Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice

by Devin Johnston

Precipitations traces the influence of the occult on contemporary American poetry and positions it within the larger tradition of Romanticism. Devin Johnston focuses on the works of H.D., Robert Duncan and James Merrill, as well as Susan Howe and Nathaniel Mackey, to show how the occult, in its resistance to dialectical thinking, proved attractive to these poets and offered a means by which traditional notions of authorship could be challenged. Johnston argues that for these writers, "the poem is not produced by the individual mind, but precipitates out of a complex network of shared circumstances."

Yeats and Blake have central roles in this study, but whereas Yeats has long been associated with occultism as a literary phenomenon, Johnston argues that Blake's Romantic organicism has offered a more compelling model for American poets in the latter half of the twentieth century. With close attention to the ways in which recent American poetry has been written and read, Precipitations examines the composition of particular poems within the context of broad debates concerning form, indeterminacy and authorship.

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 24, 2002

About the author

Born in Canton, New York, Devin Johnston grew up in Winston-Salem and received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Far-Fetched (2015), Sources (2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Aversions (2004), and Telepathy (2001). His prose writing includes the critical study Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (2002) and Creaturely and Other Essays (2009). A former poetry editor for the Chicago Review from 1995-2000, Johnston co-founded and co-edits Flood Editions with Michael O’Leary.

He lives in St. Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University.