Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s

by Mark Wallace (Editor), Steven Marks, Harryette Mullen (Contributor)

The finest essays from the newest generation of critics and poet-critics are gathered together in this volume documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetries. This collection demonstrates the breadth and openness of the field of avant-garde poetry by introducing a wide range of work in poetics, theory, and criticism from emerging writers. Examining the directions innovative poetry has taken since the emergence and success of the Language movement, the essays discuss new forms and the reorientation of older forms of poetry in order to embody present and ongoing involvements. The essays center around four the relation between poetics and contemporary cultural issues; new directions for avant-garde practices; in-depth explorations of current poets and their predecessors; and innovative approaches to the essay form or individual poetics. Diverging from the traditional, linear argumentative style of academic criticism, many of the essays in this collection instead find critical forms more subtly related to poetry. Viewed as a whole, the essays return to a number of shared issues, namely poetic form and the production of present-day poetry. While focusing on North American poetry, the collection does reference the larger world of contemporary poetics, including potential biases and omissions based on race and ethnicity. This is cutting-edge criticism at its finest, essential reading for students and scholars of avant-garde poetry, of interest to anyone interested in contemporary American literature and poetry.

Genres: Poetry

408 pages, Paperback

First published November 27, 2001

About the author

Mark Wallace was born in 1962 in Princeton, New Jersey and grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. Between the ages of 8 and 17, with his father and brother he drove across the United States to Southern California on camping trips every summer, once going by way of Mexico City and once by way of Lake Banff, and he has spent time in all 48 of US mainland states.

The numerous bad jobs he has worked since the age of 15 are distinguished not by working class physical labor but by the low paid tedium of the contemporary world’s bureaucratic nightmare.

He received his Ph.D. from the State University at Buffalo with his dissertation The Gothic Universe in the Fiction of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. He worked at Buffalo as a student assistant to Charles Bernstein on "The Wednesdays At Four Plus" reading series.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

So what's changed since this book came out? Flarf and conceptual poetry have emerged, the apparent LANGUAGE confrontation continues to perplex the poetry scene despite the fact that their claims about poetry (and here I'm quite sympathetic, though not entirely convinced by) are some 40-50 years dated since their inception. Ok movie btw. But what I'm most interested in is the fact that avant-garde has come to be synonymous with poetries who consciously seek to engage with our social relations, which is to say that to be avant-garde in our poetic field is to engage with Marx directly or indirectly at a variety of levels. Those who turn away from this task are then defined as part of the cooked school(?), or maybe they could easily get published by Fence.

Spahr gets the most interesting thing happening in a poetics of late-modernity, the end of our post-modern moment, a poetics of conclusiveness as opposed to fracture, a poetics that seeks to engage with the larger world compiling it together so that there might be some force behind the solidarity of a greater front. This is a poetics that contradicts some of the ideology of fracture we've engaged with in the past, and note that these things are not mutually exclusive, that the need to coalesce means that there was something broken in the past, and indeed the presence of "schools" altogether is one possible starting point. But more importantly, how can poetry further enable an axis of possibility while overcoming the chasms we've long entrenched ourselves within?

[Wendy Trevino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reasons to buy this collection: Steve Evans's Intro to Writing from the New Coast, Lisa Robertson's "How Pastoral: A Manifesto," Kristin Prevallet's "Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source," Jeff Derksen's "Unrecognizable Texts: From Multicultural to Antisystemic Writing," Sianne Ngai's "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust," Bill Luoma's "Cowgirls Like the Salt Lick: Gender & Some Poem Analysis," Tan Lin's "ambient stylistics," and Juliana Spahr's "spiderwasp or literary criticism"

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great book for people interested in approaching avant-garde poetics with concerns about political or ethnic literatures. The aesthetic and political are seen in the same frame.