Rethinking the North American Long Poem
Rethinking the North American Long Poem
Form, Matter, Experiment
For centuries, critics, poets, poet-scholars, and philosophers have either openly proclaimed or tacitly assumed the long poem as the highest expression of literary ambition and excellence. Rethinking the North American Long Poem focuses on the North American variant of this notorious form—notorious because of its often forbidding and difficult character, particularly with respect to the dialectics of content and form, aesthetics and politics, matter and genre. In nine essays and a contextual introduction, the editors and contributors scrutinize seminal long poems by North American writers, including Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. They also explore recent efforts that have redefined or reopened the case of the long poem, including Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Taking the categories of form, matter, and experiment as frames of conceptual reference, the book examines the ways in which material and immaterial aspects of literary practice and the philosophically and politically inscribed duality of experience and experiment are negotiated in and by North American long poems from the nineteenth century to the present.
“Rethinking the North American Long Poem is an ambitious, multipronged approach to one of the most difficult and slippery—and hence interesting and rewarding—of literary forms.”—Michael Leong, author of Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry
“As notable intervention in a recently reawakened scholarly debate, this profound study with its impressive series of chapters explores the long poem in connection with some of the most exemplary writing of our time and writers as diverse as Ezra Pound, Kamau Brathwaite, Susan Howe, Claudia Rankine, and James Schuyler (to name just a few). An invaluable and timely contribution to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, its history, theories, and conceptualizations, this edited volume makes us see the long poem with different eyes.”—Gabriele Rippl, coauthor of Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics
Ridvan Askin teaches North American literature at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He is the author of Narrative and Becoming and the coeditor of several books, including New Directions in Philosophy and Literature. Julius Greve is a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: CormacMcCarthy and the Concept of Nature.
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Form, Matter, Experiment and the North American Long Poem
Ridvan Askin and Julius Greve
Part I. Form
Chapter One. Assemblage as a Genre of the Long Poem
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Chapter Two. Incompleteness: The Project of the Long Poem
Nathan Brown
Chapter Three. “A Restless Surface”: Everyday Phenomenology in James Schuyler’s Long Poems
Matthew Carbery
Part II. Matter
Chapter Four. Matter, Rhetoric, and Ambient Form in Susan Howe’s Poetic Space
Brian J. McAllister
Chapter Five. Paterson’s Analogies: Iteration, Recursion, and Contingency
Paul Jaussen
Chapter Six. Against Spectatorship: “Being with” in Claudia Rankine’s Long Poems
Kathy Lou Schultz
Part III. Experiment
Chapter Seven. The Paradise of Rock-Drill: Far-Right Politics in the Late Cantos of Ezra Pound
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
Chapter Eight. Petitionary Long Poems: Layli Long Soldier, Juliana Spahr, and Srikanth Reddy
Peter Middleton
Chapter Nine. Whitman’s Long, Long Poem
Sascha Pöhlmann
Notes on Contributors
