Items related to Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and...

Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde - Softcover

Rifkin, Libbie

  • 3.62 out of 5 stars
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9780299168445: Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0299168441 ISBN 13: 9780299168445
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Synopsis

How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan—the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground.
Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets’ ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon.

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About the Author

Libbie Rifkin is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama.

Reviews

Rifkin (English, Univ. of Alabama) is concerned less with poetry than with "the multi-lateral space of avant-gardist identity formation." Her book is an odd compilation of materials, containing references to "positions of modified dominance," "revolutionaries," "social trajectories," and "the business of writing." The author's central argument is that postwar American anti-Establishment poets were as ambitious and career oriented as mainstream poets. Her coordinates for this discussion are Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted BerriganDnot so much for their poetry as their "forging...avant-garde poetic career[s] in a climate of inchoate anxiety over masculine authority and cultural centrality." Recommended for those who want to read about big Foucaultian concepts and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theories applied to the Berkley Poetry conference of 1965 and for those who are comfortable thinking of poets as revealing careers rather than lives.DScott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date
2000
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0299168441
ISBN 13 
9780299168445
Binding
Paperback
Edition number
1
Number of pages
172
Rating
  • 3.62 out of 5 stars
    8 ratings by Goodreads