Notational Experiments In North American Long Poems 1961 2011

This book is a critical experiment that tracks the literary and poetic uses of musical notation and notational methods in North American long poems from the middle of last century to the contemporary moment. Poets have readily referred to their poems as “scores.” Yet, in this study, Carruthers argues that the integration of musical scores in expansive works of this period does more work than previously thought, offering both resolution and escape from the demands placed on long poem form. The five case studies, on Langston Hughes, Armand Schwerner, BpNichol, Joan Retallack and Anne Waldman, offer approaches to reading literary scores in what might be described as a critical stave or a critical “fugue” of instances. In differing ways, musical notation and notational methods impact the form, time and sometimes the ethical and political stances of these respective long poems.

Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem reads major figures including Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe and Rachel Blau DuPlessis within a new approach to the long poem tradition. Through a series of contextualised close readings, it explores the ways in which American poets developed their poetic forms by engaging with a variety of European phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Consolidating recent materials on the role of Continental Philosophy in American poetics, this book explores the theoretical and historical contexts in which avant-garde poets have developed radically new methods of making poems long. Matthew Carbery offers a timely commentary on a number of major works of American poetry whilst providing ground-breaking research into the wider philosophical context of late twentieth-century poetic experimentation.

The argument of this book is a simple one: that criticism after theory is a single movement of thought defined by synthesis and continuity rather than by conflict and change. The most influential figures in criticism since Saussure—Bakhtin, Derrida, and Foucault—are wholly consistent with Saussure's foundational Course in General Linguistics (1916) no matter the traditions of complaint that have followed in Saussure's wake from Bakhtin forward. These complaints vitiate—despite themselves and often hilariously so—the misconceptions that have made cottage industries out of quarrels with Saussurean semiology that are based on notions of Saussure that are incorrect. The materialist criticism dominant today is actually dependent upon on the legacy of a presumably formalist structuralism rather than a step beyond it. New Historicism, postcolonialism, gender studies, environmental criticism, archive studies, even shared and surface reading are, like deconstruction, the by-products of Saussure's structuralism, not its foils. Saussure's sign is sensory and concrete. Language and materiality are not distinct but one and the same—history, society, the psychological subject, even the environment are systems of signs, material archives read and reread by futures that produce the past after the fact. Without Saussure, contemporary criticism would have no identifiable or effective source. The book begins with chapters on Saussure and Derrida, Bakhtin and Shakespeare, and Freud and Foucault followed by chapters on Victorian and American fiction, D.H. Lawrence and modern poetry, Virginia Woolf and Melanie Klein, and the historicist tropology of psychoanalysis. It concludes with a coda in life writing on the author's epileptic disability.

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

Publisher description

This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.

With AXIS Book 1: 'Areal', the inaugural part of carruthers' long poem project, each 'axis' cuts, layers, folds, and accumulates language in two columns. One side often plays the support role, an 'accompaniment' for the other side. Elsewhere they merge, intersect, cross, or even obliterate each other. Book 1 is the first test of this structure, a laying out of fields, of poetic 'areas.' AXIS begins with questions like these: Can utopia be lived inside the work? Is there a place for the political in the poem? What is the fate of community, of the chorus, of lyric time? Could there be such a thing as poetic geography? Poetic science? What doesn't poetry know about music? The AXIS system is designed to work in the future with three, - and four-columns of text, bringing together discourses of science, pharmacology and contemporary art. "Big, bold, brainy. An experimental tour de force."- Kate Lilley "With Axis, a.j. carruthers explicitly aligns himself with the lineage of the long poem. It is a bold move, if we consider that the major exponents of the form, from Ezra Pound to Anne Waldman, had invariably produced significant bodies of work prior to embarking on their poetic marathons. But ambition is fundamental to the long poem, and Axis, comprising thirty-one extended sequences and billed as 'Book the first', certainly outstrips Pound's inaugural efforts - a mere sixteen Cantos issued in 1925 - by a country mile . . . AXIS proves as much a delight for the eye as for the ear." - Australian Book Review "If he is also engaged in deranging formal play, Carruthers evinces a different kind of aesthetico-ontological program. An axis is -- as the great Chinese Taoists liked to say -- the void about which the wheel turns. This 'wheel' is as cosmic as it is quotidian . . . one further suspects a literally cosmic ambition for his work, which attempts to establish the very axle of existence as the power of absence. Hence, in a post-MallarmEan fashion, many of the numbered (and sometimes unnumbered) 'Axis' poems here are split across a central hinge of the page itself, not to mention the crease between pages, or between words or letters or lines. A 'turn' in poetry can designate a strophe, a turn of a line, a trope or figure, a narrative, a character's fortunes, a shift of tone, and so on -- so Axis takes its task to assemble and expose in all such turns their conditions of possibility, their axes, annexes, appendices, adaptations, antitheses and anaesthesias, their abecedarian and auratic apertures." - Justin Clemens, Southerly