Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry argues that memorable and resonant poetry often distorts form, image, concept, and notions of truth and metaphor. Discussing how changes in electronic communication and artificial notions of landscape have impacted form and content in poetry, Monster redefines the idea of what is memorable and original through a broad range of poets including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Laura Kasischke, W. S. Merwin, Srikanth Reddy, Donald Revell, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and James Tate.
Mark Irwin received his PhD in English/comparative literature from Case Western Reserve University and his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987-2014). He has also translated two volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is Associate Professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.
Show moreMonster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry argues that memorable and resonant poetry often distorts form, image, concept, and notions of truth and metaphor. Discussing how changes in electronic communication and artificial notions of landscape have impacted form and content in poetry, Monster redefines the idea of what is memorable and original through a broad range of poets including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Forrest Gander, Peter Gizzi, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Laura Kasischke, W. S. Merwin, Srikanth Reddy, Donald Revell, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and James Tate.
Mark Irwin received his PhD in English/comparative literature from Case Western Reserve University and his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987-2014). He has also translated two volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is Associate Professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.
Show moreList of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – Distortion & Disjunction in Contemporary American Poetry – Poetry, Reality, & Place in a Placeless World of Global Communication – Toward a Wilderness of the Artificial – The Poem as Concept – Three Notions of Truth in Poetry – Raising Poetry to a Higher Power – Poetry & Memorability – Poetry & Originality: "Have you been there before?" – Origin, Presence, & Time in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin – Jorie Graham: Kite’s Body & Beyond – A Romp through Ruefleland: Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems & Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures – Orpheus, Parzival, & Bartleby: Ways of Abstraction in Poetry – Bibliography – Author Index – About the Author.
Mark Irwin received his PhD in English/comparative literature from Case Western Reserve University and his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987–2014). He has also translated two volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is Associate Professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.
“In these essays Mark Irwin moves among poems like an ecstatic bee
in pollen season. No one more zealous at placing both particulars
and compositions under the strong light of a concept, whether
distortion, transition, abstraction, or time.”—Calvin Bedient,
Author, He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and
Its Protagonist
“This important work of literary and cultural criticism probes the
essential issues of poetry today. For example, distortion in poetry
may now be necessary to its truth-function, a broken language for a
broken world. Are we so distracted by the buzz of electronic media
that lyric silence, along with nature, has receded into the past?
Is anything real or, as it often seems, a virtual creation? Quoting
Alfred Jarry, ‘I call Monster all original and inexhaustible
beauty,’ Irwin reminds us that monstrosity is inherent in the new.
Every great work of art, from Picasso’s Guernica to W.C. Williams’
plainspoken objectivism, emerges as a monster. As the author writes
in his wonderful essay, ‘The Emergency of Poetry’: ‘Poetry is born
of crisis or will seek it, often beginning in medias res —the
middle where the danger is.’ It is then a question if art can heal
or does the cultural wound lie open. My response to reading this
book was immediate. It made me want to write something.”—Paul
Hoover, Editor, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology
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