BiblioVault - Books about Ma, Ming-Qian

The Objectivist Nexus

Essays in Cultural Poetics

Peter Quartermain

University of Alabama Press, 1999

"Objectivist" writers, conjoined through a variety of personal, ideological, and literary-historical links, have, from the late 1920s to the present, attracted emulation and suspicion. Representing a nonsymbolist, postimagist poetics and characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological worldview, Objectivists have retained their outsider status. Despite such status, however, the formal, intellectual, ideological, and ethical concerns of the Objectivist nexus have increasingly influenced poetry and poetics in the United States.

Thus, argue editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, the time has come for an anthology that unites essential works on Objectivist practices and presents Objectivist writing as an enlargement of the possibilities of poetry rather than as a determinable and definable literary movement. The authors' collective aim is to bring attention to this group of poets and to exemplify and specify cultural readings for poetic texts--readings alert to the material world, politics, society, and history, and readings concerned with the production, dissemination, and reception of poetic texts.

The contributors consider Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky within both their historical milieu and our own. The essays insist on poetry as a mode of thought; analyze and evaluate Objectivist politics; focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by certain Objectivist affiliations with Judaism; and explore the dissemination of poetic texts and the vagaries of Objectivist reception. Running throughout the book are two related threads: Objectivist writing as generally a practice aware of its own historical and social contingency and Objectivist writing as a site of complexity, contestation, interrogation, and disagreement.

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Poetry as Re-Reading

American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method

Ming-Qian Ma

Northwestern University Press, 2008

Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma’s book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading.

With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.

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Wreading

A Poetics of Awareness, or How Do We Know What We Know?

Jed Rasula

University of Alabama Press, 2022

A diverse collection of essays and interviews on reading, teaching, and writing poetry from a preeminent critic and scholar

Jed Rasula is a distinguished scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. Wreading: A Poetics of Awareness, or How Do We Know What We Know? is a collection of essays and interviews that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity.

While this volume presents highlights from Rasula’s criticism, it also serves as a carefully assembled intellectual autobiography. Wreading consists of two parts: an assortment of Rasula’s solo criticism and selected interviews and conversations with other poets and scholars. These detailed conversations are with Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, Tony Tost, Mike Chasar, Joel Bettridge, and Ming-Qian Ma. Their exchanges address ecopoetics, the corporate university, the sheer volume of contemporary poetry, and more. This substantial set of dialogues gives readers a glimpse inside a master critic’s deeply informed critical practice, illuminating his intellectual touchstones.

The balance between essay and interview achieves a distillation of Rasula’s long-established idea of “wreading.” In his original use, the term denotes how any act of criticism inherently adds to the body of writing that it purports to read. In this latest form, Wreading captures a critical perception that sparks insight and imagination, regardless of what it sees.

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