Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism

W. Scott Howard, Broc Rossell, W. Scott Howard, Broc Rossell

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781609385927
• eBook ISBN: 9781609385934
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivismexamines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement's development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. 

Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement's development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present. 

Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De'Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, Robert Sheppard 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. ‘After’ Objectivism: Sincerity, Objectification, Contingency
• 1. Objectivist Poetics, ‘Influence,’ and Some Contemporary Long Poems
• 2. “More formal / Than a field would be”; or, Imaginary Gardens with Virtual Poems in Them: On George Oppen and Louise Glück
• 3. “Listening’s trace”: Reading Lorine Niedecker and Lisa Robertson
• 4. Macro, Micro, Material: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts and the Post-Objectivist Serial Poem
• 5. John Seed’s Poetics of the Punctum: From Manchester to the “Mayhew Project”
• 6. Meaning It: The Affective Poetics of Social Sincerity
• 7. Against Objectivism: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
• 8. Women and War, Love, Labor: The Legacy of Lorine Niedecker
• 9. The Long Moment of Objectivism: Reznikoff, Bäcker, Fitterman, and Holocaust Representation
• Coda. Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index
• Series List