
Disjunctive Poetics
From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe
Peter Quartermain(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 26. June 1992
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-521-41268-1 (ISBN)
Description
Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of non-canonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their traditions and dissociated from their cultures. The line of American poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but the deconstructive aspect, which emphasises the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openness of the creative process. Providing close reading of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Basil Bunting, Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan and Susan Howe, the book explains how these writers describe the modern experience in a multicultural world by displacing commonly accepted cultural icons and by loading their language with multiple potential meanings.
Reviews / Votes
"Articulate, resourceful readings of the decisive poetry of our time, beginning with Gertrude Stein and continuing to the latest, crucial ground work of Susan Howe. Truly a pioneering work." Robert Creely "The line of American experimentalist poetry that extends from Gertrude Stein to Susan Howe (with such major figures as Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creely, Robert Duncan, and Guy Davenport along the way) has never had a more lucid, subtle, and discriminating interpreter than Peter Quartermain. In their spirited engagement with seemingly recalcitrant material, these superb essays are sure to become classics of their kind." Marjorie Perloff |x xMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
571 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-521-41268-1 (9780521412681)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Peter Quartermain taught modernist poetry and poetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada for over thirty years, until retiring in 1999. He has had a major impact on poetic scholarship in English; his work brings together late 20th century English-language avant-garde poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of Basil Bunting, Poet of the North (1990), Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge U Press, 1992) and Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde (U Alabama Press, 2013). He edited two volumes of the collected works of Robert Duncan - Robert Duncan: The Collected Early Poems and Plays (U California Press, 2019) and Robert Duncan: The Collected Later Poems and Plays (U California Press, 2019) and edited, with Richard Caddel, Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970 (Wesleyan U Press, 1999) and, with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (U Alabama Press, 1999).
Content
Preface; Introduction; 1. 'A Narrative of Undermine': Gertrude Stein's Multiplicity; 2. Recurrencies: No. 12 of Louis Zukofsky's Anew; 3. 'Instant Entirety': Zukofsky's 'A'; 4. 'Not at All Surprised by Science': Louis Zukofsky's First Half of 'A' - 9; 5. 'Actual Word Stuff, Not Thoughts for Thoughts': Williams and Zukofsky; 6. 'Only Is Oreder Othered. Nought Is Nulled': Finnegans Wake and Middle and Late Zukofsky; 7. 'To Make Glad the Heart of Man': Bunting, Pound and Whitman; 8. Six Plaints and a Lament for Basil Bunting; 9. Exploring the Mere: A Note on Charles Reznikoff's Shorter Poems; 10. Robert Creeley What Counts; 11. 'Go Contrary, Go Sing': Robert Duncan 1919-1988; 12. Writing as Assemblage: Guy Davenport; 13. And The Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe; Notes; Index.