Poetic Machinations

Reviews / Votes

Infectiously interesting, Poetic Machinations is useful both as a survey of critical claims for allegory and as a practical guide for reading the challenges of contemporary poetry. -- Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania Clark Coolidge's photographic meta-process, Lyn Hejinian's alphabet, Susan Howe's Peirce, what Lorine Niedecker learned from Surrealism, what language writers learned from Czech and Russian Formalism, what Craig Dworkin learned from everyone-- Golston's provocative, ambitious, learned, and useful study unifies these discoveries under the banner of allegory, a term capacious enough to include many ways that Golston's challenging present-day writers highlight the invention, the arbitrariness, and yet the continuing meaningfulness, of their estranged, and yet explicable, forms. If you care for those writers-- and I do-- you will be glad you read Golston's book. -- Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry Poetic Machinations demonstrates that, from 1930s Objectivism to 2010s Conceptualism, poets have written allegorically, that is, taken metaphors--writing as photography, history as assembly line, colonial politics as printing press--and turned them into 'systematic procedures for formal composition.' Golston reassesses marquee names such as John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Myung Mi Kim, and he excels when analyzing 'formally extreme' poetry by Clark Coolidge and P. Inman. He twists the kaleidoscope and, suddenly, much writing that seemed illegible becomes pellucid. -- Brian Reed, University of Washington