Peter Middleton
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195109924
- eISBN:
- 9780199855261
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195109924.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Many poetry readings since the Beat poets read at the Six Gallery have radiated a belief in poetry's revolutionary cultural power. Poets certainly become uneasy when they do occasionally reflect on ...
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Many poetry readings since the Beat poets read at the Six Gallery have radiated a belief in poetry's revolutionary cultural power. Poets certainly become uneasy when they do occasionally reflect on poetry readings. Performance degrades cognitive apprehension of poems because the educated inward ear can do more with the rhythms, vowels, syncopations, and stresses of any poem than the amateur human voice can do. Current performance writers stress the importance of the unique location in history, space, and interaction for the significance of the poem, a condition that is paramount in performance. Poetry readings are often justified as opportunities to hear the poem uttered by the reader who understands its sounding best. Authorship and intersubjectivity collaborate with the implicit allegorisation of poetry's potential and actual place in everyday life.Less
Many poetry readings since the Beat poets read at the Six Gallery have radiated a belief in poetry's revolutionary cultural power. Poets certainly become uneasy when they do occasionally reflect on poetry readings. Performance degrades cognitive apprehension of poems because the educated inward ear can do more with the rhythms, vowels, syncopations, and stresses of any poem than the amateur human voice can do. Current performance writers stress the importance of the unique location in history, space, and interaction for the significance of the poem, a condition that is paramount in performance. Poetry readings are often justified as opportunities to hear the poem uttered by the reader who understands its sounding best. Authorship and intersubjectivity collaborate with the implicit allegorisation of poetry's potential and actual place in everyday life.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ...
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This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
Wyatt Prunty
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195057867
- eISBN:
- 9780199855124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195057867.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the difference between contemporary and modern poetry. It then turns to Robert Lowell, arguing that because of his early success as a young ...
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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the difference between contemporary and modern poetry. It then turns to Robert Lowell, arguing that because of his early success as a young modernist and later success with poetry that diverged from modernist norms, his career is representative of a substantial segment of a younger generation of poets who distanced themselves from the tenets of their modernist elders. It compares the systematic minimalism of Edmund Husserl’s method in his Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology with the factualism of Lowell’s method, which began with the second version of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs”. The chapter also considers the work of Heidegger.Less
This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the difference between contemporary and modern poetry. It then turns to Robert Lowell, arguing that because of his early success as a young modernist and later success with poetry that diverged from modernist norms, his career is representative of a substantial segment of a younger generation of poets who distanced themselves from the tenets of their modernist elders. It compares the systematic minimalism of Edmund Husserl’s method in his Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology with the factualism of Lowell’s method, which began with the second version of “The Mills of the Kavanaughs”. The chapter also considers the work of Heidegger.
Nick Piombino
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195109924
- eISBN:
- 9780199855261
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195109924.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter presents the idea of “aural ellipsis”, a term used to define certain effects of indeterminacy in writing, reading, and listening to contemporary poetry. It also discusses the effect of ...
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This chapter presents the idea of “aural ellipsis”, a term used to define certain effects of indeterminacy in writing, reading, and listening to contemporary poetry. It also discusses the effect of the “aural ellipsis” in poetry and how in certain readings of poetry, the author is hearing something parallel but otherwise mysteriously inaccessible, compared to what he was listening to when listening to becomes listening for. The chapter also emphasizes the distinction that can be made between written works, those that can be appreciated by means of ordinary silent reading and those in which each word should be heard read aloud. The complex nature of the relationship between thinking and listening is at the heart of the experience of listening to poetry. The aural ellipses of the contemporary poem ensure that there will be spaces for invention on the part of the listener.Less
This chapter presents the idea of “aural ellipsis”, a term used to define certain effects of indeterminacy in writing, reading, and listening to contemporary poetry. It also discusses the effect of the “aural ellipsis” in poetry and how in certain readings of poetry, the author is hearing something parallel but otherwise mysteriously inaccessible, compared to what he was listening to when listening to becomes listening for. The chapter also emphasizes the distinction that can be made between written works, those that can be appreciated by means of ordinary silent reading and those in which each word should be heard read aloud. The complex nature of the relationship between thinking and listening is at the heart of the experience of listening to poetry. The aural ellipses of the contemporary poem ensure that there will be spaces for invention on the part of the listener.
