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A Guide to Poetics Journal
Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998
Edited Lyn Hejinian , Barrett Watten
Sales Date: 2013-08-15
An anthology of key texts in the development of contemporary poetics
Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten are internationally recognized poet/critics. Together they edited the highly influential Poetics Journal, whose ten issues, published between 1982 and 1998, contributed to the surge of interest in the practice of poetics. A Guide to Poetics Journal presents the major conversations and debates from the journal, and invites readers to expand on the critical and creative engagements they represent.
In making their selections for the guide, the editors have sought to showcase a range of innovative poetics and to indicate the diversity of fields and activities with which they might be engaged. The introduction and headnotes by the editors provide historical and thematic context for the articles. The Guide is intended to be of sustained creative and classroom use, while the companion Archive of all ten issues of Poetics Journal allows users to remix, remaster, and extend its practices and debates. (See http://www.upne.com/0819571236.html for more information on the digital archive.)
How to Use This Guide
Introduction
PART I: NUMBERS 1 – 4
Close Reading: Leavings and Cleavings — Steve Benson
Writing and Method —Charles Bernstein
Forbidden Knowledge — Beverly Dahlen
Language/Mind/Writing — Alan Davies
His Heart Is a Lute Held Up: Poe and Bataille — Robert Glück
The Rejection of Closure — Lyn Hejinian
My Emily Dickinson — Susan Howe
Continuous Reframing — George Lakoff
Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work — Jackson Mac Low
Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov — Viktor Shklovsky
Migratory Meaning: The Parsimony Principle in the Poem — Ron Silliman
The Politics of Style — Barrett Watten
Constellation I: Practices of Poetics
PART II: NUMBERS 5 – 7
Ugly — Kathy Acker
Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis — Bruce Andrews
Mainstream Marginality — Rae Armantrout
"Hey, Man, My Wave!": The Authority of Private Language — Michael Davidson
Hypergraphy: A Note on Maurice Lemaître's Roman Hypergraphique — Johanna Drucker
Toy Boats — Carla Harryman
Jameson's Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier — George Hartley
Good and Bad/Good and Evil: Pound, Celine, and Fascism — Bob Perelman
Poets Theater: Two Versions of Collateral: Raising Collateral — Kit Robinson; Subtext in Collateral — Nick Robinson
Pattern—and the 'Simulacral' — Leslie Scalapino
An Example from the Literature — Peter Seaton
Narrative Concerns — Warren Sonbert
Constellation II: New Methods and Texts
PART III: NUMBERS 8 – 10
Seeking a Sentence — Pierre Alferi
Can't We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz — Dodie Bellamy
I(s) — Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
Cold Heaven: The Uses of Monumentality — Jerry Estrin
Miscegenated Texts and Media Cyborgs: Technologies of Body and Soul — Harryette Mullen
"A Form of Assumptions" — Ted Pearson
Time and Materials: The Workplace, Dreams, and Writing — Kit Robinson
The Death of Lady Day — Andrew Ross
What/Person: From an Exchange — Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman
The Marks Are Waiting — Lorenzo Thomas
Thinking You Know — Reva Wolf
Memory and Immorality in Musical Composition — John Zorn
Constellation III: The Expanded Field
Acknowledgments and Permissions
Appendixes
Contributor Index
Keyword Index
Index
LYN HEJINIAN is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Among her best-known works are My Life, A Border Comedy, The Book of a Thousand Eyes, and The Language of Inquiry. She teaches at University of California, Berkeley. BARRETT WATTEN teaches at Wayne State University in Detroit. His major collections include Frame, Progress/Under Erasure, Bad History, and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Both are among the ten authors of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography.
"Poetics Journal has always helped me to situate a complex ecology of artists and theoreticians within multiple spheres of influence and community histories, and thus to locate the work of my own generation. A Guide to Poetics Journal, with its finding aids, indexes, and links, offers itself again as a critical intervention at the intersection of scholarly and creative genres, just as invaluable now as the journal was during its original publishing tenure."
~Rob Halpern, author of Music for Porn
"Essential and forceful, this anthology proposes poetics as a site of investigation, intervention, and struggle. It is equally an energetic call for future work and an enriching overview of former compacts and understandings."
~Rachel Blau DuPlessis
"Poetics Journal has always helped me to situate a complex ecology of artists and theoreticians within multiple spheres of influence and community histories, and thus to locate the work of my own generation. A Guide to Poetics Journal, with its finding aids, indexes, and links, offers itself again as a critical intervention at the intersection of scholarly and creative genres, just as invaluable now as the journal was during its original publishing tenure."
~Rob Halpern, author of Music for Porn
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