The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly

Contents

Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Linearity, Anomaly, and Anachronism: Toward an Archaeology of the New 1 1 Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: The Fate of the Dada Sound Poem 11 2 Corrosive Poetics: The Relief Composition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os 25 3 Interpretation and the Limit Text: An Approach to Jackson Mac Low’s Words nd Ends from Ez 41 4 TranscoherenceandDeletion:TheMesosticWritingsof JohnCage 51 5 A Chapter of Accidents: Disfiguration and the Marbled Page in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 63 6 From Muse to Mousepad: Informatics and the Avant-Garde 75 7 Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap 95 8 “To Lose One’s Way” (For Snails and Nomads): The Radical Labyrinths of Constant and Arakawa and Gins 115 viii Contents 9 Difficult Harmony: The Picturesque Detail in Gilpin, Price, and Clark Coolidge’s Space 149 10 The ’Pataphysics of Auschwitz 167 11 The Instrumental Nightingale: Some Counter-Musical Inflections in Poetry from Gray to Celan 185 Notes 211 Works Cited 243 Index 257 ...