I’m very pleased that an essay of mine is included in a great new collection of essays called Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry, edited by Libbie Rifkin and Anne Dewey (with a wonderful cover painting by Susan Bee).  I’m particularly excited about the book because it feels like something of a companion to my own Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, as it too focuses on friendship, poetry, and “the social site of the contemporary avant-garde.”   The collection takes up the vexed role of gender and women’s writing within avant-garde poetic communities, especially as it gets played out within actual poems.  As a whole, the book argues “that friendship is a promising site from which to trace the changing gender politics of post-1945 avant-garde and antiestablishment poetry,” as the editors put it in their introduction. “By studying how the intimate relationships that form the bedrock of community shape the poem as social site, these essays reveal tensions marginal and internal to the group as significant contexts of creativity and sources of change in poetic communities.”

The book features a really interesting array of essays by some excellent scholars and poet-critics, including Linda Russo on Philip Whalen and Joanne Kyger, Daniel Kane on Patti Smith and the Poetry Project, Lytle Shaw on the poetry community in Bolinas, Peter Middleton and Barrett Watten with essays on Language poetry, Maria Damon on Flarf, Ross Hair on Lorine Niedecker and Jonathan Williams, Ann Vickery on Jennifer Moxley, and Duriel Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ronaldo Wilson on the Cave Canem / Black Took Collective poetic community.  I’m honored to have my own work in such company.

My essay examines the little-discussed and rather rare phenomenon of cross-gender collaboration.  It focuses on a fascinating poem, “Engines,” that was co-written by Rae Armantrout and Ron Silliman in 1982.  I argue that the poem self-consciously explores a host of interesting questions about gender, the nature of collaboration, and the problematic yet generative relationship between women poets and Language poetry, both as a movement and as a community.

Please check out the book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Among-Friends-Engendering-Contemp-American/dp/1609381505

and here:

http://www.uiowapress.org/books/2013-spring/among-friends.htm

Here are some blurbs for the book, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Brian Reed:

“Among Friends is a fresh, suggestive and lively anthology whose focus on sociality, gender, affiliation, and friendship enriches current literary study. Personable and original, this anthology is full of scintillating information about contemporary people and poems, and it analyzes, theorizes about, and even performs the meanings and excitements of friendship in the literary field.”—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, professor emerita at Temple University, author, Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry

“The essays collectively reaffirm an experimental/avant-garde poetic tradition and deftly demonstrate that gender, far from representing an ‘add on’ or ‘supplement’ to the study of postwar American poetics, is a means of speaking to the very core of a poet’s artistry and self-conception.”—Brian M. Reed, University of Washington, Seattle, author of Phenomenal Reading: Essays in Modern and Contemporary Poetics

 

The idea that Ashbery’s reference to “accents” in the poem’s last lines may have something to do with the nasal twang Ashbery felt he shared with O’Hara is tantalizing.  However, I think it’s unlikely that “Some Trees” is a love poem about O’Hara — not least because their relationship was, by all accounts, not a romantic one, but rather a close platonic friendship from beginning to end.  But who knows?  They were young and reckless and still in college at the time!  As I argue in the book, Ashbery spent a lot of time writing in subtle and oblique ways about his relationship with O’Hara, so I for one support this line of argument!

I’m very pleased to have an essay of mine included in a great-looking new collection, The Routledge Companion to Experimental Writing, edited by Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale (Routledge 2012).

It’s a big book, filled with great stuff, including chapters by Charles Bernstein, R.M. Berry, Brian McHale, N. Katherine Hayles, Tyrus Miller, Ben Lee, Amy Elias.  My piece is “Found Poetry, ‘Uncreative Writing,’ and the Art of Appropriation,” and it discusses the history of appropriation, sampling, borrowing, and other such practices in literature and the arts, before turning to contemporary developments like the Conceptual poetry of Kenneth Goldsmith and the movement known as Flarf.