Wyatt Prunty
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195057867
- eISBN:
- 9780199855124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195057867.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Two types of contemporary poetry stand as opposites — plainspoken poems that are reticent about their intensity and lyrical poems that are both compulsive and musical. There are many other ways to ...
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Two types of contemporary poetry stand as opposites — plainspoken poems that are reticent about their intensity and lyrical poems that are both compulsive and musical. There are many other ways to distinguish contemporary poems, which must compete during what is a pluralistic period; but in thinking about different poems, especially the presuppositions behind the different modes of thought they employ, this chapter posits the extremes of speech and song in order to uncover what they suggest about the resources available to poets. There is more to such a distinction than our usual ideas about speaking and singing take into account. If we focus our attention on poems that speak and those that sing, we will see fundamental differences in the assumptions made by poets about the truth claims available to them.Less
Two types of contemporary poetry stand as opposites — plainspoken poems that are reticent about their intensity and lyrical poems that are both compulsive and musical. There are many other ways to distinguish contemporary poems, which must compete during what is a pluralistic period; but in thinking about different poems, especially the presuppositions behind the different modes of thought they employ, this chapter posits the extremes of speech and song in order to uncover what they suggest about the resources available to poets. There is more to such a distinction than our usual ideas about speaking and singing take into account. If we focus our attention on poems that speak and those that sing, we will see fundamental differences in the assumptions made by poets about the truth claims available to them.
Natalie Pollard (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780748669417
- eISBN:
- 9781474406338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748669417.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This is the first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. It includes eight essays by leading literary critics and writers. These explore the social, historical, ...
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This is the first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. It includes eight essays by leading literary critics and writers. These explore the social, historical, and personal dimensions of Paterson's poetry and prose. The book relates Paterson's work to the classical, medieval, early modern, modernist, and contemporary voices that inform it. It analyses the literary qualities across Paterson's poetry and prose, from his sonnets to his long sequences, his aphorisms to his versions and translations. It considers Paterson as a figure actively negotiating his place within literary history and theory, as well as confronting that history with humour and directness. It also includes two interviews with Paterson, a critical introduction, and a bibliography. Overall, it attends to key issues in British poetry and publishing, including: translation, national and international identities, spirituality and religion, the contemporary poetry industry, poetry and mathematics, the intersections of poetry, art and music, and psychoanalysis and the body.Less
This is the first book-length critical study of the contemporary British poet, Don Paterson. It includes eight essays by leading literary critics and writers. These explore the social, historical, and personal dimensions of Paterson's poetry and prose. The book relates Paterson's work to the classical, medieval, early modern, modernist, and contemporary voices that inform it. It analyses the literary qualities across Paterson's poetry and prose, from his sonnets to his long sequences, his aphorisms to his versions and translations. It considers Paterson as a figure actively negotiating his place within literary history and theory, as well as confronting that history with humour and directness. It also includes two interviews with Paterson, a critical introduction, and a bibliography. Overall, it attends to key issues in British poetry and publishing, including: translation, national and international identities, spirituality and religion, the contemporary poetry industry, poetry and mathematics, the intersections of poetry, art and music, and psychoanalysis and the body.
Wyatt Prunty
- Published in print:
- 1990
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195057867
- eISBN:
- 9780199855124
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195057867.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
When we mention mimicry we think “of” a thing imitated, but “of” is a middle term that both holds a thing off and holds it close. It may indicate a point or direction by which one reckons, a ...
