Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and CarsonMuch of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ... |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 9 |
Defensive | 32 |
Defensive Nonsense in Elizabeth | 56 |
Copyright | |
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Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson Lee Upton Limited preview - 2005 |
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aesthetic animates Anne Carson argues Autobiography of Red Beauty Bishop's poems body Boland boundaries Cambridge Charles Olson child Cid Corman contemporary context creates creature critics culture defense of poetry defensive measures desire distance Ecco Edited Edward Lear Elizabeth Bishop enacts Eros the Bittersweet erotic error essay experience focus Gender genre Glück's poems Glück's speaker human Ibid illusion imagination Jenny Penberthy John D'Agata Knopf language Lear Lear's letter linguistic Lorine Niedecker Louis Zukofsky Louise Glück lover lyric Man-Moth Marianne Moore Marjorie Perloff material meaning ment mind Moore's mouse narrative natural Niedecker's poems nonsense object Objectivism Objectivist perspective Peter Quartermain physical poem's poetic points Proofs & Theories prose Quartermain Rachel Blau Rachel Blau DuPlessis readers reflects resistance Robert Lowell scene scholarship seemingly seems sense sensory space spatial stanza suggests surface surrealism Susan tion tone turn ultimately visual voice Woman & Poet words writes York Zukofsky