Description
Book SynopsisThe first book to treat the emergence of Flarf, Conceptual Poetry, and other genres of contemporary avant-garde poetry in a serious way.
Trade Review[Brian Reed] is a useful, intelligent,and well-read omnivore, able to offer not only incisive and theoretically personable insights but also witty and dynamic writing. Reed is one of the bestmidcareer critics writing about contemporary poetry in a poetics context; hemakes a person extremely eager to follow his work, now and in the future. Thisbook seems to be one cut of a developing careerlong argument, one calf of ahearty glacier.
-- Rachel Blau DuPlessis * Modern Language Quarterly *
In this radical, engaging critical study, Reed extends the work he did in Phenomenal Reading (2012) by discussing poets widely recognized as formal and linguistic innovators. Innovation and the interface of art and technology, along with sociology and politics, are his subjects.... He writes of 'better appreciat[ing] the sophistication, idiosyncrasy, and value of these oddball contemporary American efforts to find viable poetic strategies for dissent, critique, and utopian dreaming.' Despite what some readers regard as the willy-nilly hodge-podge that is today's poetry, this is a book not of dreaming but of focused attention on what is new.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsPreface: What Now?1. In Praise of Obsolescence2. New Consensus Poetics and the Avant-Garde3. Mechanical Form and Avant-Garde Aesthetics4. Flarf, Folly, and George W. Bush5. Andrea Brady's Peculiar Dissidence6. Danny Snelson’s Disco Operating SystemAcknowledgments
Notes
Index
