Radical Artifice

Explores the intricate relationships of postmodern poetics to the culture of network television, advertising layout, and the computer. Perloff argues that poetry today, like the visual arts and theater, is always "contaminated" by the language of mass media. Among the many poets Perloff discusses are John Ashbery, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Steve McCaffery, and preeminently, John Cage--Publisher.

Today interviews proliferate everywhere: in newspapers, on television, and in anthologies; as a method they are a major tool of medicine, the law, the social sciences, oral history projects, and journalism; and in the book trade interviews with authors are a major promotional device. We live in an 'interview society'. How did this happen? What is it about the interview form that we find so appealing and horrifying? Are we all just gossips or is there something more to it? What are the implications of our reliance on this bizarre dynamic for publicity, subjectivity, and democracy? Literature and the Rise of the Interview addresses these questions from the perspective of literary culture. The book traces the ways in which the interview form has been conceived and deployed by writers, and interviewing has been understood as a literary-critical practice. It excavates what we might call a 'poetics' of the interview form and practice. In so doing it covers 150 years and four continents. It includes a diverse rostrum of well-known writers, such as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, William Burroughs, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison, while reintroducing some individuals that history has forgotten, such as Betty Ross, 'Queen of Interviewers', and Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's profligate son. Together these stories expose the interview's position in the literary imagination and consider what this might tell us about conceptions of literature, authorship, and reading communities in modernity.

Rev. ed. of: The Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics / Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, co-editors; Frank J. Warnke, O.B. Hardison, Jr., and Earl Miner, associate editors. 1993.

In The Poetry of Saying Robert Sheppard explores an array of ‘experimental’ writers and styles of writing many of which have never secured a large audience in Britain, but which are often fascinatingly innovative. As a published poet in this tradition, Sheppard provides a detailed and thought provoking account of the development of the British poetry movement from the 1950s. As well as analysing the work of individual poets such as Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth The Poetry of Saying also examines the influence of the Poetry Society and poetry magazines on the evolution of British poetry throughout this period. The overriding virtue of the poetry of this period is its diversity, a fact that Sheppard has not ignored. As well as providing a fascinating into the work of these poets, The Poetry of Saying offers an ‘insider’s’ commentary on the social, political and historical background during this exciting period in British poetry.

Describes the visual and mental models by which urban environment has been recognized, depicted and planned. This analysis draws from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature and painting to identify these maps of the city - as a work of art, as panorama and as spectacle.

"The noted critic and translator Yunte Huang is known for his work on the cultural and linguistic transactions between the Anglo-American and Chinese worlds. In this new book, he explores the dynamics of poetry and poetics in the age of globalization, particularly questions of translatability, universality, and risk in the transpacific context. The title of the book, Chinese Whispers, refers to an American children's game dating to the years of the Cold War, a period in which everything Chinese, or even Chinese sounding, was suspect, but also evokes Europeans' inability to understand China in earlier centuries. Taking up various manifestations of "Chinese Whispers" in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Huang investigates how poetry, always to a significant degree untranslatable, complicates the transpacific production of meanings and values. The book opens with the efforts of I. A. Richards, arguably the founder of Anglo-American academic literary criticism, to promote Basic English in China in the early twentieth century. For Huang, Basic English foreshadows the rise of the digital technology, making for a dry run of the search for universal intelligibility. It culminates by resituating Ernest Fenollosa's famous essay "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry," in the context of what Lev Manovich has called "the language of the new media," exploring the ways in which Chinese has historically enriched but also entrapped the Western conception of language. Chinese Whispers is an important contribution to comparative literary study and transnational poetics"--