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Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies
Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method
Rereading and rewriting our understanding of the poetics of modernism and postmodernism, this truly revisionary work identifies a significant counter-tradition in twentieth-century poetry. Postmodernism, Ming-Qian Ma argues, does not so much follow from modernism as coexist with it, with postmodernists employing the anarchic poetics introduced by Gertrude Stein in countering the rationalist method of high modernists such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma’s book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading.
With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.
Grounded in a detailed and compelling account of the philosophy guiding such a project, Ma’s book traces a continuity of thought and practice through the very different poetic work of objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and John Cage and language poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, and Charles Bernstein. His deft individual readings provide an opening into this notoriously difficult work, even as his larger critique reveals a new and clarifying perspective on American modernist and post-modernist avant-garde poetics. Ma shows how we cannot understand these poets according to the usual way of reading but must see how they deliberately use redundancy, unpredictability, and irrationality to undermine the meaning-oriented foundations of American modernism--and to force a new and different kind of reading.
With its unusually clear explanation of the philosophy informing postmodern practice, and its unique insights into some of the more interesting and vexing poets of our time, this book points to a reading of an important strain of postmodern American poetry that is likely to develop well into the twenty-first century.
320 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2008
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July 16, 2018A difficult and dense text. Poetry as Re-Reading is carefully rooted in a complex philosophical tradition of a "critique" of method as such and Ming-Quian Ma is arguing that the American Avant-Garde in the late 20th century (as descended from Gertrude Stein and the Objectivists) is characterized by a poetic deployment or enactment of that very philosophical critique. Between my relative unfamiliarity with most of the poets discussed and my lack of background in this segment of epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of science I am eminently not qualified to evaluate the accuracy of most of Ma's eruditely argued claim. I am however qualified to say that I was largely not convinced. I found that, due to the very qualities that Ma was claiming constituted the "counter-method" of these avant-garde poets, his arguments felt less like compelling readings of texts and more like speculation about the authors' interiority and intentions in writing such bizarre and unfriendly pieces. I thought his characterization of everything except Lyn Hejinian's My Life (also the only discussed poem that I had read even excerpts of prior to reading this book) was well supported by the examples chosen, but I had trouble following him from the catalog of characteristics to the claim about (counter-)method, intention, and the politics of the poetry (although the book did get largely easier to follow as it went on).
For my project of reading up on the avant-garde because of my frustrations with it, I found this book to be illustrative. If Ma is even mostly right about even most of the poets he discusses, then these poetic projects are not designed to convey anything at all on a conventional semantic level, or largely, on an instinctive emotional level. Furthermore, if he's right about the political aims of much of it, those aims are unseeable and thus unreachable unless you, like him and like most of these authors, have extensive scholarly background in 20th century philosophy, especially continental critical and poststructuralist thought. In other words, it seems that these poets often seem to at best, not care if you hate them, at worst would think you a fool for thinking that liking or disliking the work is even relevant to its grand project of incoherent and embodied critique. I am coming to realize that I don't much like that sort of attitude, that I think writing is something to be read and the avant-garde's move to break the writing free of both writer and reader seems both futile and counterproductive to me.
In all, I was not especially impressed with this book, but I do not regret reading it, if only because I have a better idea of the kind of argument and literature that I don't especially like.
For my project of reading up on the avant-garde because of my frustrations with it, I found this book to be illustrative. If Ma is even mostly right about even most of the poets he discusses, then these poetic projects are not designed to convey anything at all on a conventional semantic level, or largely, on an instinctive emotional level. Furthermore, if he's right about the political aims of much of it, those aims are unseeable and thus unreachable unless you, like him and like most of these authors, have extensive scholarly background in 20th century philosophy, especially continental critical and poststructuralist thought. In other words, it seems that these poets often seem to at best, not care if you hate them, at worst would think you a fool for thinking that liking or disliking the work is even relevant to its grand project of incoherent and embodied critique. I am coming to realize that I don't much like that sort of attitude, that I think writing is something to be read and the avant-garde's move to break the writing free of both writer and reader seems both futile and counterproductive to me.
In all, I was not especially impressed with this book, but I do not regret reading it, if only because I have a better idea of the kind of argument and literature that I don't especially like.
Displaying 1 of 1 review