Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry - Hardcover

McGuiness, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 079144953X ISBN 13: 9780791449530

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2001

Synopsis

Argues that if poems are to matter in American culture, they must be read rather than theorized over.

Holding Patterns provides a sympathetic criticism of poems, one that avoids the appliance of criticism and that self-consciously persists in close readings of texts as the directing force of its argument. Presently, contemporary literary criticism and contemporary poetry in America seem at cross-purposes. Indeed, current literary critics seldom address the poems of their contemporaries. While structuralists and other schools of critics seek terms, generalizations, and whole systems to account for and to understand poems, poets themselves repeatedly assert that each poem has its own poetic and that no system applies to their writing. This book reads poems by contemporary poets, such as Jorie Graham, Charles Wright, Denis Johnson, and Amy Clampitt, not to illuminate a theory but to shed light on the poem.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel McGuiness is Associate Professor of Writing at Loyola College.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 079144953X
• ISBN 13: 9780791449530
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 202