Introduction : Reading the Difficult -- Canonical Strategies and the Question of Authority : Eliot and Williams -- Basil Bunting : Poet of the North -- Parataxis in Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky -- Writing and Authority in Zukofsky's Thanks to the Dictionary -- Thinking with the Poem : Louis Zukofsky -- Reading Niedecker -- "Take Oil / and Hum" : Niedecker and Bunting -- The Mind as Frying Pan : Robin Blaser's Humor -- "Writing on Air for Dear Life" : Richard Caddel -- "The Tattle of Tongueplay " : Mina Loy's Love Songs -- "Conversation with One's Peers" : George Oppen and Some Women Writers -- Momently : The Politics of the Poem, a Note on Robert Creeley -- Syllable as Music : Lyn Hejinian's Writing Is an Aid to Memory -- McCaffery's Diptych : The Black Debt -- "Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened" : How I Read Bruce Andrews -- Paradise as Praxis : Bruce Andrews's Lip Service -- Undoing the Book -- Poetic Fact --Sound Reading -- Paradise of Letters.
Summary
This is a study of poets whose work, because of its difficulty, apparent obduracy, or simple resistance to conventional explication, remains more-or-less firmly outside the canon. The focus of these essays is on nonmainstream poets - often unknown, unstudied, and neglected writers whose work bucks preconceived notions of what constitutes the avant-garde.