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When we mention mimicry we think “of” a thing imitated, but “of” is a middle term that both holds a thing off and holds it close. It may indicate a point or direction by which one reckons, a derivation, a cause, the constitutive material of a thing, belonging or possession, a separation, an object of some action, the place in time of a particular action. There is both overlap and distance created by the polynomial function that “of” introduces between a subject and its object, or between an object and its copy. The relationship between the contemporary poet who employs synaposematic mimicry and the object imitated involves all these meanings. The poet’s mimicry carries these meanings the way a primitive shepherd’s notched bone was used for reckoning his sheep or the way a Mesopotamian egg-shaped envelope with clay balls inside it was used for the same purpose. At first mimicry carries us through an ordinal sequence of particulars; taken in the aggregate, however, it becomes a cardinal summary that is both inclusive and separative. This chapter first takes Nemerov’s poems on their own terms, and then considers how by synaposematism and other modes of thought they investigate, separate, deflect, make safe, and generate wholeness.Less
When we mention mimicry we think “of” a thing imitated, but “of” is a middle term that both holds a thing off and holds it close. It may indicate a point or direction by which one reckons, a derivation, a cause, the constitutive material of a thing, belonging or possession, a separation, an object of some action, the place in time of a particular action. There is both overlap and distance created by the polynomial function that “of” introduces between a subject and its object, or between an object and its copy. The relationship between the contemporary poet who employs synaposematic mimicry and the object imitated involves all these meanings. The poet’s mimicry carries these meanings the way a primitive shepherd’s notched bone was used for reckoning his sheep or the way a Mesopotamian egg-shaped envelope with clay balls inside it was used for the same purpose. At first mimicry carries us through an ordinal sequence of particulars; taken in the aggregate, however, it becomes a cardinal summary that is both inclusive and separative. This chapter first takes Nemerov’s poems on their own terms, and then considers how by synaposematism and other modes of thought they investigate, separate, deflect, make safe, and generate wholeness.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. ...
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Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.Less
Attention Equals Life examines why a quest to pay attention to daily life has increasingly become a central feature of both contemporary American poetry and the wider culture of which it is a part. Drawing on theories and debates about the nature of everyday life from fields in the humanities, this book traces the modern history of this preoccupation and considers why it is so much with us today. Attention Equals Life argues that it is no coincidence a potent hunger for everyday life exploded in the post-1945 period. This cultural need could be seen as a reaction to rapid and dislocating cultural, political, and social transformations that have resulted in a culture of perilous distraction, interruption, and fragmented attention. The book argues that poetry has mounted a response, and even resistance, to a culture that is gradually losing its capacity to pay attention. It examines why a compulsion to represent the everyday became predominant in decades after modernism, why it has often led to unusual projects and formal innovations, and why poetry in particular might be an everyday-life genre par excellence. The book considers the forms this preoccupation takes and examines their aesthetic, philosophical, and political ramifications. By exploring these innovative strategies, unusual projects, and new technologies as methods of attending to dailiness, Attention Equals Life uncovers an important factor at the heart of twentieth- and twenty-first–century literature.
Guillermo Rodríguez
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199463602
- eISBN:
- 9780199087235
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199463602.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The critical approach followed in this chapter is pluralistic and takes into consideration the diverse literary and critical traditions present in Ramanujan’s scholarly work and their different ...
