LoveReading has teamed up with Audiobooks.com to give you the chance to get 2 free audiobooks when you sign up. Try it for 30 days for free with no strings attached. You can cancel anytime, although we're sure you'll love it. Click the button to find out more:
Find out more
What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time, a book that sets out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but also the poet's relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism. In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda and C.S. Giscombe. Behind it all is a sense of poetry not just as an academic area of study, but also as a lived experience and a way of understanding. Few books of poetry criticism show such range-yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call 'poetry,' and what is its consequence in the world?
What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time, a book that sets out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but also the poet's relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism. In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda and C.S. Giscombe. Behind it all is a sense of poetry not just as an academic area of study, but also as a lived experience and a way of understanding. Few books of poetry criticism show such range-yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call 'poetry,' and what is its consequence in the world?
Robert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau divides the poets into two groups, laureates and heretics. Hass and Pinsky, each of whom served multiple terms as United States Poet Laureate, achieved both popular recognition and institutional renown. In contrast, the poetic accomplishments of Matthias, McMichael, and Peck (and to some extent Winters himself), the 'heretics', have not resulted in wide readership or institutional canonization. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows - of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters' poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late twentieth-century letters - illuminates the cultural politics of poetry in our own day. The author provides close readings of poems by this diverse group of poets, places their careers and works in the context of their times, and traces the relationship between American literary history and American canons of literary taste from the 1930s to the present day. Laureates and Heretics is an important contribution to American literary history and American poetry.
In one way or another most of the poems in Home and Variations are about displacement. Sometimes this is literal, but more often there is another kind of displacement at work. It can be a matter of finding American homes for European-derived poetics, as it is in poems like Two Short Films on the Translation of the European Imagination to America or, say, Experimental Researches on the Irrational Embellishment of Chicago, (which takes a form from Andre Breton and repurposes it for the American midwest). The textual raiding, sampling, and splicing that we see in many of many of the poems (most notably Citation Suite ) can be seen as a way of making the self at home in an initially alien textual environment - a reworking of text to make the available discourse into a habitable (and, inevitably, hybrid) space. The sources for splicing include everything from David Bowie to William Blake, often in the same poem. The process is a kind of mutation of the global textual DNA to fit local conditions. Satire (a way of making yourself at home with things that bother you) finds its way into the book, especially in the send-up of the academic left of the nineties in In Elsinore. As a rule, the book's longer poems are more experimental than the shorter ones, at least on the surface of things. Some evolutions of textual DNA (the sonnet, for example) are hardy species, and have a good chance for survival, even now.
The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at the end of the twentieth century. This volume introduces the work of this significant American poet to readers previously unfamiliar with it and enriches the reading of those who have long admired it. The essays collected here treat Matthias's career from its beginnings under the tutelage of John Berryman and Yvor Winters through its engagement with modern and postmodern poetics. With contributions from John Peck, Michael Anania, Peter Michelson, and ten other critics, Word Play Place is the first sustained treatment of the poetry of this writer who stands outside the mainstream of American poetry in our time, and is guided by an aesthetic that has not been easy to define. This collection emphasizes how readers ought to approach Matthias's work in all its ambition, its richness, and its strangeness.
