Davidson M. On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics

Middletown, CN: Wesleyan, 2011. — 344 p. — ISBN10: 0819569585; ISBN13: 978-0819569585.This new book by eminent scholar Michael Davidson gathers his essays concerning formally innovative poetry from modernists such as Mina Loy, George Oppen, and Wallace Stevens to current practitioners such as Cristina Rivera-Garza, Heriberto Yépez, Lisa Robertson, and Mark Nowak. The book considers poems that challenge traditional poetic forms and in doing so trouble normative boundaries of sexuality, subjectivity, gender, and citizenship. At the heart of each essay is a concern with the “politics of form,” the ways that poetry has been enlisted in the constitution—and critique—of community. Davidson speculates on the importance of developing cultural poetics as an antidote to the personalist and expressivist treatment of postwar poetry. A comprehensive and versatile collection, On the Outskirts of Form places modern and contemporary poetics in a cultural context to reconsider the role of cultural studies and globalization in poetry.A Public Language.
Objectivist Frames.
Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism.
"Closed in Glass": Oppen's Class Spectacles.
Approaching the New American Poetry.
Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method.
"The Repeated Insistence": Creeley's Rage.
A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov.
Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk.
Ekphrasis and The New York School.
The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity.
"Struck Against Parenthesis": Shelley and Postmodern Romanticisms.
"Skewed by Design": From Act to Speech Act in Language Writing.
Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen.
Afterword: Impossible Poetries.