The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry

✍ Scribed by Robert Sheppard (auth.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 255
• Series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard’s axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
Introduction: Form, Forms, and Forming....Pages 1-28
Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice....Pages 29-46
Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence....Pages 47-69
Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Hughes’ Petrarch....Pages 71-84
Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure....Pages 85-100
Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney....Pages 101-117
Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms, and Palimpsest Prose....Pages 119-133
The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, and John Seed....Pages 135-154
Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry....Pages 155-171
The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher....Pages 173-194
Geraldine Monk’s Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act....Pages 195-212
Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs....Pages 213-239
Back Matter....Pages 241-248

✦ Subjects

Poetry and Poetics;Literary Theory;Contemporary Literature;British and Irish Literature;North American Literature