Assembling Alternatives

by Huk, Romana

• ISBN13: 9780819565402
• ISBN10: 0819565407
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-29
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

Assembling Alternatives brings together five English-speaking communities -- the U.S., U.K., Canada, Ireland and Australia -- to discuss how national differences have inflected poetic experimentation. The 24 essays provide historic overviews, close readings, personal views and polemics on poetics as they have developed in situ. These "oppositional poetries" and poetics are highly diverse and can only be unified -- as they are here -- as an imagined collective alternative to a mainstream and institutionalized practice of poetry. By tracing the varied histories and trajectories of innovative poetry in these countries, and by engaging in readings of specific texts from within these traditions, Assembling Alternatives suggests subtle but provocative differences in strategies of resistance, constructions of self, use of voice and use of technology.

Author Biography

Romana Huk is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is co-editor of Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (1996), and author of a forthcoming book on Stevie Smith as well as numerous essays on contemporary poetics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(40)
Romana Huk
I International inflections / histories / comparisons
Where Have All the Equal Signs Gone?: Inside/Outside the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Site	41	(25)
Jeff Derksen
A/Politics of Contemporary Anglo-Canadian Poetries: The Toronto Research Group and the Kootenay School of Writing	66	(20)
Miriam Nichols
The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes toward a History	86	(28)
Steve Evans
Poetic Relations and Related Poetics: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Charles Bernstein	114	(14)
Alison Mark
Imagined Readerships and Poetic Innovation in U.K. Poetry	128	(15)
Peter Middleton
Slobbering Distance: American, British, and Irish Exploratory Poetries in a Global Era	143	(13)
Keith Tuma
Irish Terrain: Alternate Planes of Cleavage	156	(13)
Trevor Joyce
The American Model II	169	(26)
Philip Mead
II Intranational divides and intracultural differences
Interview with an Empire	195	(12)
M. NourbeSe Philip
Cultural Cannibalism and the Intercultural Text	207	(12)
Don Wellman
``Choice Voice Noise'': Soundings in Innovative African-American Poetry	219	(27)
Kathleen Crown
`giving tongue'	246	(13)
cris cheek
Complexities of Subjectivity: Scottish Poets and Multiplicity	259	(16)
Nancy Gish
Feminist Experimentalism, Literary History, and Subjectivity: ``this lyric forever error'' of Kathleen Fraser and Denise Riley	275	(9)
Linda A. Kinnahan
`& how else can I be here?': Reading Cross-Wise through Some Poetries of Canada	284	(15)
Susan Rudy
The Nadja and Nanette of Gail Scott's Main Brides (Against Ochre Pediment and Aztec Sky)	299	(12)
Carla Harryman
III In practice / polemics
Hypertext/Cybertext/Poetext	311	(16)
John Cayley
In the Place of Writing	327	(11)
Caroline Bergvall
Signs Taken for Signifiers: Language Writing, Fetishism and Disavowal	338	(9)
David Marriott
What Is Literature? From Material Text to Cultural Poetics	347	(17)
Barrett Watten
Too-Close Reading: Poetry and Schizophrenia	364	(11)
John Wilkinson
Polemic Greeting to the Inhabitants of Utopia	375	(9)
Bob Perelman
After Avant-gardism: Her Weasels Wild Returning	384	(5)
Rod Mengham
My Eighteenth Century: Draft towards a Cabinet	389	(10)
Lisa Robertson
Contributors' List of Further Readings	399	(6)
Notes on Contributors	405