"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.
A Times Higher Education Book of the Week
One of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume.
“It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.”
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books
“Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.”
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review
“Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.”
—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement
This book plumbs the virtues of the Homeric poems as scripts for solo performance. Despite academic focus on orality and on composition in performance, we have yet to fully appreciate the Iliad and Odyssey as the sophisticated scripts that they are. What is lost in the journey from the stage to the page?
Readers may be readily impressed by the vividness of the poems, but they may miss out on the strange presence or uncanniness that the performer evoked in ancient audience members such as Plato and Aristotle. This book focuses on the performer not simply as transparent mediator, but as one haunted by multiple stories and presences, who brings suppressed voices to the surface.
Performance is inextricable from all aspects of the poems, from image to structure to background story. Background stories previously neglected, even in some of the most familiar passages (such as Phoenix’s speech in Iliad 9) are brought to the surface, and passages readers tend to rush through (such as Odysseus’s encounter with Eumaeus) are shown to have some of the richest dramatic potential. Attending to performance enlivens isolated features in a given passage by showing how they work together.
Condemned to hang after his raid on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown prophesied that the crimes of a slave-holding land would be purged away only with blood. A study of omens, maledictions, and inspired invocations, The Oracle and the Curse examines how utterances such as Brown’s shaped American literature between the Revolution and the Civil War.
In nineteenth-century criminal trials, judges played the role of law’s living oracles, but offenders were also given an opportunity to address the public. When the accused began to turn the tables on their judges, they did so not through rational arguments but by calling down a divine retribution. Widely circulated in newspapers and pamphlets, these curses appeared to channel an otherworldly power, condemning an unjust legal system and summoning readers to the side of righteousness.
Exploring the modes of address that communicated the authority of law and the dictates of conscience in antebellum America’s court of public opinion, Caleb Smith offers a new poetics of justice which assesses the nonrational influence that these printed confessions, trial reports, and martyr narratives exerted on their first audiences. Smith shows how writers portrayed struggles for justice as clashes between human law and higher authority, giving voice to a moral protest that transformed American literature.
"Orange Alert is a poetic and yogic salvo across the bows of our defensive imperial posturing. Kazim Ali's essays leap deftly from homages to avant-garde artists (Yoko Ono, Agnes Martin, John Cage) to awestruck meditations on ancient architecture, from analyses of poets (Jane Cooper, Agha Shahid Ali, Mahmoud Darwish, Lucille Clifton) to twitter aphorisms. Orange Alert is a revelation, a salve, an invitation to breathe again."
---Philip Metres, Associate Professor, Department of English, John Carroll University
"With their delicacy of attention and bold range of subjects, Kazim Ali's essays hold many quiet surprises. In each art he searches for insight and craft---the virtues of his own patient writing."
---Susan Stewart, Chancellor, Academy of American Poets; and Professor, Princeton University
"Kazim Ali's essays, like his poems, are alive with curiosity and humanity. . . . Orange Alert makes a compelling case for the necessity of poetry on a planet wracked by war and devastation."
---Timothy Yu, Associate Professor, English and Asian American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Kazim Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding.
In Orange Alert, Ali discusses poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Bhanu Kapil, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Samuel Beckett. He considers painters Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian, musicians Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono, and philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Jean Baudrillard. Ali links the poetic endeavor to such diverse texts as Moby-Dick, Battlestar Galactica, and Marilyn Buck's prison journals.
Ali discusses contemporary poetry in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television; film; and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook.
He shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture.
Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a memoir, Bright Felon: Autobiographyand Cities. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He has been a regular columnist for American Poetry Review.
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