Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism (Contemp North American Poetry) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609385926 ISBN 13: 9781609385927

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2018

Synopsis

Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivismexamines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, Robert Sheppard

About this title

About the Author

W. Scott Howard is associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. His books include SPINNAKERS: poems and Susan Howe’s factual telepathy. He is founding editor of the poetics journal, Reconfigurations, and lives in Englewood, Colorado.

Broc Rossell is lecturer in critical and cultural studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. The author of Unpublished Poems and Festival, he is publisher of the small press Elephants. 

Review

“Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism is an important contribution to our understanding of a movement that refused to be labeled a movement. It will be useful for students of modernist and postmodern poetics interested in the evolution of issues first addressed in Zukofsky’s foundational essays, ‘Program: Objectivists 1931’ and ‘Sincerity and Objectification,’ and in the various formal innovations launched by the practitioners. This is a new look at Objectivism’s influence and, equally, a look at the problematic nature of influence in general.” 

(Michael Davidson, author, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics)

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1609385926
• ISBN 13: 9781609385927
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Howard W. Scott, Rossell Broc