History matters
Subtitle: contemporary poetry on the margins of American culture
By: by Ira Sadoff.
Publisher: Iowa City; University of Iowa Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: University of Iowa Press
Language: eng
Number of pages: 219
ISBN-13: 9781587297977
Subjects: American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; American poetry -- 21st century -- History and criticism; Literature and society -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Postmodernism (Literature) -- United States
Description: "In this capacious and energetic volume, Ira Sadoff argues that poets live and write within history, our artistic values always reflecting attitudes about both literary history and culture at large. History Matters does not return to the culture war that reduced complex arguments about human nature, creativity, identity, and interplay between individual and collective identity to slogans. Rather, Sadoff peels back layers of clutter to reveal the important questions at the heart of any complex and fruitful discussion about the connections between culture and literature." "Much of our most adventurous writing has occurred at history's margins, simultaneously making use of and resisting tradition. By tracking key contemporary poets - including John Ashbery, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Louise Gluck, Czeslaw Milosz, Frank O'Hara, and C.K. Williams - as well as musing on jazz and other creative enterprises, Sadoff investigates the lively poetic art of those who have grappled with late twentieth-century attitudes about history, subjectivity, contingency, flux, and modernity. In plainspoken writing, he probes the question of the poet's capacity to illuminate and universalize truth. Along the way, we are called to consider how and why art moves and transforms human beings."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: On the margins: verse poems; title: On the margins: the prose poem; title: Mixed messages: hearing voices; title: Form: neo-formalism revisited; title: History matters: a minority report; title: Louise Glück: the failure of romanticism; title: Trafficking in the radiant: the spiritualizing of American poetry; title: Czeslaw Milosz: the late style; title: Strategic fictions: the mobile architecture of Frank O'Hara's poetry; title: C. K. Williams and John Ashbery: on the edge of romanticism and the postmodern; title: Olena Kalytiak Davis: revising tradition-the retro-new.