Description
Book SynopsisOffers a fresh way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. The author argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects.
Trade Review"A blazingly astute assessment of postmodern poetics, Oren Izenberg's Being Numerous examines the role contemporary poetry plays in representing being and what constitutes value of being."--Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail "[Izenberg] makes an intriguing case for focusing on the ontological dimension of poetic practice in general; readers might move beyond seeing the poem as a self-contained artifact and instead see it as a function of the poet's desire to define the person."--Choice "Izenberg's conclusive meditation on known and unknown readers, then, seems to open and invite the readings that this book will generate, as it powerfully, scrupulously recalls us to the responsibilities inherent in any literary response."--Siobhan Phillips, Contemporary Literature
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION: Poems, Poetry, Personhood 1 CHAPTER ONE: White Thin Bone: Yeatsian Personhood 40 CHAPTER TWO: Oppen's Silence, Crusoe's Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds 78 CHAPTER THREE: The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O'Hara 107 CHAPTER FOUR: Language Poetry and Collective Life 138 CHAPTER FIVE: We Are Reading 164 Notes 189 Index 225
