Bøger i Modern & Contemporary Poetics serien

Collects Alan Golding's essays on the futures (past and present) of poetry and poetics. Throughout the 13 essays gathered in this collection, Golding skillfully joins literary critique with a concern for history and a sociological inquiry into the creation of poetry.

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

Offers the first full-length study of Larry Eigner's poetry, covering his entire career from the beginning of his mature work in the 1950s to his last poems of the 1990s. George Hart charts where Eigner's two central interests intersect, and how their interaction fueled his work as a poet-critic.

"Philip Whalen (1923-2002) is a key figure in both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the New American Poetry. Whalen authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy. A professed Buddhist for most of his adult life, Whalen was ordained a Zen Buddhist monk in 1972 in what is arguably still the most influential Zen Buddhist training temple complex in North America. In some ways Whalen begs a comparison with Thomas Merton, the twentieth century's most significant Christian monk-poet. But where Merton contained himself within the conservative guidelines of Trappist-Christian orthodoxy, Whalen was a closeted homosexual (or bisexual) who inscribed an insider's account of his monastic community with an acid tongue and a keen sense of humor. His pen spared no one in the religious hierarchy he trained under. Whalen's literary work represents a significant turn in American letters, as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen's forty-plus years of journals-sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks-have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen's journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers who follow twentieth-century North American poetry. In his complex and idiosyncratic poetics, Whalen adopts a unique mind-and-language-centered approach to the creation of a poem. Some of his finest works are "live action" scenes where he fuses moments of bald mental perception with the linguistic intricacies of his inner consciousness (i.e., the words, phrases, and observations that his mind forms, or that other people spill into his mind in the same block of time). The significance of Whalen's journals is manifold, Brian Unger argues, and goes beyond their mere availability. Unger argues that of all the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat poets of the postwar period, Whalen's roots in modernism are among the strongest. He was a voracious reader, as his journals show, and a keen student of earlier literatures. Furthermore, the journals conclusively overturn many misleading arguments about Whalen's personal life as related in the 2015 Whalen biography Crowded by Beauty by David Schneider. The publication of the journals would provide for the first time, and in Whalen's own words, an objective and self-substantiated account of his life with biographical information that has never before been generally available. The Whalen journals make clear as never before the primary psychological forces driving his personal life, his interior life as a poet and a religious monk, and they shed important light on the intriguing complexity of his philosophical and phenomenological poetics"--

Explores the effects of parataxis, or fragmentary writing as a device in modern literature. Gerald L. Bruns focuses on texts that refuse to follow the traditional logic of sequential narrative. He explores numerous examples of self-interrupting composition, starting with Friedrich Schlegel's inaugural theory and practice of the fragment as an assertion of the autonomy of words.

Explores the impact of music on recent pioneering literary practices in the United States. Adopting the myth of Orpheus as its framework, Robert Zamsky argues that works by Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, John Taggart, Tracie Morris, and Nathaniel Mackey restage ancient debates over the relationship between poetry and music.

This work not only introduces the reader to the contemporary state of electronic writing, but also outlines the historical and technical contexts out of which electronic poetry has emerged and demonstrates some of the possibilities of the new medium.

Artist-architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins demonstrate the interconnectedness of innovative architectural design, the poetic process and philosophical enquiry. Their book promotes a deliberate use of architecture and design in dealing with the blight of the human condition.

This collection of 18 essays by the poet Kathleen Fraser, combines autobiography and criticism to examine what it means for an artist to innovate instead of following an already travelled path. The essays also examine modernist women writers, their contemporary successors, and their visual poetics.

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. This book focuses on Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein as important intellectual resources because both see the history of poetry as a crisis of the present.

Focusing on programs and experiments produced before the emergence of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, this title analyzes numerous landmark works of digital poetry to illustrate that the foundations of most advanced works are rooted in the rudimentary generative, visual, and interlinked productions of the genre's prehistoric period.

A radical rereading of Emerson that posits African-American culture, literature and jazz as the very continuation and embodiment of pragmatic thought and democratic tradition. The book traces Emerson's legacy through the 19th and 20th centuries to discover how Emersonian thought continues to inform issues of race, aesthetics and poetic discourse.

An analysis of the sustaining vitality behind contemporary American poetry from 1975 to the 2003, these 12 essays examine both exemplary innovators and the social context in which innovation is resisted, acclaimed, or taken for granted.

Explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms.

Celebrated by both the Black Mountain poets in the '50s and '60s and the Language poets in the '70s and '80s, Larry Eigner's poems occupy an important place in American poetry and poetics. This book gathers some of the most intimate, personal writing on life and the art of poetry by this crucial figure in late twentieth-century American letters.

With the ascent of digital culture, new forms of literature and literary production are thriving while traditional genres and media have been transformed. Word Toysis a thought-provoking volume that speculates on a range of poetic, novelistic, and programmed works that lie beyond the language of the literary and views them instead as technical objects.

Calligraphy Typewriters is the first and only single-volume collection of Larry Eigner's most significant poems, gathering in one place the most celebrated of the several thousand poems that constitute his remarkable life's work.

Offers an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. In Imperfect Fit, Allen Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts.

This new edition of Contemporaries and Snobs, a landmark collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of high modernist poetics.

African American poetry exhibits an impressive range of style and substance, in all its forms. This history of the genre offers a critical reassessment of its development in the 20th century, within the contexts of modernism and the troubled racial history of the United States.

A work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices - historical and private - that capture the dizzying evolution of America's social, cultural, and literary consciousness.