Disjunctive Poetics
From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe

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 (Author)

9780521101301, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 February 2009

256 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.38 kg

"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 x

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]