Bøker i Modern and Contemporary Poetic-serien

"In A Long Essay on the Long Poem, DuPlessis invokes a quote from Ronald Johnson: "Americans like to write big poems, even if people don't read them." It's a joke, in part, but also a telling indication of the difficulty of the subject. Long poems are elusive, particularly in the slippery forms that have emerged in the postmodern mode. DuPlessis quotes both Nathaniel Mackey and Anne Waldman in metaphorizing the poem as a Box: both in the sense of a vessel that contains, and as a machine that processes, an instrument on which language is played. To reckon with a particularly noncompliant variant of a notoriously slippery form, DuPlessis works in a polyvalent mode, a hybrid of critical analysis and speculative essay. She resists a single-focus approach to the long poem and does not venture a bravura, one-size-all thesis. Yet there is an arc of argument here, even as the book ranges across five chapters and a host of disparate writers. DuPlessis roughly divides the long poem and the long poets into three genres: epics, quests, and something she terms "assemblages." The poets surveyed will be familiar for most readers of twentieth-century American and English poetry: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Alice Notley, Anne Waldman, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, and Robert Duncan. But rather than attempting a definitive treatment of such a long roster, DuPlessis assumes a certain familiarity in order to focus on key works. A standout example comes in the third chapter, in which DuPlessis reads Dante by way of the modern long poem to generate surprising insights. But she also carefully avoids the self-confirming search for genealogical patterns (e.g., Eliot to Pound to Williams to Zukofsky). Instead she deliberately seeks to see different but intersecting patterns of connection between poems, a nexus rather than a lineage. In doing so she works around the metatextual challenge of the long poem and of her own attempt to "essay" it: how to encompass "everything." The end result is a fascinating and generous work that defies neat categorization as anything other than essential"--

"The American poet Larry Eigner (1927-1996) is the subject of a true renaissance in recent literary scholarship. Until recently, Eigner was relegated to a peripheral place next to the work of his friends and fellow poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. Eigner was nonetheless a key figure in the "New American Poetry" that grew from the Black Mountain School and the San Francisco Renaissance, and a major influence on the l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets who followed in their footsteps. Eigner suffered from cerebral palsy his entire life, limiting his mobility and his ability to communicate both verbally and in writing, and yet he went on to make a place for himself as one of the most prolific and innovative American poets of the late twentieth century. In 2010, the University of California Press published The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner in a four-volume set that runs to 1,868 pages, meant principally for libraries and collectors. In 2016, the University of Alabama Press published Calligraphy Typewriters: The Selected Poems of Larry Eigner, a more affordable paperback of the poet's most significant work, meant for a popular readership and the classroom. Other volumes have followed, among them Momentous Inconclusions: The Life and Work of Larry Eigner (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), a gathering of critical appreciations of Eigner's work and legacy, and George Hart's Finding the Weight of Things: Larry Eigner's Ecrippoetics (forthcoming, University of Alabama Press, 2022). While each of these volumes makes available either Eigner's poetry or critical studies of his work, none of them have ever presented a comprehensive biography of the poet, other than the biographical context necessary for the framing of each volume. Jennifer Bartlett's The Sustaining Air will be the first single-volume biographical account of Eigner's life. Bartlett-a poet, teacher, and life-long disability advocate who herself lives with cerebral palsy-covers every significant phase of Eigner's life: his childhood and young adulthood in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he began typing poems with one finger on the manual typewriter that was a bar mitzvah gift; his first publications and the maturation of his poetic interests through correspondence with many noteworthy poets of the era; how he and his family contended with his disability both before and after his move to Berkeley, California, and the ever-expanding circle of friends, poets, caretakers, and collaborators that he established there. The result is a deft, incisive, and inspiring account of a singular figure and voice in postwar American poetry"--

"This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language. The germ of Golston's project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson's Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: "The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of 'low budget' mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance." Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde. Golston creates what he calls a "regular Rube Goldberg machine" of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists. Golston's critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more "alien" terrain: Ed Dorn's long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston's restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form"--