Holding patterns
Subtitle: temporary poetics in contemporary poetry
By: Daniel McGuiness.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Albany
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
Subjects: American poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Poetics.
Description: "Holding Patterns provides a sympathetic criticism of poems, one that avoids the appliance of criticism and that self-consciously persists in close readings of texts as the directing force of its argument. Presently, contemporary literary criticism and contemporary poetry in America seem at cross-purposes. Indeed, current literary critics seldom address the poems of their contemporaries.

While structuralists and other schools of critics seek terms, generalizations, and whole systems to account for and to understand poems, poets themselves repeatedly assert that each poem has its own poetic and that no system applies to their writing. This book reads poems by contemporary poets, such as Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, Denis Johnson, and Amy Clampitt, not to illuminate a theory but to shed light on the poem."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 169-174) and index.