A survey of major poets and movements of American postmodern poetry includes more than four hundred poems by 103 poets

"This study finds that in scanning poetry, the commitment to the "foot" as a unit of measure satisfies a desire for a poem to display a "system." But that system is achieved only at the cost of distorting or obscuring the true stress configuration of verse lines. The foot also comes into play in setting up the notion of an ideal line, supposedly heard by the "mind's ear," and said to be in "tension" or "counterpoint" with the actual line. Rethinking Meter discards this approach as removing us from our authentic experience of a poem's movement." "Before presenting its own view of meter, the book takes up the issues of how the words of a poem are to be enunciated, the place of pauses, and the notion of the line as the essential formal feature marking off poetry from prose. Focusing on iambic pentameter, Rethinking Meter proceeds to offer a view of metrical patterns that discards the foot entirely."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

This anthology includes many of the major poets to have emerged and gained pre-eminence since World War II, and whose writing reflects not only the significant changes in this nation's postwar history, and the coming to grips with a nuclear age, but also an entirely new way of looking at and structuring reality. United by their "postmodernist" concerns with spontaneity, "instantism," formal and syntactic flexibility, and the revelation of both the creator and the process through the writing itself, these 38 poets represent very diverse strains of an essential American individualism. Included are many of the poets whose work first gained widespread national attention with the 1960 publication of The New American Poetry: Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and others. Among the poets included here for the first time are Anne Waldman, Diane di Prima, Ed Sanders, Jerome Rothenberg, and James Koller. In addition to a new preface by Allen and Butterick, the book provides autobiographical notes of all the poets and listings of their major works.

This book explores the political significance of formal experimentation in American poetry written during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It focuses on the use of procedural forms, which involve the invention of rules or methods designed to structure the production of a poem's content.

Forces in Modern and Postmodern Poetry examines the works of classic authors in the modern and postmodern literary tradition, including Stéphane Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and John Ashbery, all from a comparative perspective. The concepts, modern and postmodern, are not used to provide definitive answers but to raise questions concerning the status of representation, issues of the self, and the use of imagery and musical invention. The wide range of the study is matched by the richly detailed analysis of specific poetic texts from an author noted for the scope and acuity of his attention to modern poetry in all its varied forms.