Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990S (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817310975 ISBN 13: 9780817310974

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2001

Synopsis

The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries.

This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four themes: the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics.

Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity.

This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Wallace is Lecturer in the Department of English at George Washington University. Steven Marks is an independent scholar.

From Publishers Weekly:

Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s collects essays on the issues driving the poetic generation just now coming to the fore. Edited by George Washington University's Mark Wallace and scholar Steven Marks, the book includes 26 pieces from Steve Evans, Harryette Mullen, Brian Kim Stefans, Kristin Prevallet, Jeff Derksen, Sianne Ngai, Caroline Bergvall, Bill Luoma, Benjamin Friedlander, C.S. Giscombe, Rod Smith, Juliana Spahr and others. Most of the pieces are short, pointed meditations, short on footnotes and long on invention. Capitalism, marginality, disjunction, graphical disruption, race and gender identification, cogent analysis, political and poetic history, disgust, exhaustion, dialogue and agonism figure prominently, often inspiringly.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0817310975
• ISBN 13: 9780817310974
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 408
• Editor: Wallace Mark, Marks Steven