critique dominant modes of racial visibility, seeking alternatives to the unreflective stances that identity politics often unwittingly reproduces. At the heart of Jeon’s project is the assumption thatracial form is continually recalibrated to elide ideological ambiguities and ambivalences in contemporary culture. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on the subject—on interiority and individual experience—Racial Things, Racial Forms also uses the calculated strangeness of the avant-garde art object as an occasion to emphasize the physical and visual oddness of racial constructs, as a series of everchanging, contemporary phenomena that are in conversation with, but not entirely determined by, their historical legacy.

 

In this critical study, Jeon argues that by invoking the foreignness of an avant-garde art object as a way to understand racial otherness, these writers model the possibility of a post-identity, racial politics that challenges how race is fundamentally visualized. In addition to appealing to those interested in Asian American studies and race in American literature, Racial Things, Racial Forms addresses readers interested in contemporary poetry, art, and visual culture, paying particular attention to the intersections between literary and visual art.

 

The essays are written from the engaged perspective of an active poet for other poets, as well as for those who would like to read and think about poetry in a participatory fashion. The essays thus present “inside narratives” of some of the most challenging contemporary American poetry.
 

The range of Songs of Degrees extends from the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan to such “language poets as Bruce Andres and Susan Howe. Taggart closely examines the work of the objectivist poets George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. Three essays are devoted to each of these poets, providing detailed readings of individual poems and considerations of each poet’s overall achievement. Taggart also concentrates on poets whose work has not been widely recognized or is only now beginning to be recognized. These include Theodore Enslin, Frank Samperi, and William Bronk. Taggart’s essay “Reading William Bronk” is the first extensive reading of this relatively unknown but truly outstanding poet.

Taggart’s essays also focus on his own poetry. He describes the composition process and the thinking behind it, as well as the poet’s own evolving sense of what the poem can and ought to be. These very personal reflections are unique in their attention to current questions concerning form and the issue of spiritual vision. Avoiding political and cultural reductionism, Taggart throughout keeps his eye—and heart—on the poetic, singing his own “Songs of Degrees,” even as he discovers notes of the same music in the works of other.

The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries.

This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.

Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.

This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of physical sex and desire.
 
In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”
 
Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.
 
The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

The first critical volume devoted to the full range of women's postmodern works

We Who Love to Be Astonished collects a powerful group of previously unpublished essays to fill a gap in the critical evaluation of women's contributions to postmodern experimental writing. Contributors include Alan Golding, Aldon Nielsen, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis; discussions include analyses of the work of Kathleen Fraser, Harryette Mullen, and Kathy Acker, among others. The editors take as their title a line from the work of Lyn Hejinian, one of the most respected of innovative women poets writing today.

The volume is organized into four sections: the first two seek to identify, from two different angles, the ways women of different sociocultural backgrounds are exploring their relationships to their cultures' inherited traditions; the third section investigates the issue of visuality and the problems and challenges it creates; and the fourth section expands on the role of the body as material and performance.

The collection will breach a once irreconcilable divide between those who theorize about women's writing and those who focus on formalist practice. By embracing "astonishment" as the site of formalist-feminist investigation, the editors seek to show how form configures feminist thought, and, likewise, how feminist thought informs words and letters on a page. Students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, women's writing, and late-20th-century American literature will welcome this lively discussion.