What Are Poets For?

by Bruns, Gerald L.

• ISBN13: 9781609380809
• ISBN10: 1609380800
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-06-01
• Publisher: Univ of Iowa Pr

Summary

Conceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns's magisterial What Are Poets For?explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores. Naturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses-for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth. What Are Poets For?is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.

Author Biography

Gerald L. Bruns is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame. A prolific author, his works inclued Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language, Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy: Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics on the Anarchy of and Philosophy, and On Ceasing to Be Human. In 1974 and again in 1985 he received Guggenheim fellowships and has been a fellow at the Institute for Advance Study at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1985-1986), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1993-1994), and the Stanford Humanities Center (2007-2008). In 2008 he was elected to the American Academy of arts and Sciences.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Abbreviations	p. xvii
What Are Poets For?	p. 1
Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise?	p. 18
Voices of Construction On Susan Howe's Poetry and Poetics (A Citational Ghost Story)	p. 35
A Poem about Laughter and Forgetting Lyn Hejinian's A Border Comedy	p. 56
Among the Pagans The Polyvocal Poetry of Karen Mac Cormack	p. 72
The Rogue Poet's Return On John Matthias's Poetic Anecdotes	p. 91
Adding Garbage to Language On J. H. Prynne's "Not-You"	p. 106
Anomalies of Duration in Contemporary Poetry	p. 123
Nomad Poetry A Ludic Miscellany from Steve McCaffery	p. 137
On the Conundrum of Form and Material Adorno's Aesthetic Theory	p. 152
Notes	p. 167
Bibliography	p. 201
Index	p. 219
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