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The critical approach followed in this chapter is pluralistic and takes into consideration the diverse literary and critical traditions present in Ramanujan’s scholarly work and their different conceptualizations of poetry and poetics. These multiple components are not placed in a hegemonic relationship, but treated as a network of ideas that feed into Ramanujan’s ‘outer’ poetics. It relates his professional involvement with several Western critical disciplines and Indian traditional poetics and their impact on his poetic thought, covering the mother-tongue (Tamil Sangam, Tamil and Kannada bhakti) and father-tongue traditions (literature in English, Sanskrit poetics), and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western and Indian poets and their use of the past. The description of these literary traditions and schools draws attention to the scholar’s characteristic interpretation of their systems of poetry in the light of his own critical notions and ideals.Less
The critical approach followed in this chapter is pluralistic and takes into consideration the diverse literary and critical traditions present in Ramanujan’s scholarly work and their different conceptualizations of poetry and poetics. These multiple components are not placed in a hegemonic relationship, but treated as a network of ideas that feed into Ramanujan’s ‘outer’ poetics. It relates his professional involvement with several Western critical disciplines and Indian traditional poetics and their impact on his poetic thought, covering the mother-tongue (Tamil Sangam, Tamil and Kannada bhakti) and father-tongue traditions (literature in English, Sanskrit poetics), and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western and Indian poets and their use of the past. The description of these literary traditions and schools draws attention to the scholar’s characteristic interpretation of their systems of poetry in the light of his own critical notions and ideals.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction provides a theoretical and critical framework for this study, situating the book’s argument alongside recent critical studies of the everyday in literature. The chapter traces the ...
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The introduction provides a theoretical and critical framework for this study, situating the book’s argument alongside recent critical studies of the everyday in literature. The chapter traces the evolution of the poetics of everyday life, especially the intensification of avant-garde interest in the quotidian following World War II. It argues that poetry has come to be defined as a form of attention, and it explores how gender, class, and political and cultural forces inflect the representation and experience of everyday life. Contrasting different approaches to the everyday in American poetry, the introduction identifies skeptical or experimental realism as an influential mode, which finds expression in experimental strategies and forms, including the long poem, constraint-based projects, appropriation, fragmentation, collage, resistance to epiphany, and radical mimesis.Less
The introduction provides a theoretical and critical framework for this study, situating the book’s argument alongside recent critical studies of the everyday in literature. The chapter traces the evolution of the poetics of everyday life, especially the intensification of avant-garde interest in the quotidian following World War II. It argues that poetry has come to be defined as a form of attention, and it explores how gender, class, and political and cultural forces inflect the representation and experience of everyday life. Contrasting different approaches to the everyday in American poetry, the introduction identifies skeptical or experimental realism as an influential mode, which finds expression in experimental strategies and forms, including the long poem, constraint-based projects, appropriation, fragmentation, collage, resistance to epiphany, and radical mimesis.
Louisa Gairn
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633111
- eISBN:
- 9780748653447
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633111.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Scottish Studies
This chapter demonstrates that John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Alan Warner were not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role that writing has to play in exploring and ...
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This chapter demonstrates that John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Alan Warner were not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role that writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological ‘value’ of poetry and fiction. It argues that contemporary poetry and lyricism in Scotland constituted an ecological ‘line of defence’, providing a space in which reader and author can examine their relationship to the world around them. It notes that while these writers do not form a conscious ‘school’ or affiliation, they share in common a lucid and intelligent lyrical vision which seeks to re-centre and redefine concepts of nature and rural environments — an outlook which is crucial in an age of growing ecological crisis.Less
This chapter demonstrates that John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Alan Warner were not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role that writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological ‘value’ of poetry and fiction. It argues that contemporary poetry and lyricism in Scotland constituted an ecological ‘line of defence’, providing a space in which reader and author can examine their relationship to the world around them. It notes that while these writers do not form a conscious ‘school’ or affiliation, they share in common a lucid and intelligent lyrical vision which seeks to re-centre and redefine concepts of nature and rural environments — an outlook which is crucial in an age of growing ecological crisis.
Lucy Collins
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381878
- eISBN:
- 9781781382271
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381878.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. It explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of ...
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This book examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. It explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian as well as in that of an exciting group of younger poets. Literary memory highlights the relationship between poet and reader, as well as the larger critical contexts that support or challenge the production of creative work. This book analyses, for the first time, the complex responses to the past recorded by contemporary women poets in Ireland and the implications these have for the concept of a national tradition.Less
This book examines the intersection of private and public spheres through the representation of memory in contemporary poetry by Irish women. It explores how memory shapes creativity in the work of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian as well as in that of an exciting group of younger poets. Literary memory highlights the relationship between poet and reader, as well as the larger critical contexts that support or challenge the production of creative work. This book analyses, for the first time, the complex responses to the past recorded by contemporary women poets in Ireland and the implications these have for the concept of a national tradition.
