Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics

Preface: How Reed Wrote Certain of His Essays

Preface How Reed Wrote Certain of His Essays Beginning Again This book gathers twelve essays written over a twelve-year span. eleven of them were published previously in a range of different venues, from ezines to refereed journals. each essay focuses on one or more twentieth- or twenty-first-century poets known for formal and linguistic experiment. together, they offer a discontinuous partial overview of several storylines: modernism’s unpredictable shifts and self-reinventions, the links between the historical and neo-avant-gardes, and collaboration between poets and artists working in other media. The account might be slightly off-center—gay men and women predominate—but the goal is less revisionism than affirmation. Here are writers worth reading. “taste them and try . . . sweet to tongue and sound to eye” (rossetti 2). A Body Does Get Around The oldest essay in this book dates back to my time as a graduate student at stanford University during the height of the dotcom boom. i had the opportunity to study with such eminent scholars as terry Castle, George dekker, albert Gelpi, robert Harrison, seth Lerer, diane Middlebrook, stephen orgel, and Jeffrey schnapp. above all, i had the chance to work with Marjorie perloff. from “introduction to Graduate studies” to my dissertation defense, she was my mentor ; she taught me to write and think as a literary critic. over the last decade, she has remained an adviser, an interlocutor, and a constant inspiration. Her imprint will be obvious throughout Phenomenal Reading. Less obvious might be the rhetorical agenda that unites these essays, which can in fact be traced back to a moment of insight that predates my arrival in x / Preface the Bay area. it happened in november 1992, just before Thanksgiving. i had just begun a two-year stint at oxford University, and i was on a mission to see everything included in the Lonely Planet guide. near the top of the list was the tate Gallery, at the time still a one-stop pilgrimage site for aspiring art snobs. (The tate Modern did not open until 2000.) Here is how i described my first visit to my parents in a letter: saturday i (big surprise) went into London (for the fifth time). i saw the tate Gallery, a big art museum with lots of British paintings from Q Liz i’s day to 1992. . . . i wanted to see francis Bacon’s stuff (20th century Brit painter), almost all of which is owned by the tate, but they had all but one painting in storage, to make way for temporary exhibits like The Nude in Art (ranging from pasty women to abstract blobs, very dull) and British Art During World War II (looked like a high school show). The best thing by far was a special installation piece by richard serra. The middle of the tate is a long series of three galleries, two elongated rectangular ones connected by an octagonal, column-bedecked one. They had emptied the whole space of paintings, and serra had put two forty-ton iron shoebox shapes in each of the rectangular galleries. The iron was roughly wrought, nice to the touch and pleasingly irregular, with glorious red/black rust patterns, and the boxes were about six foot tall, so standing on tiptoe i could just barely see over them. The blocks really made you feel the space of the galleries themselves—large, solid presences announced themselves loudly but kind of almost got drowned out by the gulfs around them. They were also the same size as the gap between the columns that led into the octagonal gallery, so the whole thing felt spatially unified, though tension filled at the same time. Cool. (personal correspondence, 26 nov. 1992) everything said here is accurate. i did marvel over serra’s Weight and Measure installation, and i was surprised that any single artwork could so decisively transform a person’s experience of a remarkably busy architectural space. i entirely leave out, however, the most important occurrence that day. you see, i wasn’t alone. i was exploring the tate with a new friend, a rhodes scholar from Minneapolis. as i scooted from gallery to gallery, she trailed behind me, suspended between bemusement and irritation. By the time we reached the serra sculptures, she had had enough. i began to praise rust patterns and sight lines. she interrupted me. “They’re big slabs of iron. They just sit there. They mean nothing to me.” i tried to explain that minimalist sculpture...