A Guide To Poetics Journal

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.)

The highly influential Poetics Journal, whose ten issues were published between 1982 and 1998, contributed to the surge of interest in the practice of poetics. Edited by internationally recognized poet/critics Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, the journal presents major conversations and debates, and invites readers to expand on the critical and creative engagements they represent. This archive re-presents virtually all the articles originally published in Poetics Journal, organized alphabetically by author and in searchable form. It features indexes by contributors, keywords, and volume. The writing that appeared in Poetics Journal reflects the development of a range of creative and critical approaches in avant-garde poetry and art over two decades. In making this content newly available, the editors hope to preserve the generative enthusiasm for innovative writing and art it represents, while encouraging new uses and contexts. A Guide to Poetics Journal is also available, see http://www.upne.com/0819571205.html for more information.

Object Lessons -- Subject Formations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

What kinds of pleasure do we take from writing and reading? What authority has the writer over a text? What are the limits of language's ability to communicate ideas and emotions? Moreover, what are the political limitations of these questions? The work of the French cultural critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-80) poses these questions, and has become influential in doing so, but the precise nature of that influence is often taken for granted. This is nowhere more true than in poetry, where Barthes' concerns about pleasure and origin are assumed to be relevant, but this has seldom been closely examined. This innovative study traces the engagement with Barthes by poets writing in English, beginning in the early 1970s with one of Barthes' earliest Anglophone poet readers, Scottish poet-theorist Veronica Forrest-Thomson (194775). It goes on to examine the American poets who published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other small but influential journals of the period, and other writers who engaged with Barthes later, considering his writings' relevance to love and grief and their treatment in poetry. Finally, it surveys those writers who rejected Barthes' theory, and explores why this was. The first study to bring Barthes and poetry into such close contact, this important book illuminates both subjects with a deep contemplation of Barthes' work and a range of experimental poetries.

The influence of Roland Barthes on contemporary culture has been the subject of much analysis, but never before has this influence been closely examined in relation to poetry. This innovative study traces Anglophone poetry’s response to the literary and cultural theory of Barthes — from debate to adoption, adaptation and rejection.

A COMPANION TO AMERICAN POETRY A Companion to American Poetry brings together original essays by both established scholars and emerging critical voices to explore the latest topics and debates in American poetry and its study. Highlighting the diverse nature of poetic practice and scholarship, this comprehensive volume addresses a broad range of individual poets, movements, genres, and concepts from the seventeenth century to the present day. Organized thematically, the Companion’s thirty-seven chapters address a variety of emerging trends in American poetry, providing historical context and new perspectives on topics such as poetics and identity, poetry and the arts, early and late experimentalisms, poetry and the transcendent, transnational poetics, poetry of engagement, poetry in cinema and popular music, Queer and Trans poetics, poetry and politics in the 21st century, and African American, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous poetries. Both a nuanced survey of American poetry and a catalyst for future scholarship, A Companion to American Poetry is essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, academic researchers and scholars, and general readers with interest in current trends in American poetry.

The essays in Inciting Poetics provide provocative answers to the book’s opening question, “What are poetics now?” Authored by some of the most important contemporary poets and critics, the essays present new theoretical and practical approaches to poetry and poetics that address current topics and approaches in the field as well as provide fresh readings of a number of canonical poets. The four sections—“What is Poetics?,” “Critical Interventions,” “Cross-Cultural Imperatives,” and “Digital, Capital, and Institutional Frames”—create a basis on which both experienced readers and newcomers can build an understanding of how to think and write about poetry. The diverse voices throughout the collection are both informative and accessible and offer a rich exploration of multiple approaches to thinking and writing about poetry today.