In this Book

The University of Akron Press
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summary
What are we really wishing for when we want poetry to have the prominence it had in the past? Why do American poets overwhelmingly identify with the political left? How do poems communicate? Is there an essential link between formal experimentation and political radicalism? What happens when poetic outsiders become academic insiders? Just what makes a poem a poem? If a poet gives up on her art, what reasons could she find for coming back to poetry? These are the large questions animating the essays of The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time, a book that sets out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but also the poet's relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism. In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda and C.S. Giscombe. Behind it all is a sense of poetry not just as an academic area of study, but also as a lived experience and a way of understanding. Few books of poetry criticism show such range - yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call 'poetry,' and what is its consequence in the world?

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
  2. p. 1
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  1. Title Page, Copyright
  2. pp. 2-7
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  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. 8-11
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. xii-xiii
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  1. Instead of an Introduction
  2. pp. 1-6
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  1. Situations of Poetry
  1. The Discursive Situation of Poetry
  2. pp. 9-31
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  1. Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?
  2. pp. 32-39
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  1. The Aesthetic Anxiety
  2. pp. 40-63
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  1. Public Faces in Private Places
  2. pp. 64-79
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  1. Negative Legislators
  2. pp. 80-87
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  1. When Poets Dream of Power
  2. pp. 88-96
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  1. Can Poems Communicate?
  2. pp. 97-103
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  1. The Poet in the University
  2. pp. 104-114
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  1. The State of the Art
  2. pp. 115-126
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  1. To Criticize the Poetry Critic
  1. Seeing the New Criticism Again
  2. pp. 129-137
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  1. Poetry / Not Poetry
  2. pp. 138-143
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  1. The Death of the Critic
  2. pp. 144-155
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  1. Marginality and Manifesto
  2. pp. 156-164
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  1. Poets and Poetry
  1. A Portrait of Reginald Shepherdas Philoctetes
  2. pp. 167-179
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  1. True Wit, False Wit
  2. pp. 180-187
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  1. Emancipation of the Dissonance
  2. pp. 188-202
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  1. In the Haze of Pondered Vision
  2. pp. 203-207
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  1. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry
  2. pp. 208-218
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  1. Power and the Poetics of Play
  2. pp. 219-235
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  1. Neruda’s Earth, Heidegger’s Earth
  2. pp. 236-243
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  1. The Decadent of Moyvane
  2. pp. 244-249
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  1. Modernist Current
  2. pp. 250-266
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  1. Laforgue / Bolaño
  2. pp. 267-273
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  1. Oppen / Rimbaud
  2. pp. 274-284
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  1. Remembering Robert Kroetsch
  2. pp. 285-292
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  1. Myself I Sing
  1. Nothing in this Life
  2. pp. 295-305
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  1. My Laureates
  2. pp. 306-323
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