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The Poetics of Wrongness
The Poetics of Wrongness is a collection of essay/talks that the poet Rachel Zucker, expanded from lectures presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2016.
Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares “I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.” Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde—among many others—into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet’s need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Prescient in their original observations, these expanded talks seek to respond to and engage the many political events since their presentation, remaining timelessly persistent in their galvanizing force.
Devastating in their revelations, yet hopeful in their endurance, these are lectures of protest and reckoning. Zucker declares “I write against. My poetics is a poetics of opposition and provocation that I never outgrew. Against the status quo or the powers that be, writing out of and into wrongness.” Thus, Zucker deftly dismantles the outdated paradigms of motherhood, aesthetics, feminism, poetics, and politics. Bringing Bernadette Mayer, Marina Abramovic, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde—among many others—into the conversation, Zucker questions the categories that have been imposed on poetry, as well as a poet’s need to speak, and the resulting responsibilities. Prescient in their original observations, these expanded talks seek to respond to and engage the many political events since their presentation, remaining timelessly persistent in their galvanizing force.
256 pages, Paperback
First published February 7, 2023
12 people are currently reading
256 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Zucker
20 books87 followersRachel Zucker is the author of Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University, 2007), The Last Clear Narrative (Wesleyan University, 2004), Eating in the Underworld (Wesleyan University, 2003), and Annunciation (The Center for Book Arts, 2002), as well as the co-editor (with Arielle Greenberg) of Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama's First 100 Days and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (both from the University of Iowa Press). A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Zucker has taught at several institutions, including NYU and Yale. She currently lives in NYC with her husband and three sons, and is a certified labor doula.
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/63-...
For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/63-...
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 22, 2023
this book was so compelling and captivating. i was so impressed by her analysis of confessional poetry and the idea of how poetry can be "wrong", but even more so i was impressed by how she wove her personal stories into these essays. the parts about her failing marriage, her mother's death, and her relationship to her children were earth shattering and truly gutted me. i also appreciated her honesty about her growth in terms of better understanding her role in the world/politics as a white woman. she was able to remove her voice to discuss the history of confessional/feminist poetry and how it was often reduced to the likes of plath and sexton in the 60s/70s and discredited poets like lorde and clifton. she did a great job revising her own train of thought and research to include prominent women of color and it was just such a great read. i could say more bc i seriously devoured this book but i will stop here. i wanna read everything that zucker writes.
December 11, 2023
A superb essay on motherhood that (finally) elucidates the tensions between a woman’s pursuits (academic/poetic in her case, corporate in mine) and her engagements (kids, parents, basic human-ness). A tender set of essays. I don’t think she uses the word ‘tender’ but they are.
A reaction to trump’s election that felt like mine (the hatred, the wake up). An argument to read longer poems. A hilarious egg metaphor. And a pun on ‘expression’ that was a bit devastating.
“Time bends as the mother (male or female or fluid) relives or reexperiences an early age through close contact with and care of an infant, baby, child, adolescent and simultaneously inhibits her own past-future as the mother identifies with the child and with the mother‘s own mother, as she is now the mother.”
A reaction to trump’s election that felt like mine (the hatred, the wake up). An argument to read longer poems. A hilarious egg metaphor. And a pun on ‘expression’ that was a bit devastating.
“Time bends as the mother (male or female or fluid) relives or reexperiences an early age through close contact with and care of an infant, baby, child, adolescent and simultaneously inhibits her own past-future as the mother identifies with the child and with the mother‘s own mother, as she is now the mother.”
September 7, 2024
I LOVE THIS BOOK - it speaks distinctly to my experience as a mother and a writer, and I dream of meeting Rachel (we are neighbors uptown now) and walking with Rachel in the park and asking all the questions I want to ask that the book brings up which are, exactly, all the questions I wanted to ask before I read the book, only now I have more, better ways to articulate my own existence and feelings of wrongness. Thank you to Rachel Zucker for this amazing inquiry! I highly recommend it!
August 9, 2024
The moment I finished this book I felt like I needed to sit down and read it again. I got goose bumps too many times to count and was left feeling both liberated and constrained (especially as we yet again face a potential Trump election).
I felt inspired to write again. I felt challenged and angry and guilty and ashamed. I felt empowered and gutted and deeply aware of how I’ve never written something that feels this honest. Most of all, I felt proud of my poetry and of women and of mothers.
I felt inspired to write again. I felt challenged and angry and guilty and ashamed. I felt empowered and gutted and deeply aware of how I’ve never written something that feels this honest. Most of all, I felt proud of my poetry and of women and of mothers.
January 27, 2024
Probably the best thing I’ve ever read. Necessary reading for confessional(istic) writers. Using it for my dissertation on confessing abortion in America (mid twentieth century, before Roe), but it’s become more than that to me. Zucker writes in a way that speaks to my way of understanding the world and the way I approach it.
