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Poetic Creation was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Myths of creativity have changed throughout Western literary history. The Romantic era cherished the idea of creativity as a spontaneous, unpremeditated act, closely related to improvisation. In the twentieth century the myth of the writer as a worker among workers has competed with the Surrealist myth of the spontaneous author who writes in a sort of trance. Yet there can be no doubt that the creative process as such crosses historical boundaries. Carl Fehrman devotes this book to the process of artistic creativity, focusing on the dichotomy between inspiration and effort and using texts and manuscripts from the period of early Romanticism to present.

Fehrman is primarily concerned with the creativity of poets and draws on authorial accounts of the process, the analysis of manuscripts in successive drafts, psychological and linguistic experiments in creativity, and accounts of creativity in other fields. At the heart of the book are case studies: on Coleridge's writings of "Kubla Khan," Poe's composition of "The Raven," And Valery's account of his prolonged work on "Le Cimetiere Marin." Fehrman also deals with literary works that have undergone genre transformation, Ibsen's Brand and Selma Lagerlof;s Gosta Berlings Saga. In closing chapters he draws upon his case studies and other materials to provide fascinating insights into both productivity and its converse, blocked creativity, and in this context discusses the general problem of periodicity in a creative life.

Fehrman works within a Swedish aesthetic tradition which has attracted philosophers, art historians, and literary scholars since the turn of the century, all of them intent on discovering the origins of the work of art. This translation brings his work to Englishspeaking literary scholars and will be of special interest to those concerned with comparative aesthetics and the creative process.

Since at least the time of Plato's Republic, the relationship between poetry and ethics has been troubled. Through the prism of what has been called the "new" ethical criticism, inspired by the work of Emmanuel Levinas, G. Matthew Jenkins considers the works of Objectivists, Black Mountain poets, and Language poets in light of their full potential to reshape this ancient relationship.

American experimental poetry is usually read in either political or moral terms. Poetic Obligation, by contrast, considers the poems of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Susan Howe, and Lyn Hejinian in terms of the philosophical notion of ethical obligation to the Other in language. Jenkins's historical trajectory enables him to consider the full breadth of ethical topics that have driven theoretical debate since the end of World War II. This original approach establishes an ethical lineage in the works of twentieth-century experimental poets, creating a way to reconcile the breach between poetry and the issue of ethics in literature at large.

With implications for a host of social issues, including ethnicity and immigration, economic inequities, and human rights, Jenkins's imaginative reconciliation of poetry and ethics will provide stimulating reading for teachers and scholars of American literature as well as advocates and devotees of poetry in general. Poetic Obligation marshals ample evidence that poetry matters and continues to speak to the important issues of our day.

 Poems written in the first person, poems that contain passages of conversation or dialogue, and narrative poems all rely on their readers’ capacity to process discourse. Discourse features in the texts of those poems—features such as temporal and spatial reference, narrative “framing”, and the strategic use of direct speech—inevitably affect the way readers receive the central themes. Recent developments in linguistic theory, including developments that address discourse structure, thus offer literary scholars new tools for approaching a richer understanding of those poems.

Poetics & Polemics, 1980-2005 brings together in one volume a wide-ranging selection of essays and commentaries by one of the most significant poets, critics, and translators working with American and international poetry today.

Jerome Rothenberg’s work spans a period of over forty years and nearly one hundred books, and though perhaps best known as a poet, his critical and theoretical contributions to the fields of innovative, experimental poetry have become equally important facets of his work. Rothenberg’s earliest critical writings concerned themselves with ethnopoetics and the poetics of performance. In the last twenty years his critical thinking has evolved to encompass more explicitly issues of modernism, postmodernism, and the avant-garde, as well as meditations on the nature of the book and writing. This volume extends and elaborates all of those interests, allowing for the first time a comprehensive glimpse of the full trajectory of his thinking.

