Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth [Paperback]

The sites of inspiration documented in this book range from nineteenth century linguistic theory to postmodern strategies of conceptual writing, encompassing well known instances of modernist poetics (Mallarm?, Pound, Olson) alongside obscure but revealing figures like Otto Nebel and Henri-Martin Barzun.Shadow Mouth The Murmur Drawing a Blank: Episodes in the Poetics of Unworking Poetry's Voice-Over Gendering the Muse Medusa's Gaze, or Traveling in the Dark 'When the Mind Is Like a Hall': Places of a Possible

[F]or those who understand a poem as an epistemological form of knowing, this study will be a pleasure. Highly Recommended. - CHOICE

Poetry, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. As Jed Rasula in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth makes clear, poetry is an archaic technology that emerges the moment the Muses dictate directly into the inner ear or mind (98). Rasula presents this primal voice-over as not a beginning of but a split from, where all subsequent episodes retain a sense of incommensurability between voice and voice-over (100). Such rifts are as unsettling as they are rich. Aesthetic myths underwrite modernist aesthetics to the exact extent modernism obscures this. Rasula does not mean to change this, but, like one acquainted with the facilities, to give us the password for wifi. This then is a welcome addition to Rachel Blau DuPlessis excellent Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics series. - Jacket2

Facing the dark mouth of poetic inspiration, Hugo s prophetic bouche d ombre, Rasula does not stand in awe; instead, he decides to organize tours of the cave. Acting as a spirited and indefatigable guide, armed with an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, great quotes and illuminating readings, he invites us to overhear an infinite conversation linking poets, poems and poetics of an ageless modernity. Hence the mouth will not only speak tolӜ