Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian

by Huntsperger, David W.

• ISBN13: 9780230622029
• ISBN10: 023062202X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

During the second half of the twentieth century, avant-garde American poets experimented with procedural formsinventive, predetermined methods or rules for generating poetry.In Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry, David Huntsperger suggests that this mode of poetic production calls attention to the changing dynamics of intellectual labor at large. Procedural forms foreground literary labor, and in doing so, they remind us of the extent to which other forms of intellectual production have become formulaic. In this book, Huntsperger combines explication of avant-garde poetry with a discussion of the rapidly changing forms of labor in the postindustrial United States.

Author Biography

David Huntsperger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Communication at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Social Reading of Postmodern Poetic Form * Procedural Form: An Overview * Making Poems: The “method” of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets * The Tactics of the Text: Experimental Form in David Antin’s “Novel Poem” * “A new content”: Procedural Form and Concrete Reality in Ron Silliman’s Tjanting  * Objectivist Form and Feminist Materialism in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life * Afterword