Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe

Description

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.

"Articulate, resourceful readings of the decisive poetry of our time, beginning with Gertrude Stein and continuing to the latest, crucial ground work of Susan Howe. Truly a pioneering work." Robert Creely "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