The Poetics Of Indeterminacy

She traces this tradition from its early "French connection" in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern "landscapes without depth" as the French/English language constructions of Samuel Beckett, the elusive dreamscapes of John Ashbery, and the performance works of David Antin and John Cage.".

This Companion offers the most comprehensive overview available of modernist poetry, its forms, its major authors and its contexts. The first part explores the historical and cultural contexts and sexual politics of literary modernism and the avant garde. The chapters in the second part concentrate on individual authors and movements, while the concluding part offers a comprehensive overview of the early reception and subsequent canonisation of modernist poetry. As well as insightful readings of canonical poets, the Companion features extended discussions of poets whose importance is now being increasingly recognised, such as Mina Loy, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and postcolonial poets in the Caribbean, Africa and India. While modernist poets are often thought of as difficult, these essays will help students to understand and enjoy their experimental, playful and fascinating responses to contemporary social and cultural change and their dialogue with the arts and with each other.

In Politics and Verbal Play Martha LaFollette Miller traces the evolution of the poetry of Angel Gonzalez from his early existential and social period through later works that draw heavily on verbal and conceptual play for their effect.

In this book the author takes an unusual multi-disciplinary approach to debates about contemporary art and poetry, ideas about the mind and its representations, and theories of knowledge and being. Arts practices are considered as enactments of mind and as transformative modes of consciousness. Ideas drawn from poetics, philosophy and consciousness studies are used to illuminate the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of a diverse array of visual artists. Themes explored include: the interconnectedness of existence; art as a way of interrogating appearances; identity and otherness; art and the self as 'open work'; Buddhist concepts of 'emptiness' and 'suchness'; scepticism, mysticism and the arts; and mind in the landscape. The book contains an important and distinctive visual dimension with photographs and drawings by the author and texts employing unorthodox syntax and layouts that exemplify the themes under discussion. The author hints at a new aesthetics and philosophy of indeterminacy, paradox, uncertainty and discontinuity - a contrarium - in which we negotiate our way through the instabilities and contradictions of contemporary life. Written in a lively and accessible style this volume is of interest to scholars, arts practitioners, teachers and to anyone with an interest in art, poetry, consciousness studies, philosophy and nature. Artists, poets and philosophers discussed, include: Cy Twombly, Helen Chadwick, John Ruskin, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Long, James Turrell, Anish Kapoor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Agnes Martin, Land Art, Arte Povera, Minimalism, Charles Olson, Kenneth White, Robin Blaser, Fred Wah, Gary Snyder, RS Thomas, Alice Oswald, John Cage, Jorge Luis Borges, Guy Davenport, Kenneth Rexroth, Heidegger, Marjorie Perloff, Thomas McEvilley, Merleau-Ponty, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, David Abram, Thomas Merton, Pyrrho & Nagarjuna.

This collection brings together writings on contemporary poetics by poets and critics who have been involved in the contemporary literary avant-garde. Pieces range in style and approach from theoretical writings to discussions of individual poets.

Modernist debates about waste - both aesthetic and economic - often express biases against gender and sexual errancy. The Poetics of Waste looks at writers and artists who resist this ideology and respond by developing an excessive poetics.

While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his 'borrowing' from painters or his proto-Derridean use of language, but his preoccupation with self exploration and the temporal effects of his work as artifacts. Following Pasternak's understanding of artistic inspiration as an act of love for the material world, O'Hara explores moments of experience in an effort to both complicate and enrich our experience of the material world. On the one hand, in poems such as Second Avenue, for example, O'Hara works to 'muddy' language through which experience is, in part, mediated with the use of parataxis, allusions, and absurd metaphors and similes. On the other, in his 'I do this I do that' poems, he names the events of his lunch hour in an effort, among other things, to experience time as a moment of fullness rather than as a moment of loss. The book argues, furthermore, that O'Hara's view of the self as both an expression of the creative force at work in the world and as the temporal aggregate of finite experiences, places him between so-called 'Romantic' and 'postmodern' theories of the lyric. While it is often argued that O'Hara is a forerunner of a new, critically informed, 'materialist' poetics, this study concludes that O'Hara's work is somewhat less radical in its understanding of poetic meaning than is often claimed. Moreover, while O'Hara is preoccupied with his experience in his poems, the book argues that he espouses, in some respects, a rather traditional view of love. In addition to being a metaphor for the creative act, love, for O'Hara, is the chance coming together of two entities. Yet, one of the ironies of this is that while love is, for O'Hara, a feeling that is the result of movement, or the unexpected coming together of two otherwise separate entities, and is itself characterized in his work as a moving, 'life-giving vulgarity,' it produces a feeling of peace and stillness—a feeling that will not remain because of the fact that the self changes and that love is itself a moving, living thing. Thus, love contains within itself the ominous promise of future loss and is, therefore, the highest feeling that contains within itself the seeds of the lowest.