Ideas of Order in Contemporary American Poetry

Diana von Finck / Oliver Scheiding (Eds.)
This collection of essays examines the increasing experimentation with ideas of order in American poetry from the 1980s until the present. The last two decades comprise a significant period in American poetcraft. On the one hand, vibrant alternatives in the theory and practice of poetic texts have risen out of the movement known as “Language Poetry.” On the other hand, the 1980s were also a period of transition in American versemaking, presumably the return of metrical form and narration in “New Formalist” poems. In contrast to earlier scholarly focus on avant-garde trends prevailing in contemporary American poetic culture, this collection of essays addresses traditional and non-traditional practices of poetry that reveal the numerous phenomena and spectra of order in recent writing of poetic works. In doing so, the essays included in this volume call attention to language, form, and the ways of making mean-ing American poets employ to see order within disorder while engaging contemporary subject matter.

Table of Contents
Introductions
O.Scheiding: Ideas of Order in Contemporary American Poetry
J. Rothenberg: The Future of Poetry in the Computer Age: The Medusa Interview
Part I: Poetry as the Other Language
H. Zapf: Structure and Event in Poetry: "122" by Charles Bernstein
G. M. Grabher: "Playing Hide and Seek in the Nothing that Is": 'Silent' Meaning and Order in the Poetry and Aesthetics of John Cage
D.von Finck: "what am i doing here?": David Antin's Talk Poems
K.-A. Tan: "To Catch the World / at Pure Idea": Structures of Order and Disorder in Jorie Graham's Poetry
C. Albers: Can Meter Matter? Ideas of Order in the Poetry of Dana Gioia
Part II: Poetry as Social Act
C. Spahr: Holding up the "Poetry Front": A. Waldman's Politics of the Aesthetic
G. W. Foust: "Not [Not] the Poet, Not [Not] Me": Frederick Seidel and Lisa Jarnot after 9/11
N. W. Balestrini: Between California and Camp: Space and Structure in the Multipart Poems of Lawson Fusao Inada
Part III: Poetry and the Self
A. Cazé: Alterna(rra)tives: Syntactic Spaces and Self-Construction in the Writing of Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino
S. Fritz: "What were Caesar's battles but Caesar's prose": Self-Writing and the Open Text in Lyn Hejinian's My Life
P. Phillips: "Shade of a Shade": The Doomed Order of Alan Shapiro's Song and Dance
T. Steffen: The Idea of Order in Rita Dove's Mother Love
Contributors
Index

Königshausen & Neumann, ZAA Monograph Series - Band 6, Paperback, english, 264 pages

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