Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry

Poets on Poetry

by Linda Gregerson

In a wide-ranging and fiercely intelligent series of readings, Linda Gregerson presents an eloquent overview of the contemporary American lyric. This lyric is distinguished, she argues, not only by its unprecedented variety and abundance, but by its persistent and supple engagement with form. In detailed examinations of work by John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louis Glück, James Schuyler, Muriel Rukeyser, C. K. Williams, Rita Dove, Philip Levine, Heather McHugh, William Meredith, John Hollander, and a host of other recent and contemporary poets, Gregerson documents the depth and richness of American lyric production at the turn of the twenty-first century.
In its scruples and reservations as in its discriminating explanations, Negative Capability unearths the contours of a distinctive American poetic tradition. This book is a rich symbiosis of critical and poetic intelligence. It is also a work of passionate advocacy.
The book will appeal to those interested in the current state of American practicing poets, readers and students of literature and literary criticism, professional critics.
Linda Gregerson is an acclaimed poet and literary critic. She is author of The Reformation of the Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic and two poetry collections, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep and Fire in the Conservatory. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan, where she heads the Visiting Writers Program.

Genres: Poetry, Criticism

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2001

About the author

Linda Gregerson is an American poet and member of faculty at the University of Michigan. She recieved her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In 2014, she was named as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Linda Gregerson is the author of several collections of poetry and literary criticism. Also a Renaissance scholar, a classically trained actor, and a devotee of the sciences, she produces lyrical poems informed by her expansive reading that are inquisitive, unflinching, and tender.

Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Waterborne
Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist for The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep
2000 Guggenheim Fellowship
National Book Award finalist for Manetic North

Reviews

[Anna]

There are a number of sentences, paragraphs, in this book that read to me like lightning—insight that stopped me and had me reaching for the poet under discussion, gathering a hoard of books falling off my bedside table. But, if I’m honest, much of this book was like trudging through very thick mud as if the language itself was a kind of disguise one must peel off and then peel off again— and now I’m mixing things up. Mud? Costume? Wallpaper? Just the feeling so strongly that I’d like to get to another lightning moment so much but….That spark IS extraordinary and shockingly so. But, I feel some relief having now come through to the end.