How to Live/What to Do: H.D.'S Cultural Poetics

by Adalaide Morris

The writing of H.D. is so linguistically rich and multilayered in structure that it has had almost as many interpretations as it has interpreters, from Freudians to feminists, from classicists to post-modernists. In How to Live / What to Do , however, Adalaide Morris removes the work of this iconic poet, dramatist, and novelist from compartments into which it has historically been placed. As she examines the "ongoingness" of H.D.'s writing, Morris makes an eloquent and compelling case for a consideration of poems -- all poems -- as forms of cultural mediation, instructive historical documents that engage the reader in wide-ranging contemporary debates and use their acoustical richness to generate tangible cultural effects. Ever since the publication of her first H.D. essay in 1985 (included here in an expanded version), Morris has favored new approaches that both challenge and overpass dominant critical constructs. She shows H.D. to be a playful linguistic innovator, a woman whose writings bear on debates in science, technology, and cinema as well as on poetry. Foremost, however, H.D. was a profound reshaper of the boundaries and possibilities of poetry, a generative form that, as this book shows, can indeed serve the cultural work of survival and resistance against the violence of modern culture.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2003