Charles A. Perrone
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780813034218
- eISBN:
- 9780813038797
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813034218.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
Brazilian poetry's scope, domain, and operational space experienced an expansion that considered the United States' literature and language. It is important to note that there are no distinct cuts in ...
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Brazilian poetry's scope, domain, and operational space experienced an expansion that considered the United States' literature and language. It is important to note that there are no distinct cuts in the separation of the different art forms and artists in lyric since poets are able to consider popular diversion figures that are often perceived as mass culture. Brazil's contemporary poetry entails much creative content and conduct that concerns other forms of media and expressive culture. The interface in which outreach is used to resolve insularity is manifested in different ways, and becomes evident in how poetic texts integrate lexemes, mythemes, semanthemes, and graphemes related particularly to popular music and film. This chapter gives specific focus to movies, jazz, blues, rock music, cinematic figures, and their corresponding players.Less
Brazilian poetry's scope, domain, and operational space experienced an expansion that considered the United States' literature and language. It is important to note that there are no distinct cuts in the separation of the different art forms and artists in lyric since poets are able to consider popular diversion figures that are often perceived as mass culture. Brazil's contemporary poetry entails much creative content and conduct that concerns other forms of media and expressive culture. The interface in which outreach is used to resolve insularity is manifested in different ways, and becomes evident in how poetic texts integrate lexemes, mythemes, semanthemes, and graphemes related particularly to popular music and film. This chapter gives specific focus to movies, jazz, blues, rock music, cinematic figures, and their corresponding players.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that Bernadette Mayer develops a groundbreaking, influential mode referred to as “the poetics of the maternal everyday”: a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is ...
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This chapter argues that Bernadette Mayer develops a groundbreaking, influential mode referred to as “the poetics of the maternal everyday”: a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is shaped by gender, represents the lived realities of being a woman and a mother, and insists that motherhood is always political. Mayer’s model of everyday poetics has been highly influential for contemporary poetry. To demonstrate and explore the aesthetic and political impact of her career, this chapter pairs Mayer’s poetry with the work of some of her most interesting descendants, including Hoa Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, and Laynie Browne. By focusing on Mayer and her poetic “daughters,” this chapter aims to revise discussions of poetry and the everyday, and to question some of the gendered assumptions that still sometimes structure those discussions.Less
This chapter argues that Bernadette Mayer develops a groundbreaking, influential mode referred to as “the poetics of the maternal everyday”: a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is shaped by gender, represents the lived realities of being a woman and a mother, and insists that motherhood is always political. Mayer’s model of everyday poetics has been highly influential for contemporary poetry. To demonstrate and explore the aesthetic and political impact of her career, this chapter pairs Mayer’s poetry with the work of some of her most interesting descendants, including Hoa Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, and Laynie Browne. By focusing on Mayer and her poetic “daughters,” this chapter aims to revise discussions of poetry and the everyday, and to question some of the gendered assumptions that still sometimes structure those discussions.
Andrew Epstein
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199972128
- eISBN:
- 9780190608965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199972128.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in ...
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This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in an age of distraction. Poetry-as-project is an attempt to recover the ordinary; at the same time, these works extend and at times critique the experimental realism and everyday-life poetics of the postwar years. This chapter examines why such projects have proliferated, why they are attractive to those fascinated by the quotidian, and why quite similar projects flourish in vernacular culture. The chapter discusses the controversial “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith; also, recent projects by Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen, and other poets who exploit the possibilities of the everyday-life project for social and political criticism.Less
This chapter argues that rule-governed, constraint-based everyday-life projects have re-emerged and spread since the 1990s as a pointed response to cultural panic concerning the fate of attention in an age of distraction. Poetry-as-project is an attempt to recover the ordinary; at the same time, these works extend and at times critique the experimental realism and everyday-life poetics of the postwar years. This chapter examines why such projects have proliferated, why they are attractive to those fascinated by the quotidian, and why quite similar projects flourish in vernacular culture. The chapter discusses the controversial “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith; also, recent projects by Brenda Coultas, Harryette Mullen, and other poets who exploit the possibilities of the everyday-life project for social and political criticism.
