Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry [Hardcover]

Focusing in particular on pairings of writers within the larger grouping of poets, this book suggests how literary partnerships became pivotal to American poets in the wake of Donald Allen's 'New American Poetry' anthology.Introduction 'In Thicket': Charles Olson, Poetic Career, and the Crisis of Cold War Masculinity 'Homosexual Advertising': Gay Subjectivity, Modernist Form, and Robert Duncan's The Venice Poem In the Shadow of Nerval: Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser and the Poetics of (Mis)Translation Recovering the Public World: Robin Blaser, Hannah Arendt, and the Discourses of Self and Other in Image-Nations 'Collapsed Aura': Nathaniel Mackey, Robert Duncan, and the Poetics of Discrepant Subjectivity in 'Song of the Andoumboulou' Afterword: Towards a Poetics of Mutual Understanding

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry offers an important study of masculinity in postwar poetry, showing the close relationship of innovative form, community, and collaborative debate. Mossin s treatment of Duncan, Blaser, Olson, and Mackey complicates the politics of the lyric, seeing the form not as an unmediated access to identity but a site of socially inflected idiolects and gender indeterminacy. Building on key theoretical interrogations of gender performativity, Mossin explores the porous border between marginal identities and textual margins. - Michael Davidson, author of Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics

This remarkable and at times brilliant book offers detailed case-studies not only to investigate the construction of maleness, but to open up the much wider territory invoked by vexed questions: the nature of translation, the nature and role of lyric, the formation of community in an intransigently provisional, polyvocal, and distressed world. Mossin threads his way through the complex entanglement of poetic career, male subjectivity, and formalist concerns, as much to teach us how to read these difficult and al#I