Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary PoetryHolding Patterns provides a sympathetic criticism of poems, one that avoids the appliance of criticism and that self-consciously persists in close readings of texts as the directing force of its argument. Presently, contemporary literary criticism and contemporary poetry in America seem at cross-purposes. Indeed, current literary critics seldom address the poems of their contemporaries. While structuralists and other schools of critics seek terms, generalizations, and whole systems to account for and to understand poems, poets themselves repeatedly assert that each poem has its own poetic and that no system applies to their writing. This book reads poems by contemporary poets, such as Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, Denis Johnson, and Amy Clampitt, not to illuminate a theory but to shed light on the poem. |
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Contents
The Static Pulse | 3 |
Recounting Linda Greggs Ghosts | 7 |
Jorie Graham in Stitches | 17 |
Pictura Poesis Galvin and Lowell | 37 |
James Wright Louise Gliick The Colon | 47 |
Water Everywhere Merwin Stafford Dugan Merrill | 61 |
Forche Fenton and Fighting | 77 |
Taking or Leaving It Amy Clampitt | 91 |
Holes in the Web Denis Johnson | 117 |
The Long Line in Jorie Graham and Charles Wright | 139 |
CONCLUSION | 155 |
NOTES | 159 |
169 | |
175 | |
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aesthetic Amy Clampitt Arnolfini artist Atheneum Beach Glass beautiful book's called Carolyn Forché Charles Wright Collected Poems colon contemporary poetry Copyright course criticism dark dead death Denis Johnson Dugan eyes feel finally Galvin garden gesture Ghosts Giroux going happened imagination Interview Iowa James Wright Jennifer Bartlett Jorie Graham Knopf language light Linda Gregg literary lives long line look Louise Glück lyric Marianne Moore Mark Strand Mary Kinzie means memory metaphor middle moving narrative never ocean painting perhaps Perloff poem's poetic poets political prose prosody pulsation random reader Reprinted by permission rhymes Richard Hugo river Robert Lowell seems Self-Portrait sentence speaker Stafford stanza stitch story Straus syntax talking tell things thought trying turn W. S. Merwin Wallace Stevens waves whale William wonder words writing York Zone Journals