Justin Clemens
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474401241
- eISBN:
- 9781474435031
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474401241.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
For much of his life, it seems Georges Perec spurned poetry, identifying it with the sort of bourgeois sentimentalism that his own writing was constitutionally against. Once, however, he had been ...
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For much of his life, it seems Georges Perec spurned poetry, identifying it with the sort of bourgeois sentimentalism that his own writing was constitutionally against. Once, however, he had been convinced by friends such as Harry Mathews that poetry was also exemplary of forms of compositional constraint, he returned to it with a vengeance — to the extent that his later work can even be seen to have received a new and decisive impetus from this realization. This chapter examines fragments from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Raymond Queneau’s oeuvre, and several works of Perec’s in order to identify key sets of operational constraints across their work. The differences and similarities between these operations are discussed, and consequences are drawn for contemporary poetry.Less
For much of his life, it seems Georges Perec spurned poetry, identifying it with the sort of bourgeois sentimentalism that his own writing was constitutionally against. Once, however, he had been convinced by friends such as Harry Mathews that poetry was also exemplary of forms of compositional constraint, he returned to it with a vengeance — to the extent that his later work can even be seen to have received a new and decisive impetus from this realization. This chapter examines fragments from Shakespeare’s King Lear, Raymond Queneau’s oeuvre, and several works of Perec’s in order to identify key sets of operational constraints across their work. The differences and similarities between these operations are discussed, and consequences are drawn for contemporary poetry.
Jahan Ramazani
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226083735
- eISBN:
- 9780226083421
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226083421.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals ...
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What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s dialogue with other genres and discourses, especially the novel, theory, the law, news, prayer, and song. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, it argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring a heterogeneous array of English-language poets— from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many others— this book shows that poetry both blends with other genres and distinguishes itself from them: the realism of the novel and the news’s empiricism, the abstractions of theory and the law’s social ordering, the ritualism of prayer and the voice-engrained melodies of song. In close readings of famous and little-known poems, the book demonstrates an interpretive practice that combines dialogic analysis, in this case of poetry’s absorption of closely related discursive forms, with genre-specific analysis of poetry’s persisting awareness of its difference. Even as poetry stretches to incorporate various genres, it puts on display the compression, dense figuration, self-reflexivity, and sonic and visual form by which it differentiates itself from the others it metabolizes. In this book, the first to trace poetry’s interactions with its discursive cousins, we understand what poetry is by closely examining its interplay with what it is not.Less
What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system— “suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But this book reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s dialogue with other genres and discourses, especially the novel, theory, the law, news, prayer, and song. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, it argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring a heterogeneous array of English-language poets— from Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams to Frank O’Hara, Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, Lorna Goodison, M. NourbeSe Philip, and many others— this book shows that poetry both blends with other genres and distinguishes itself from them: the realism of the novel and the news’s empiricism, the abstractions of theory and the law’s social ordering, the ritualism of prayer and the voice-engrained melodies of song. In close readings of famous and little-known poems, the book demonstrates an interpretive practice that combines dialogic analysis, in this case of poetry’s absorption of closely related discursive forms, with genre-specific analysis of poetry’s persisting awareness of its difference. Even as poetry stretches to incorporate various genres, it puts on display the compression, dense figuration, self-reflexivity, and sonic and visual form by which it differentiates itself from the others it metabolizes. In this book, the first to trace poetry’s interactions with its discursive cousins, we understand what poetry is by closely examining its interplay with what it is not.
