An excellent contribution to scholarship on poetry and natural sciences, persuasively linking recent innovative poetics to changing ideas of living systems. Splendid readings of the poetry of Vitiello, Inman, Crawford, and Dorn, as well as an overview of new directions in biopoetry and a glance backward at Moore as a modernist precursor reshaping models of life via language. I highly recommended this book for anyone interested in nonhuman poetry, ecopoetry, or Romanticism’s evolving legacy.
Professor Susan Vanderborg, University of South Carolina, USA
Arguing that the 19th century concept of “living form” (the idea that, like an organism, a poem develops itself from within, according to an internal logic) is not, as some critics have argued, anathema to avant-garde writing, this book contends that the concept survived and flourished in the work of a number of contemporary experimental poets.
Indebted to 19th century science, the notion of a “living form” endured throughout the 20th century and the poetic vanguard’s word games and collages mirrored the disjunctive frameworks that redefined how scientists made sense of life in the age of networks and non-linear systems.
Featuring readings of texts from poets including Ed Dorn, A.M.J. Crawford, P.Inman, Chris Vitiello, and Christian Bök, this book shows how a number of vanguardist poets explores the commonalities they detected between nature’s processes of creation and their own methods of composition. In doing so, it highlights devices like punning, paragrammatic play, metamorphic figuration and memetic repetition, mechanisms these poets find at work in the cybernetic, genetic and digital systems they investigate in their poems.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Laughing for Survival: Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Language in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger
Chapter 2: The Poetics of Living Death: Composting and Contamination in A.M.J. Crawford’s Morpheu
Chapter 3: Genetic Games: Junk DNA, Platin and P.Inman’s Paragrams
Chapter 4: The Life of the Void: Life and the Negation of Sense in Chris Vitiello’s Nouns Swarm a Verb
Chapter 5: Yedda Morrison’s Darkness
Conclusion: Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Experiment and the Dark Side of DNA
Bibliography
Examining the intersection of poetry with philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political and economic theory, and protest and liberation movements, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics focuses on books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. The series gives consideration to how poetry and poetics have moved themselves to the forefront of many of the most fraught and complex theoretical discussions of the post-war era.
Editorial Board:
Hélène Aji - University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre, France
Vincent Broqua - University of Paris 8 - Vincennes/Saint Denis, France
Olivier Brossard - University of Paris Est Marne La Vallée, France
Daniel Kane - University of Sussex, UK
Kyoo Lee - City University of New York, USA
Peter Middleton - University of Southampton, UK
Cristanne Miller - SUNY Buffalo, USA
Miriam Nichols - University of the Fraser Valley, USA
Aldon Nielsen - Pennsylvania State University, USA
Stephen Ross – Editor Wave Composition
Richard Sieburth - New York University, USA
Daniel Tiffany - University of Southern California, USA
Steven G. Yao - Hamilton College, USA