The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments During the years over which these essays were written I was generously supported by Lake Forest College, by the Illinois Arts Council, and by the Swedish Academy, and I am grateful. I am grateful, too, to the many editors, conference panel chairs, and publishers who invited and welcomed the essays in this book: Boris Jardine of Cambridge University, Louis Armand of Charles University in Prague, Emily Merriman of San Francisco State, Adrian Grafe of the Sorbonne, Mary Biddinger of the University of Akron, Kelly Comfort of Georgia Tech, David Caplan of Ohio Wesleyan, John Gallaher of Northwest Missouri State, Miranda Hickman of McGill, Kevin Prufer of the University of Houston, Alan Golding of the University of Louisville, Don Bogen of the University of Cincinnati, John Matthias of Notre Dame, Jim Johnson of the University of Pittsburgh, John McIntyre of the University of Prince Edward Island, Joe Francis Doerr of St. Edward’s University, Chris Hamilton-Emery of Salt Publishing, Aditi Machado of Washington University in St. Louis, Katy Evans-Bush of Horizon Review, and Don Share and Christian Wiman of Poetry magazine. Without them, most of what is collected here would not have come into being. I have been fortunate in my editors, and I have also been fortunate in those with whom I converse about poetry: Mark Scroggins of Florida Atlantic University, Norman Finkelstein of Xavier University, Joseph Donahue of Duke, Michael Anania of the University of Illinois—Chicago, Stefan Holander of Finnmark University College, D. L. LeMahieu of Lake Forest College, and many others, including those who have offered comments on my blog. John Wilkinson of the University of Chicago, Keston Sutherland of the University of Sussex and Andrea Brady of Queen Mary—University of London clashed with me over one of these essays, and I wish to thank them for their passion and their arguments. I owe particular thanks to David Park of Lake Forest College for introducing me to works in communications theory that have opened perspectives on literature for me that would otherwise have remained hidden. I owe a great deal to Caitlin Meeter and Traci Villa, without whose support this project would have been far more stressful. Above all I must thank my wife Valerie and also our daughter, Lila—this book is for her. A number of these essays have been published in books and journals, sometimes in slightly different form. “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” appeared in The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, ed. Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher. Akron: University of Akron Press, 2011. “Poetry and Politics, or: Why are the Poets on the Left?” appeared in Poetry (November 2008). “The Aesthetic Anxiety: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics” appeared in Art and Life in Aestheticism, ed. Kelly Comfort. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. “Public Faces in Private Places: Notes on Cambridge Poetry” appeared in Cambridge Literary Review (September 2009). “The State of the Art” appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 2012). “Seeing the New Criticism Again” appeared in different form as a presentation at the Modernist Studies Association Conference, October 2006. “The Death of the Critic” appeared in the book Avant-Post, ed. Louis Armand. Prague: Charles University Press, 2006. “Marginality and Manifesto” appeared in Poetry (June 2009). “A Portrait of Reginald Shepherd as Philoctetes” appeared in Pleiades (Spring 2008). “True Wit, False Wit: Harryette Mullen in the Eighteenth Century” appeared in different form as a presentation at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (February 2011). “Emancipation of the Dissonance: The Poetry of C. S. Giscombe” appeared in Cincinnati Review (Summer 2010). “In the Haze of Pondered Vision: Yvor Winters as Poet” appeared in Notre Dame Review (Summer 1999). “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry” appeared in Notre Dame Review (Fall 2006). “Power and the Poetics of Play” appeared in The Salt Companion to John Matthias, ed. Joe Francis Doerr. Cambridge: Salt, 2011. “The Decadent of Moyvane” appeared in Keltoi: A Journal of Celtic Studies (Summer 2006). “Laforgue/Bolaño: The Poet as Bohemian” appeared, in different form, in Notre Dame Review (Summer/Fall 2012). “Oppen/Rimbaud: The Poet as Quitter” appeared, in much shorter form, in Mimesis (Winter 2009). “Nothing in this Life” appeared in Horizon Review (Winter 2011). Several essays began life on Samizdat Blog, generally in less developed form. These include: “Negative Legislators: Exhibiting the Post-Avant,” “When Poets Dream of Power,” “Can...