Lucy Collins
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381878
- eISBN:
- 9781781382271
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381878.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This introduction explores the complex relationship between Irish women poets and the national tradition and examines the role of memory in shaping perceptions of individual subjectivity and literary ...
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This introduction explores the complex relationship between Irish women poets and the national tradition and examines the role of memory in shaping perceptions of individual subjectivity and literary community. Both public and private pasts are the focus of intense scrutiny by women poets in the interrogation of their position within creative and critical fields. Here the many implications of this personal-political dynamic are teased out. This debate encompasses both the cultural and linguistic consequences of the processes of individual and collective memory, and examines the relationship between poetry’s concern with subjectivity and with its potential for political engagement.Less
This introduction explores the complex relationship between Irish women poets and the national tradition and examines the role of memory in shaping perceptions of individual subjectivity and literary community. Both public and private pasts are the focus of intense scrutiny by women poets in the interrogation of their position within creative and critical fields. Here the many implications of this personal-political dynamic are teased out. This debate encompasses both the cultural and linguistic consequences of the processes of individual and collective memory, and examines the relationship between poetry’s concern with subjectivity and with its potential for political engagement.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846311833
- eISBN:
- 9781846315947
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846315947.002
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This chapter proposes an ideological and historical diagnosis of the new aesthetic conservatism in contemporary Spanish poetry. Essays by Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes are also ...
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This chapter proposes an ideological and historical diagnosis of the new aesthetic conservatism in contemporary Spanish poetry. Essays by Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes are also discussed. These essays present larger tendencies in Spanish poetry. It then describes the three aspects of avant-garde poetics among younger Spanish poets. ‘La diferencia’ and Vidas improbables are some works of Benítez Reyes. It is observed that García Montero's plea for a poetry for normal people is an effort to attain an otherwise unengaged audience. On the other hand, Benítez Reyes' fear of ridicule is caused by a concern with the poet's social profile.Less
This chapter proposes an ideological and historical diagnosis of the new aesthetic conservatism in contemporary Spanish poetry. Essays by Luis García Montero and Felipe Benítez Reyes are also discussed. These essays present larger tendencies in Spanish poetry. It then describes the three aspects of avant-garde poetics among younger Spanish poets. ‘La diferencia’ and Vidas improbables are some works of Benítez Reyes. It is observed that García Montero's plea for a poetry for normal people is an effort to attain an otherwise unengaged audience. On the other hand, Benítez Reyes' fear of ridicule is caused by a concern with the poet's social profile.
Yasmine Shamma
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- October 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198808725
- eISBN:
- 9780191846458
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198808725.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in ...
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Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in small spaces shaped the school’s tone and form. This chapter treats the school’s domestic poetry, focusing exclusively on Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, a collection of poems devoted to remembering the spaces Notley inhabited, while locating the tendency to address lived-in space as one promoted by Frank O’Hara. Integrating urban and spatial theory to offer a psycho-geographic reading of this poetry, this chapter utilizes material from an original interview personally conducted with Notley devoted to spatial discussions. In this way, this chapter pays homage to previous studies of the school by offering a space for the living poets of The New York School to speak for themselves, while testing the validity of this study, within the study.Less
Though Berrigan and Notley were married, this chapter moves away from addressing coterie (as it has received thorough attention) to instead consider the way that the intimacy enforced by living in small spaces shaped the school’s tone and form. This chapter treats the school’s domestic poetry, focusing exclusively on Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses, a collection of poems devoted to remembering the spaces Notley inhabited, while locating the tendency to address lived-in space as one promoted by Frank O’Hara. Integrating urban and spatial theory to offer a psycho-geographic reading of this poetry, this chapter utilizes material from an original interview personally conducted with Notley devoted to spatial discussions. In this way, this chapter pays homage to previous studies of the school by offering a space for the living poets of The New York School to speak for themselves, while testing the validity of this study, within the study.
