Fables of Representation

Contents

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The New Millenium: Fifty Statements on Literature and Culture

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pp. 1-3

(Agree or Disagree) ...

Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry

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pp. 4-25

Where there is belief, there is millennial fervor. But belief is in retreat. Among postmodern unbelievers, the approaching millennium has been greeted with a yawn. There has been no resurgence of fin de si�cle temperament beyond Camille Paglia and no outcry about cultural exhaustion despite Jerry Springer. ...

Pair of Figures for Eshu: Doubling of Consciousness in the Work of Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mackey

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pp. 26-55

In Du Bois’s view, Emancipation brought to the American Negro a “dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect” (41). But with the birth of self-consciousness, the former slave sees his own soul “darkly as through a veil,” with only “some faint revelation of his power, his mission” (41). Du Bois’s “double consciousness” inevitably brings to mind ...

Stark Strangled Banjos: Linguistic Doubleness in the Work of David Hammons, Harryette Mullen, and Al Hibbler

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pp. 56-72

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., identifies Eshu as the most powerful of the Yoruban gods because of his powers of interpretation. A “divine linguist,” Eshu is represented in Yoruba sculptures as holding a calabash in his hands: ...

The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam

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pp. 73-75

True or False/Multiple Choice (two points each): ...

Fables of Representation: Poetry of the New York School

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pp. 76-127

Since discovering Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire in a Chicago classroom in 1971, I have been drawn to the poets of the New York School. From its Joe Brainard cover design to the sonnet “Nothing in That Drawer,” which consists entirely of the title line, the book promised something quite different from the ...

Upper Limit Music (Counted Verse)

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pp. 128-135

Counted verse operates by the number of words rather than the number of syllables and stresses to the line. It is not primarily syllabic and accentual, though it obviously has those features. As Dana Gioia suggested in conversation, it reminds us that there are two kinds of lines, the visual and the aural. Often the appearance ...

The New Modernism

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pp. 136-144

The editors of Green Mountains Review have assigned the difficult task of prophecy, to determine “both the state of poetry now and what current trends predict for the writing of the future.” I suggested in my introduction to the anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994) that postmodernism, as an ...

A Score for Undetermined Moments

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pp. 145-162

The following interview was conducted by Chad Faries and Jayson Iwen in a small deli in Milwaukee’s historic Third Ward district in November 14, 1999, the morning after Paul Hoover’s visit to the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee where he had done a reading and a Q&A session. It moves sequentially from ...

The Poet in His Skin: Remembering Paul Carroll

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pp. 163-171

I first spoke with Paul Carroll in 1971 when as director he called to tell me of my acceptance to the Program for Writers at University of Illinois in Chicago. The enthusiasm in his voice surprised me. I had applied on the basis of the ten poems I’d written up to that time and had no confidence in what I was doing. ...

Last Chicago Days: In Memory of Ted Berrigan

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pp. 172-174

In the late seventies, when Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley announced they were returning to New York City at the end of Ted’s fall semester at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, all the younger poets were stunned. He had taught there for about five years, but some sort of dispute had arisen ...

Journals of Addiction

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pp. 175-179

In 1958, the graduate student editors of the Chicago Review, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal, published excerpts from an unpublished—and seemingly unpublishable—novel The Naked Lunch by an unknown author named William S. Burroughs. The excerpt had been sent to the editors by Burroughs’s friend and ...