playlist 25 october

Words

brian kim stefans. axis thinking. kelly writers house. pennsound

cecil taylor. 2; 9. chinampas. ubuweb

glenis redmond. birthdays; black of nature. monumental.

jean feraca. crossing the great divide. private recording.

jerome rothenberg. lorca variations 2. SPLAB .

john ashbery. memories of imperialism. kelly writers house. pennsound

juliana spahr. gathering palolo stream. SUNY Buffalo. Pennsound

Karen volkman. One might start here. American poets in the 21st century. wesleyan

marc smith. we wear the mask; street musician. quarters in the jukebox. slampapi

minton sparks. Gypsy; ghosted. sinsick. mintonsparks.com

myung mi kim. works. american poets in 21st century. Wesleyan

Music

global drum project. i can tell you more; tars; heartspace. global drum project. shout factory

manu katche. Lo; pieces of emotion; morning joy. playground. Ecm

Questions of Possibilitiy

Questions of Possibilitiy: Contemporary poetry and poetic form
David Caplan
Oxford University Press. 2005. 165 pp.

Why study poetic form? Why write in metrical verse?

Haven’t literary and cultural history already doomed metrical poetry to irrelevance, or at least to political and aesthetic conservatism?

David Caplan, professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan, contends that much of the most vital and interesting contemporary metrical verse shows a voracious curiosity, an openness to seemingly incompatible techniques and procedures.

And contemporary poetry demands catholicity, he writes. Many readers enjoy poetry that literary criticism insists on separating into different groups.

Two reasons in particular recommend the study of metrical poetry, Caplan argues. Poetic form obsesses twentieth- and twenty-first century American poets, and our current understanding of poetic form, especially contemporary metrical verse, remains inadequate.

Caplan focuses on five verse forms to trace the contours of contemporary metrical verse and poetic culture: the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, heroic couplet, and ballad, including examples of contemporary poets working in each form.

He aims to “move discussion beyond the simple oppositions that often impede discussions of contemporary American verse” by highlighting the interplay between allegedly antagonistic practices, between prosody and “theory,” between “traditional” and “experimental” poetry.

Younger poets, he argues, tend to place different traditions in dialogue, not put them in competition. Instead of manufacturing another “poetry war,” younger poets present themselves as a generation whose “game will become an entire century.”

Modern Poetry After Modernism

Modern Poetry After Modernism
James Longenbach.
Oxford University Press, 1997. 209 pages.

This book takes the word postmodern as literally as possible, writes James Longenbach. A professor of English at the University of Rochester, he uses the word postmodern “to describe any poet who writes with a self-conscious sense of coming after modernism. “

From his perspective, poetic form has no inevitable relationship to any ideological position. “Consequently, the cast of characters most often associated with postmodernism is not prominent here,” he writes. “A variety of postmdernisms must be discriminated, since the terms of one will not always account for the development of another.”

Longenbach wants the reader to appreciate the variety of poetries written in our time, without necessarily having to choose between them.

Chapters discuss the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, John Ashbery, Amy Clampitt, Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky, and Jorie Graham.

What ever their similarities, Longenbach writes, these poets are also highly idiosyncratic. He shapes each chapter of this book, except for the first, “in response to the distinctive problems of a particular poet’s career.”

Like most readers, Longenbach prefers certain poets to others. His goal, though, “is to offer an account of American poetry after modernism that allows us to choose from among a variety of poetic practices, not between them.”