Poetry as re-reading
Subtitle: American avant-garde poetry and the poetics of counter-method
By: Ming-Qian Ma.
Series: Avant-garde and modernism studies
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Evanston Illinois
Language: eng
Number of pages: 301
ISBN-13: 9780810124837; 9780810124851
Subjects: American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Postmodernism (Literature) -- United States
Description: "Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma's book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Revised version of the author's thesis--Stanford University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: "The medium is the 'method'": toward a postmodern poetics of counter-method; title: A "no man's land": postmodern citationality in Zukofsky's "poem beginning 'The'"; title: A "seeing" through refraction: the rear-view mirror image in George Oppen's Collected poems; title: Be aware of "the medusa's glance": the objectivist lens and Carl Rakosi's poetics of strabismal seeing in "Adventures of the head"; title: The politics of critical parody: chance operation and the mesostic method in John Cage; title: Articulating the inarticulate: singularities and the counter-method in Susan Howe; title: Reflection upon "my [unreflected] life": M. Merleau-Ponty and Lyn Hejinian's poetics of "genetic phenomenology"; title: "Nonsense bargains": inversely proportional writing and the poetics of "expenditure without reserve" in Bruce Andrews's work; title: "Slowed reason" as "idling language": postmodern counter-speed and the poetics of sediment in Charles Bernstein; title: Coda: the postmodern poetics of counter-method: toward a poetry yet to come.