In the first section, “Poetics and Polemics,” Rothenberg’s essays address a range of issues with which he’s become closely associated, among them the anthology as a critical and polemical tool; the intersection of poetry with art, performance, and politics, in both contemporary and traditional practice; the poetics of Jewish mysticism as a traditional form of conceptual and language poetry; and the universality of poetic discourse, particularly as seen in tribal poetry or in poetic traditions long separated from the Western literary mainstream.  In “A Gallery of Poets” is Rothenberg’s lively explorations of the work of other poets, as they relate to his own work, to avant-garde poetry in general, and to the poetic traditions that concern him the most. Finally, in “Dialogues and Interviews” are Rothenberg’s unbridled meditations and musings on what he calls “the life of poetry” outside the bounds of book and binding, class and category, a dynamic force at the center of all that we call human. 

Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivismexamines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. 

Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. 

Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, Robert Sheppard 

Poetry Matters explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. Central to this project is the conviction that a poetics that explores the political dimensions of affect; demonstrates an understanding of subjectivity as posthuman and transcorporeal; critically reflects on the impact of capitalism on queer, racialized, and female bodies; and develops an ethical vocabulary for reimagining the nation state and critically engaging with issues of democracy and citizenship is now more urgent than ever before. 

Milne focuses on poetry published after 2001 by writers who mostly began writing after the feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies. The poets discussed in this book—including Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Nikki Reimer, Rachel Zolf, Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka—bring a sense of political agency to poetry. These voices seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. This is poetry that matters—both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as “matter”—as a material entity under siege. It could not be more timely or more relevant. 

Delivered as a three-part lecture series in 1854 at the famous Hibernian Society Hall in Charleston, South Carolina, Simms’s spirited defense of poetry stands in the nobel line of poetic credos from poets such as Sir Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is the only full-length work of its kind in American literature, and it has never before been published.

Seventh in the University of Arkansas Press’s Simms Series, Poetry and the Practical is a clear, forceful rebuttal of arguments that would relegate poetry to the margins of life. It proclaims the high calling of poets as spokesmen and romantic visionaries, underscoring their mission to reveal truth and passion, mind and heart and to transcend the limiting bounds of the empirical. In proving poetry’s utility and worth, Simms uses all the tools of persuasion open to him: his wide reading, his considerable knowledge of the history of culture and civilizations, his understanding of the values of place and tradition, and, above all, an oratorical eloquence, which allows his words to leave the page in a rush of inspiration.

These lectures, which still retain their identity as scripts prepared and punctuated for performance, provide profound insight into Simms the poet and into the effects of industrialization, the southern sensibility, and the influence of European thought on southern literature at a critical point in that literature’s development.

What would it mean to make a work of art the focal point of one’s life practice? Poetry as a Way of Life goes back to the origins of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in the early eighteenth century in order to uncover an understanding of the work of art as an exercise of the self. Engaging in close readings of works by both canonical and less well-known eighteenth-century German poets such as Friedrich Holderlin, Novalis, Friedrich von Hagedorn, and Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Gabriel Trop illustrates the ways in which these authors tap into the potential of poetic form to redefine the limits of human perception and generate alternative ways of being in the world.

Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law.

Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present.

Set in courtrooms, lawyers’ offices, law-school classrooms, and judges’ chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think “Scottsboro”) or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.

 
Contributors Include:

W. H. Auden

Robert Burns

Lewis Carroll

John Ciardi

Daniel Defoe

Emily Dickinson

John Donne

Rita Dove

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Martín Espada

Thomas Hardy

Seamus Heaney

A. E. Housman

Langston Hughes

Ben Jonson

X. J. Kennedy

Yusef Komunyakaa

Ted Kooser

D. H. Lawrence

Edgar Lee Masters

W. S. Merwin

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sir Walter Raleigh

Muriel Rukeyser

Carl Sandburg

William Shakespeare

Jonathan Swift

Mona Van Duyn

Oscar Wilde

William Carlos Williams

from “The Hanging Judge” by Eavan Boland

Come to the country where justice is seen to be done,

Done daily. Come to the country where

Sentence is passed by word of mouth and raw

Boys split like infinitives. Look, here

We hanged our son, our only son

And hang him still and still we call it law.

The Poetry of the Possible challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, Joel Nickels rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude.

By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens, Nickels resurrects modernism’s obsession with constituent power: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, he reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation.

Setting modernism’s individual and collective models of spontaneity in dialogue with theorists of political spontaneity such as Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, Nickels retells the story of modernism as the struggle to represent powers of collective self-organization that lie outside established regimes of political representation.