ISBN 0810115611
Citation:
Perloff, Marjorie. Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions. University of Alabama Press, 2004.
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1
1. Postmodernism / Fin de Siecle: Defining “Difference” in Late Twentieth-Century Poetics   3
2. Tolerance and Taboo: Modernist Primitivisms and Postmodernist Pieties   34 [PDF]
3. “Barbed-Wire Entanglements”: The “New American Poetry,” 1930-32Â Â Â 51
4. “A Step Away from Them”: Poetry 1956Â Â Â 83
5. Lucent and Inescapable Rhythms: Metrical “Choice” and Historical Formation   116
6. After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries   141 [PDF]
7. What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Poetry: Some Aporias of Literary Journalism   168
8. English as a “Second” Language: Mina Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”   193
9. Poetry in Time of War: The Duncan-Levertov Controversy   208
10. How Russian Is It: Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota   222
11. What Really Happened: Roland Barthes’s Winter Garden/Christian Boltanski’s Archives of the Dead   243
12. “Inner Tension / In Attention”: Steve McCaffery’s Book Art   264
13. The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage’s “What You Say …”   290
14. The Morphology of the Amorphous: Bill Viola’s Videoscapes   309
Notes 323
Illustration Sources 357
Poetry Sources 363
Index 365
Reviews:
- Perloff in the Nineties by David Zauhar, EBR 9, Spring 1999.
- “Breakthrough Books,” by Al Filreis, Lingua Franca (2000).
- Poetry On and Off the Page, Michael Davidson, Boston Review, April/May 1999.
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In Gerard Hopkins poems, “No worst, there is noneâ€, and “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day†both refer to the darkness in life. The weird satnyx within many of Hopkins poems represents his confusion or lack of understanding how his life has become so dark and unhappy. Within his poem “No worst, there is noneâ€, his use of words such as Frightful, steep, deep, creep, whirlwind, death, dies and sleep all show negative aspects of life. For his choice of words can represent his sadness. “Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/ Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.â€(13-14) life must end, but every day, every second, each time we go to sleep at night, another day dies.In “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not dayâ€, Hopkins is again describing the darkness in lines two to four, “What hours, O what black hours we have spend/ This night! what sights you, hear, saw; ways you went!/And more must, in yet longer light’s delayâ€. Black hours that quickly fade, along with lights delay, he is talking about the endless darkness of night that he spends in confusion. It seems that no matter how much he tries to avoid the prolonging of darkness but can never escape it. For is it a constant feeling of pain or despair being felt? Even when he is awake, he cannot feel the joy of day, for he is to far into the darkness and depression to see light. What is it about darkness that Hopkins is so fascinated with? Why does he write in such a melancholy tone? What is the issue that keeps him in the everlasting darkness?-jaclyn solomon