Against Language?: "dissatisfaction with Language" as Theme and as Impulse Towards Experiments in Twentieth Century Poetry

by Rosmarie Waldrop

Format Paperback Subject Literary Collections Publisher Mouton De Gruyter

Genres: Poetry

138 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Rosmarie Waldrop (born August 24, 1935), née Sebald, is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is coeditor and publisher of Burning Deck Press, as well as the author or coauthor (as of 2006) of 17 books of poetry, two novels, and three books of criticism.

Reviews

[Carrie]

"...the poets who are seriously dissatisfied with our conventions of language (and do not just take this attitude as an excuse or because it is fashionable) are working at the borders of the unsayable and unknowable. They are trying to explore the areas bordering pure spirit or the void, unformed matter or energy, and the realm of 'things' considered as having a self-sufficient being alien to man. And since our language is our world, changing the language seems a possibility of changing our ways of seeing and thus to some extent changing what is seeable and knowable."