'Mind, Body, Spirit, Whatever: The New Poetics of the Metaphysical' by J. F. Quackenbush
http://www.wetasphalt.com/content/mind-body-spirit-whatever-new-poetics-metaphysical
Excerpt:
'There is a clear shift to materiality that happens at some point in American poetry somewhere during the lives of two of our most important forebearers as avant gardists, in the writing of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. Williams for his part was very much concerned with poetic object and image and actively discouraged reading other meaning into his poems beyond the words on the page. Williams was heavily committed to a material poetics, going so far as to prefigure Umberto Eco's semiotics in describing poems as "language machines." This was a position that in itself was radical at the time, given the milieu in which it took place at a time when Pound and Eliot had both become progressively more conservative and occult in their work. I would even argue that the most interesting work being done with language was rapidly becoming the realm of prose rather than poetry as, following Joyce, the great American modern novelists began an aggressive period of stylistic innovation that was very much in the vein of the sort of formal novelty that Williams championed. What was present in modernist prose, the emphasis on the individual will, the dissatisfaction of materiality present in everything from The Great Gatsby—the greatest baseball novel ever written&mdashto The Sound and the Fury, was almost wholly absent from much of modernist poetry. A single example here suffices to make my point, I think, in the very different conception of the emptiness of existence exhibited in Eliot's "The Hollow Men" which on my reading is not so much a dissatisfaction with the material but in fact with everything else around it.
Poetry echoed this movement in content, but with a pseudo-mannerism which, with its focus on the material, physical aspects of poetry that ultimately I think has served to undercut the modernist program and which put the postmoderns, particularly as represented by The New American Poetry, on the wrong foot textually from the get go. Nowhere I think is this more definitively established in the widely influential theories of projective verse as defined by Charles Olson. Olson in no uncertain terms tied the poetic line to the physical, that is material, act of breathing, and makes the physical object by which this line is composed specifically the auditory phenomenon as realized by the faculty of hearing. Here in projectivism is nothing but poem as materielle, mechanical, machine like and locked to a physical existence that points nowhere else. Olson's influence is sweeping, from the yogic-hebraic breath that measures the lines in Ginsberg's "Howl" to the various great poets who were directly tutored by Olson—the most important to my mind being John Cage, Robert Creeley, and Larry Eigner, all notoriously difficult—and through whom Olson has achieved a lasting impact in all of the avant garde poetries of the last fifty years or so.'
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