Actions for Experimentalism as reciprocal communication in contemporary American poetry : John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman
Experimentalism as reciprocal communication in contemporary American poetry : John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman / Elina Siltanen
- Author
- Siltanen, Elina
- Published
- Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing Company, [2016]
- Physical Description
- x, 210 pages ; 25 cm.
- Series
- Contents
- Machine generated contents note: ch. 1 Introduction -- 1.1.The poets, their contexts, and readers -- 1.2.Reading conspicuously -- 1.3.Prospectus -- ch. 2 "What makes you think this is a voice?": Reading presence and the self -- 2.1.From the New York School to Language Writing: Against the single voice -- 2.1.1.Modes of presence: The New York School and confessional poetry -- 2.1.2.Constructing the self: Language Writing and the workshop lyric -- 2.1.3."Authenticity" / "sincerity" and Ashbery, Silliman and Hejinian's Postmodernism -- 2.2.Possibilities for multiple presences: Redefining defining the self -- 2.2.1.Pronominal indeterminacies in Ashbery -- 2.2.2."Attention is all"? Silliman's disrupted presences of the self -- 2.2.3."The self as a relationship": Hejinian writing (her)self -- 2.3."There is no T as such": Escaping the self -- ch. 3 "Do you see how it posits you the reader?": Reading in a community -- 3.1.Collaborative writing and collective reading -- 3.1.1.The New York School: Towards a collective voice -- 3.1.2.Language Writing collaborations: Collectivity and strangeness -- 3.2.Hard work: Becoming a reader -- 3.2.1.Making reading communities -- 3.2.2."Joining" a reading community -- 3.2.3.Poetic address: Collaborating with readers -- 3.3.Reading to escape the self -- ch. 4 "What of a poem that told you what it did...?": Consciousness of poetry -- 4.1.Unidentifiable writing: Poetry and criticism -- 4.2.Poetic inquiries: Critical readings in and of poetry -- 4.2.1."New / Criticism": Dialogic art-critical discussion in Ashbery's "Litany" -- 4.2.2."Normal chores of verse": Theory-consciousness and constructedness in Silliman's "Ketjak' and "Ketjak2" -- 4.2.3."A language of inquiry": Hejinian and the discourse of poetry -- 4.3.The experimental poem as an intersection -- ch. 5 "Pending panic of sense": Reading everyday communication in experimental poetry -- 5.1."Gazing at the stars": Particularity and commonality -- 5.1.1."Coming from the same place": Commonality and context in writing about the everyday -- 5.1.2."This is not repetition": Iteration and commonality -- 5.2.A sense of the idiomatic -- 5.2.1."Transparent and needle-pure": Ashbery's everyday cliches -- 5.2.2."You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon": Everyday life turned idiom in Hejinian's writing -- 5.2.3."Cannot shut / revolving door": Silliman's idiomatic insistence -- 5.3.Happily: Chance and the unexpected in the everyday -- ch. 6 Afterword.
- Summary
- The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem's words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. 0The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.
- Subject(s)
- Ashbery, John, 1927-2017—Criticism and interpretation
- Hejinian, Lyn—Criticism and interpretation
- Silliman, Ronald, 1946-—Criticism and interpretation
- Ashbery, John, 1927-2017
- Hejinian, Lyn
- Silliman, Ronald, 1946-
- 1900-1999
- American poetry—20th century—History and criticism
- Experimental poetry, American—History and criticism
- Poetics
- Communities in literature
- Authors and readers—United States—History—20th century
- American poetry
- Authors and readers
- Experimental poetry, American
- United States
- Genre(s)
- ISBN
- 9789027201317 hardcover alkaline paper
9027201315 hardcover alkaline paper - Bibliography Note
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
View MARC record | catkey: 19173677