Meaning Performance
Essays on Poetry
Tony Lopez(Author)
Salt Publishing
Published on 1. June 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
236 pages
978-1-84471-082-9 (ISBN)
Description
This is an extraordinary and genuinely groundbreaking study of the most challenging contemporary poetry written today in both USA and UK. Presented originally as a series of public lectures and talks, Tony Lopez takes us with him in this new collection of essays, through the most penetrating analysis of abstract and difficult postmodern poetry written on both sides of the Atlantic. He attends to important American poets, such as the `Language' poets, their Avant-garde predecessors and the New York School, who are largely unknown and unread in Britain, including David Antin, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Berrigan, and Bob Perelman, together with better known American poets such as John Ashbery. He reads radical British poets not widely known in America such as J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Allen Fisher, Andrew Crozier, Edwin Morgan and W.S. Graham, presenting new work also on the international writings of Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood. He shows how these poets articulate beauty in their writings, how they attend to life's human complexity and engage with issues of widespread public concern. These essays show an exceptional range and familiarity with different traditions of radical writings, with the different histories of American and English poetry, making links to the most widely studied and best known of modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. What is truly remarkable about Lopez's study of the most demanding recent poetry is the constant lucidity, the lack of jargon and complete clarity of his critical writing which shows a profound regard for his readers, specialist and non-specialist alike.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Not illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-84471-082-9 (9781844710829)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Tony Lopez is the author of 20 books of poetry, fiction and criticism. His most recent poetry collections are Devolution (The Figures, USA) and Data Shadow (Reality Street, UK), both published in 2000. His work is featured in many anthologies including Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford), Other (Wesleyan) and Conductors of Chaos (Picador). He is well-known as a poetry performer and has given readings throughout UK, Europe and North America. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth, where he was appointed the first professor of poetry in 2000.
Content
Acknowledgements
Limits of Reference and Abstraction in American Poetry
W. S. Graham's Elegies and St Ives
Repetition and Innovation in Contemporary poetry
`Powder on a Little Table': Berrigan's Sonnets and 60s Poems
sequel lines
Poetry and Performance
Graham and the 1940s
The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse
Innovative Poetry in English
Pound and Postmodern British Poets
Oppositional Englishness: National Identity in Basil Bunting's `Briggflatts'
Pound and Contemporary Poetry
Thomas A. Clark, Nationality, Modernism
Sequential Meaning in Ezra Pound's `Cathay'
T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham
Limits of Reference and Abstraction in American Poetry
W. S. Graham's Elegies and St Ives
Repetition and Innovation in Contemporary poetry
`Powder on a Little Table': Berrigan's Sonnets and 60s Poems
sequel lines
Poetry and Performance
Graham and the 1940s
The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse
Innovative Poetry in English
Pound and Postmodern British Poets
Oppositional Englishness: National Identity in Basil Bunting's `Briggflatts'
Pound and Contemporary Poetry
Thomas A. Clark, Nationality, Modernism
Sequential Meaning in Ezra Pound's `Cathay'
T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham