1,721,128 research outputs found
Physics envy: American poetry and science in the Cold War and after
No full textAt the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration. In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American—shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things
The "final finding of the ear": Wallace Stevens' modernist soundscapes
No full textExplores the question of why Stevens invested so much belief in a cosmology of sound, and discusses how the poet uses sound patterns to create reflexive, metapoetic effects, especially in 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
Language public and poetry
No full textThis paper is a response to the collection of essays edited by Tony Lopez and Anthony Caleshu, Poetry and Public Language, based on a conference at the University of Plymouth in 2007. I argue that poetry is a slow politics, and we need to recognise the complexities of the politics in which poetry can engage, especially around discourses of public engagemen
Expanding authorship: transformations in American poetry since 1950
No full textStudies of collaboration, poetry networks, disability, and the role of sound in poetry
Aftermath
No full textShort description/annotation: A selection of poems about masculinity, memory, authority and science. Languages of science and policy try to talk their way out of poetic trouble in serial poems and longer sequences. Past and future, America, Greece, and conservative Britain, are all scenes of action.Main description: Aftermath brings together several long poems concerned with masculinity, authority, and the politics of art, alongside a selection of shorter poems curious about science, memory and new technology, written over a twenty year period. Many of the poems search out traces of narrative and emotion in the often anonymous and neutralised languages of contemporary culture. This is an investigation prompted by the restricted civic space and cultural possibilities of a conservative Britain. Earlier poems were written in the shadows of a conservative roll-back of many progressive government programmes and a rapid increase in poverty and decline in education and health. This was also a time when poststructuralism persuasively mocked humanist and transcendental ideas about language. Was there any truth or hope in language? This is a poetry with arguments, a conviction, challenged at every turn, that observation and communication are still possible for the stretched language of poems. Included are two recent sequences, ‘Tell Me About It’ and ‘Next Gen,’ in which the selves called into being by New Labour and New Technology aspire to their own lyric sublime. The concluding poem, A Dialogue on Anachronism, looks back on the past two decades with some wonder and puzzlement
Science and poetry
No full textEssay on theory and history of interrelations between science and poetr
Distant reading: performance, readership, and consumption in contemporary poetry
No full textA dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words
Strips: Scientific Language in Poetry
No full textThe poetry that flourished in America between the mid 1970s and the 1990s known as Language Poetry was influenced by changing public perceptions of the natural sciences as well as the influence of structuralist social sciences. By considering the importance of physics and chemistry for the British poet J. H. Prynne, and the epistemological implications of references to current scientific publications, I discuss the struggles of Language Poets and other contemporary writers to assert the primacy of their own cognitive inquiries in the face of the authority of the sciences. Does poetry adumbrate more extended forms of knowledge and truth than dominant scientific methods recognise, and if so how might writers and critics better articulate these possibilities? The essay demonstrates that these questions have to address sensuous particularity as well as conceptual argument
- …
