ABOUT THIS BOOK

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

The Resistance to Poetry - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0001
[poetry, poems, wisdom, meaning]
This chapter explores the ways in which poets since the time of Callimachus have resisted their own usefulness. It suggests that a poem can't help but to be meaningful; it may speak as easily to one person as to a thousand. But especially when it has something urgent to say, a poem's power inheres less in its conclusions than in its propensity to resist them, demonstrating their inadequacy while moving inevitably toward them. At the same time, however, a poetry content with limitation would be merely as alluring as a poetry content with grandeur. Poets fear wisdom. This is why great poems threaten to feel beside the point precisely when we want them to reflect our importance: language returns our attention not to confirm what we know but to suggest that we might be different from ourselves. (pages 1 - 11)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

The End of the Line - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0002
[syntax, poetry, poems, lines, sentence]
This chapter argues that casting syntax into lines is to provide choices, to place precision in the service of equivocation by making us consider the implications of reading the syntax in one way rather than another. So if line determines the way a sentence becomes meaningful to us in a poem, it also makes us aware of how artfully a sentence may resist itself, courting the opposite of what it says—or, more typically, something just slightly different from what it says. (pages 12 - 25)
This chapter is available at:
    https://academic.oup.com/chica...

Forms of Disjunction - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0003
[poets, poetry, modernism, postmodernism]
Disjunction—the leap from one semantic, discursive, or figurative plane to another—is often associated with modernism; we think of Rimbaud, of Ezra Pound. We often associate an even more aggressive mode of disjunction with postmodernism; we think of Ashbery, of Charles Bernstein. This chapter argues that disjunction has always been a crucial aspect of poetry, and considers how certain modern poets purchased this quality for themselves. (pages 26 - 37)
This chapter is available at:
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Song and Story - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0004
[poems, poetry, sound, Charles Bernstein, Poem, Johnny Cake Hollow, Objectivist movement, George Oppen]
This chapter begins with looking at the poems by Charles Bernstein called “Poem” and “Johnny Cake Hollow” to illustrate how a poem that stakes its claim exclusively on sound will only travel so far as a poem of what and why. It then considers George Oppen's “Debt,” and argues that the Objectivist movement in poetry was not about focusing language on objects but about the achievement of form. Oppen was one of the twentieth century's most dazzling makers of lines. Reading him, it is impossible not to be aware of how, in the strategic absence of meter and rhyme, line becomes the crucial means by which a poet controls stress, intonation, and speed. (pages 38 - 49)
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Untidy Activity - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0005
[poems, poetry, uselessness, art, poetic language]
Uselessness has been a distinguishing feature of a work of art since Kant, but anyone who dreams or falls in love has known the freedom of forgetting ourselves so that we might discover we are different from ourselves. How does the act of a poem, the act embodied in its being written or being read, instill this feeling in us? How can poetic language simultaneously ask us to imagine a world and incite us to forget it, distracting us from it simultaneously renders viscerally there? (pages 50 - 60)
This chapter is available at:
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The Spokenness of Poetry - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0006
[poems, poetry, voice, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Victorian poetics, New Critical]
A number of modern poets have made highly influential remarks about the dramatic nature of lyric utterance. “Everything written is as good as it is dramatic,” said Robert Frost. “In the search for sincere self-expression,” said Ezra Pound, “one gropes, one finds some seeming verity,” casting off “complete masks of the self in each poem.” In the middle of the twentieth century, the New Critical synthesis of these remarks transformed a means into a method, and by the time Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published Understanding Poetry, it could be taken for granted that all poetry involves a dramatic organization. The method leads us to prefer modern poems that announce themselves immediately as voice driven and encourages us to look back to older poems that prefigure the preference. The New Critical preference for the dramatic poem helped to perpetuate the illusion that the nineteenth century had been a bad time for poetry—the gradual attenuation of Wordsworth's bold decision to place the poet at the center of the poem. But in fact the modern notion of the persona is a refinement of a crucial turn in Victorian poetics. (pages 61 - 71)
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The Other Hand - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0007
[poems, poetry, or, George Oppen, Hamlet]
This chapter explores the meaning of “or” in poetry. In Latin, which had several different words for “or,” the word aut was used to express an ultimatum: either X or Y. The words sive or vel were used to express a more equivocal set of alternatives: either X or Y but possibly both. George Oppen specialized in the latter kind of “or,”—an “or” that presents a choice without necessarily forcing us to make it, an “or” that leaves us suspended between alternatives whose juxtaposition seems neither dismissible nor completely satisfactory. Hamlet's “or” makes distinctions only to make the choices between alternatives seem simultaneously more urgent and more difficult to make. The sound of this kind of “or” is the sound of thinking in poetry—not the sound of finished thought but the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical process of discovering what it might be thinking. (pages 72 - 83)
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Leaving Things Out - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0008
[poems, poetry, omission, interpretation]
This chapter discusses omissions in poetry. It suggests that the job of interpretation—what in fact we're doing when we interpret—is to supply what the poem has appeared to omit, and our continuing interest in a poem turns on its resistance to our efforts. While poems cannot help but leave things out, and while the job of interpretation is in some sense to supply what the poem has appeared to omit, we return to poems when they make our job difficult. Poems show us how it feels to like trouble. (pages 84 - 94)
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Composed Wonder - James Longenbach
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226492513.003.0009
[poems, poetry, wonder, composition]
This chapter discusses wonder in poetry. Wonder is the reinvention of humility, the means by which we fall in love with the world. We gaze at the moon. We read a poem we've read a hundred times before. While a poem might speak vividly in one circumstance, it may never speak again. An event of unimaginable proportion may render a poem shockingly relevant, or it may make the poem feel smaller than ever before. In any case, the power of a poem inheres in the realization that we cannot count on it. Its ephemeral consolation depends precisely on its being ephemeral, open to the vicissitudes of self-doubt. Not wonder, but composed wonder. Not the composition achieved, but the composition unraveling. Not the meaning as such but the fact of the poem's existence as a movement of language—small enough to be remembered whole, difficult enough to be forgotten. (pages 95 - 108)
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Bibliography

Index