In this Book
- The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks
- Book
- 2016
- Published by: University of Michigan Press
- Series: Poets on Poetry
summary
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.
In The Skin of Meaning, Aaron Shurin has collected thirty years’ worth of his provocative essays. Fueled by gender and queer studies and combined with radical traditions in poetry, Shurin’s essays combine a highly personal and lyrical vision with a trenchant social analysis of poetry’s possibilities. Whether he’s examining innovations in poetic form, analyzing the gestures of drag queens, or dissecting the language of AIDS, Shurin’s writing is evocative, his investigations rigorous, and his point of view unabashed.
Shurin’s poetic practice braids together many strands in contemporary, innovative writing, from the San Francisco Renaissance to Language Poetry and New Narrative Writing. His mentorships with Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov; his studies at New College of California, where he was the first graduate of the epochal Poetics Program; and his years of teaching writing provide a rich background for these essays. San Francisco provides the color and context for formulations of “prosody now,” propositions of textual collage, and theories of radical narrativity, while the heart of the book searches through the dire years of the AIDS epidemic to uncover poetic meaning, and “make the heroes heroes.”
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-iv
- Acknowledgments
- pp. v-vii
- I.
- Like a Book
- pp. 3-4
- Narrativity
- pp. 5-13
- The Irruptive Text
- pp. 25-31
- Involuntary Lyrics: A Foot Note
- pp. 35-36
- Prosody Now
- pp. 37-49
- Note to a Student
- pp. 50-52
- II.
- From Unbound: A Book of AIDS
- Notes from Under
- pp. 77-83
- Further Under
- pp. 84-88
- Orphée: The Kiss of Death
- pp. 89-92
- My Memorial
- pp. 95-98
- Some Haunting
- pp. 99-101
- Inscribing AIDS: A Reflexive Poetics
- pp. 102-105
- Shifting Paradise
- pp. 106-108
- Generation
- pp. 113-116
- III.
- After Genet: Jean Genet 1910–1986
- pp. 119-123
- Synching in Tongues
- pp. 126-127
- The Gaze of Julie
- pp. 130-132
- Among way: On Leslie Scalapino’s way
- pp. 149-150
- The People’s P***k: A Dialectical Tale
- pp. 151-162
- IV.
Additional Information
ISBN
9780472121564
Related ISBN(s)
9780472052967, 9780472072965
MARC Record
OCLC
940500951
Pages
192
Launched on MUSE
2016-02-27
Language
English
Open Access
No