June 21, 2023
Enorme ensayo sobre el yo, la confesión, lo autobiográfico... y también sobre el machismo y el racismo en la crítica literaria de USA. Una escritura muy divertida. Salí de aquí con decenas de poetas por descubrir.
April 7, 2023
This is the book I've been waiting for for a long long time. If I thought I could do it justice, I would write more but I think you just have to read it.
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January 29, 2025thank you rachel
May 22, 2023
This book is extraordinary, and what a read for Mother's Day. Layered, intelligent, raw, I feel like I want to go rethink everything now. I wrote about the genius of my favorite essay and what it feels like to be constantly interruptible while also trying to be creative here.
December 30, 2023
What I wrote about this book in LitHub:
Lectures are a relatively ancient form (dating to medieval times at least), and one we associate with instruction—a person with intellectual authority imparting their genius on their audience in a way that might change them.
For someone like Zucker for whom taking up power isn’t a comfortable experience, this wasn’t an easy task. At one point in The Poetics of Wrongness she writes, “In order to write [poetry] ethically… I need to think about who I am as maker and what I gain by my writing—understanding, money, notoriety, pleasure, power?” In her podcast Commonplace, Zucker spoke with fellow poet and Bagley Wright Lecturer Douglas Kearney (who won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for his own amazing published lectures Optic Subwoof!) about many things—including their experiences writing lectures on craft. For Zucker, it was deeply fraught.
At one point, she tells Kearney, “Part of my drama was about authority. For sure, that comes from being a woman, being an only child, coming out of a very patriarchal religion, coming out of a heterosexual marriage, having only male children, having a male editor—wanting to prove myself and get the gold ring. At the same time I knew that my deepest most authentic work in life was about trying—you know, I can’t live outside of capitalism, but can I, instead of going after this power that I think will protect me or, I dunno, make me a man! Can I dismantle this within myself—the need for it, the addiction to it, the desire for it—and still speak?”
These inquiries are emblematic of Zucker’s approach to writing—she will point directly to the part of herself most would do much to hide from themselves and, failing that, likely the world. The rigor and expansiveness of her lectures and prose surprised me again and again. The ways in which she adheres to lectures in the format we know and generally accept—and then pushes back, breaks, flees from it. The vulnerability of the process and her thinking throughout was radically generous.
In her lectures and prose pieces (“An Anatomy of the Long Poem,” “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood”), she references poets from past and present while simultaneously interrogating her experiences as a poet and person. Throughout, Zucker interrogates what “confessional” means, writing about yourself entails, what one’s limits should be (or not). These pieces stirred up so much inside me regarding power, the lecture form, writing, teaching, feminism, the ethics of writing about the self and those in your life. Anyone who is touched by these concerns should read Zucker’s work in all its forms.
Lectures are a relatively ancient form (dating to medieval times at least), and one we associate with instruction—a person with intellectual authority imparting their genius on their audience in a way that might change them.
For someone like Zucker for whom taking up power isn’t a comfortable experience, this wasn’t an easy task. At one point in The Poetics of Wrongness she writes, “In order to write [poetry] ethically… I need to think about who I am as maker and what I gain by my writing—understanding, money, notoriety, pleasure, power?” In her podcast Commonplace, Zucker spoke with fellow poet and Bagley Wright Lecturer Douglas Kearney (who won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism for his own amazing published lectures Optic Subwoof!) about many things—including their experiences writing lectures on craft. For Zucker, it was deeply fraught.
At one point, she tells Kearney, “Part of my drama was about authority. For sure, that comes from being a woman, being an only child, coming out of a very patriarchal religion, coming out of a heterosexual marriage, having only male children, having a male editor—wanting to prove myself and get the gold ring. At the same time I knew that my deepest most authentic work in life was about trying—you know, I can’t live outside of capitalism, but can I, instead of going after this power that I think will protect me or, I dunno, make me a man! Can I dismantle this within myself—the need for it, the addiction to it, the desire for it—and still speak?”
These inquiries are emblematic of Zucker’s approach to writing—she will point directly to the part of herself most would do much to hide from themselves and, failing that, likely the world. The rigor and expansiveness of her lectures and prose surprised me again and again. The ways in which she adheres to lectures in the format we know and generally accept—and then pushes back, breaks, flees from it. The vulnerability of the process and her thinking throughout was radically generous.
In her lectures and prose pieces (“An Anatomy of the Long Poem,” “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood”), she references poets from past and present while simultaneously interrogating her experiences as a poet and person. Throughout, Zucker interrogates what “confessional” means, writing about yourself entails, what one’s limits should be (or not). These pieces stirred up so much inside me regarding power, the lecture form, writing, teaching, feminism, the ethics of writing about the self and those in your life. Anyone who is touched by these concerns should read Zucker’s work in all its forms.
July 21, 2025
Fuck yeah with a hard F.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews