Prose Poetry and the City

Donna Stonecipher

• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781602359994
• eBook ISBN:
  9781643172651
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

"In this fascinating book, Donna Stonecipher doubles down on the development of prose poetry and the city. Tactically, her sweeping, complex yet meticulous essay engages Baudelaire's sudden--or is it sudden?--incursion from the constraints of verse into the 'roominess' of prose, 'paragraphs of place, ' while linking 'civic horizontality' and 'corporate verticality.' Tracking possibilities, (m)using everything from architecture to landscape to cookbooks, fl neur-like, her essay exuberantly and expertly gathers together rhizomatic threads of thinkers and poets of the last two centuries. Reads like a song." --Norma Cole"This fascinating exploration of the prose poem begins with a question that most other studies have overlooked or taken for granted: 'What, if anything, do cities and prose poetry have to do with each other?' Donna Stonecipher's touchstone for this question is Charles Baudelaire's prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris, but her excavation of the relationship between the 'built environment' of prose poem and city moves backwards to ancient Greece and forwards to the new sentence. As Stonecipher unpacks the 'dialogic space' of the prose poem, her essay moves vertically and horizontally, providing histories of the skyscraper and the aesthetics and ethics of vertical ascension, and much else. As she moves nimbly through large swaths of intellectual, architectural, urban, and aesthetic history, Stonecipher engages debates central to poetics and to modernity itself, taking seriously the challenge of considering how aesthetic forms register, respond to, and transform their built, social, and historical environments. An indispensable and enlightening guide that is also a pleasure to read." --Susan Rosenbaum

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• 1. Preliminaries
• 2. The View from the Top of the World Trade Center/“. . . this Lust to Be a Viewpoint and Nothing More”
• 3. The Double City
• 4. Constriction
• 5. The Solar Eye Looking Down at the Page
• 6. Langue/Parole and the Two Axes of Language
• 7. An Enchantment
• 8. Freedom
• 9. Subversion, or, “Horrible vie! Horrible ville!”
• 10. A Language of the Gods
• 11. Subversion, Part II
• 12. Aphasia
• 13. The New Sentence
• 14. Brief Detour on Space
• 15. Gaps
• 16. Breath
• 17. The Heights
• 18. Civic Horizontalism and Corporate Verticality
• 19. The Sublime
• 20. Psychoarchitecture
• 21. The Crowd
• 22. Trivia
• 23. Dissensions
• 24. The Philosophical Sundial
• Epilogue
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Back cover