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On the Outskirts of Form
Practicing Cultural Poetics
Sales Date: 2011-11-15
Essays on modern and contemporary poetry from a cultural studies perspective
This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the "politics of form," the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution—and critique—of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A PUBLIC LANGUAGE
On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA
The Dream of a Public Language: Modernity, Textuality, and the Citizen Subject
OBJECTIVIST FRAMES
Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism
"Closed in Glass": Oppen's Class Spectacles
APPROACHING THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY
Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method
"The Repeated Insistence": Creeley's Rage
A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov
Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk
Ekphrasis and The New York School
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity
"Struck Against Parenthesis": Shelley and Postmodern Romanticisms
"Skewed by Design": From Act to Speech Act in Language Writing
Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen
Afterword: Impossible Poetries
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Poet and scholar MICHAEL DAVIDSON is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body.
"An astute reader of late-20th-century American poetry, Davidson covers a lot of ground, in terms of both composition and range of interest. ... Recommended"
~R.T. Prus, Choice
"Michael Davidson's compelling essays provide a rich fund of insight into American poetry from Oppen to Ashbery, from Objectivism to transnational poetries. Written with eloquence and concision, these pages deftly fuse formal analysis with cultural history."
~Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics
"Michael Davidson's superbly written book compellingly expands the category 'American poetry' into a global(ized) context, a 'cosmopoetics.' On the Outskirts of Form represents one direction in which scholarship on American poetry must move if it is to remain intellectually and culturally relevant, and Davidson is on the cutting edge of that future."
~Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry