The Monkey and the Wrench

Essays into Contemporary Poetics

Mary Biddinger

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781931968911
• eBook ISBN: 9781935603528
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics takes a snapshot of a moving target: the ever-shifting conversation about today's poetry. The ten essays in this collection offer reflections and insights, practical advice for craft matters, and provocative points of departure for those who read and write poetry. This series seeks to further the discussion of poetics in America and beyond, and to showcase the ideas of writers and critics with varied sensibilities. The first volume in the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, The Monkey & the Wrench, explores the debate over hybrid aesthetics, confronts the topic of contemporary rhyme, and ventures into the realm of persona and the mystical poem. This volume is ideal for both the classroom and the nightstand, for the poet's desk and the critic's bookshelf. Series editors Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher have assembled an eclectic collection that welcomes the reader into the conversation, while documenting the seismic activity of today's poetry world.

Index

A

“About Face” (Fulton), 28

Abstract Epistolary, 30

Ackroyd, Peter, 12

The Act of Reading (Iser), 107

“Adam’s Curse” (Yeats), 61

“After Lorca” (Spicer), 95–97

After the Death of Poetry (Shetley), 7

“Against Unity” (Wallace), 119–29, 149

Ali, Taha Muhammed, 112

“Alive for an Instant” (Koch), 50

Allen, Donald, 153

Alphabet (Christensen), 57

“America” (Ginsberg), 50–52

American Hybrid, 4, 117–20, 125–27, 129–32, 139, 141–42, 148–53

“American Poetry in the New Century” (Barr), 8

American Poetry Since 1950 (Weinberger), 117

American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Rankine and Spahr), 118, 126

Anaphora, 46, 48, 51–52, 53–54, 56. See also Litany in contemporary poetry

“And As In Alice” (Bang), 71

“Andrew Marvell” (Eliot), 131–32

Antin, David, 49–50

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 138

Apex of the M (magazine), 124

Aquiline, Danielle, 33

“Archaic Torso of Apollo” (Rilke), 164

Archambeau, Robert, 2, 5–26

Armantrout, Rae, 127

Arnold, Matthew, 16, 19

Arteaga, Alfred, 138

Ashbery, John, 15, 34, 142, 145

“As If to Say” (Nealon), 36

Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), 3, 118–20, 140, 149

“Atlas” (Ryan), 66–67

“At Peter Pan Mini Golf After the Wedding of Rebecca and Brian, or Any Binary System” (Boehl), 31

Auden, W. H., 62

Auster, Paul, 117

“Autobiogeography” (Aquiline), 33

“Autobiographia” (Parker), 35

Autonomous principle, 10–11

B

Background rhyme, 61–76

Bang, Mary Jo, 71–72, 156

Barr, John, 8, 14, 17, 22–24

Barrett, Terry, 32

Battiste, Michele, 39

Bawer, Bruce, 7–8

Beach, Christopher, 8

Beach Bo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Of Monkeys and Wrenches
• The Discursive Situation of Poetry
• The Moves: Common Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry
• An Aesthetics of Accumulation: On the Contemporary Litany
• Cornucopia, or, Contemporary American Rhyme
• I Am One of an Infinite Number of Monkeys Named Shakespeare, or; Why I Don’t Own this Language
• Persona and the Mystical Poem
• A Wilderness of Monkeys
• Hybrid Aesthetics and its Discontents
• Response to Hybrid Aesthetics and its Discontents
• Goodbye, Goodbye, Goodbye: Notes on the Ends of Poems
• Contributors
• Index