Poetry as Re-Reading

by Ma, Ming-Qian

• ISBN13: 9780810124837
• ISBN10: 0810124831
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-20
• Publisher: Northwestern Univ Pr

Summary

Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma's book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernismand to force a new and different kind of reading. With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

Ming-Qian Ma is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Buffalo.

Table of Contents

"The Medium Is the 'Method''': Toward a Postmodern Poetics of Counter-Method	p. 3
A "No Man's Land": Postmodern Citationality in Zukofsky's "Poem beginning 'The,'"	p. 39
A "Seeing" Through Refraction: The Rear-View Mirror Image in George Oppen's Collected Poems	p. 60
Be Aware of "the Medusa's Glance": The Objectivist Lens and Carl Rakosi's Poetics of Strabismal Seeing in "Adventures of the Head,"	p. 83
The Politics of Critical Parody: Chance Operation and the Mesostic Method in John Cage	p. 112
Articulating the Inarticulate: Singularities and the Counter-Method in Susan Howe	p. 135
Reflection upon My [Unreflected] Life: M. Merleau-Ponty and Lyn Hejinian's Poetics of "Genetic Phenomenology,"	p. 154
"Nonsense Bargains": Inversely Proportional Writing and the Poetics of "Expenditure Without Reserve" in Bruce Andrews's Work	p. 174
"Slowed Reason" as "Idling Language": Postmodern Counter-Speed and the Poetics of Sediment in Charles Bernstein	p. 195
Coda. The Postmodern Poetics of Counter-Method: Toward a Poetry Yet to Come	p. 215
Notes	p. 219
Works Cited	p. 273
Index	p. 289
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