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Providing a synthesis of New York's artistic and literary worlds, this book uses social and philosophical problems involved in reading a coterie to propose a language for understanding the poet, art critic, and Museum of Modern Art curator, Frank O'Hara.
The life of legendary Swiss photographer Ernst Moiré is so shrouded in speculation that he sometimes seems more like a phantasm than the flesh-and-blood figure whose name will forever be linked with the well-known printer's error. Yet as scholar Lytle Shaw reveals in The Moiré Effect, when it comes to Monsieur Moiré and his circle, fact is often stranger than fiction. Tracking the artist from his humble Alpine beginnings as the son of a postal clerk to his fateful founding of a Zurich photography studio in the 1890s and his subsequent role in the lives of a number of curious figures--including the legendary Dutch architect Mer Awsümbildungs, the theosophist philosopher Rudolf Steiner and several members of the secretive Chadwick family--The Moiré Effect takes readers on a journey from the elegant salons of Swiss palazzi to the dusty bowels of ancient archives to a conclusion as hair-raising as it is oblique.
Fieldworks offers a historical account of the social, rhetorical, and material attempts to ground art and poetry in the physicality of a site. Arguing that place-oriented inquiries allowed poets and artists to develop new, experimental models of historiography and ethnography, Lytle Shaw draws out the shifting terms of this practice from World War II to the present through a series of illuminating case studies. Beginning with the alternate national genealogies unearthed by William Carlos Williams in Paterson and Charles Olson in Gloucester, Shaw demonstrates how subsequent poets sought to ground such inquiries in concrete social formations—to in effect live the poetics of place: Gary Snyde...
Lytle Shaw New Grounds for Dutch Landscape.
Third personism : the FBI's poetics of immediacy in the 1960s -- The Eigner sanction : keeping time from the American century -- Olson's sonic walls : citizenship and surveillance from the OWI to the Nixon tapes -- The strategic idea of north : Glenn Gould, Sergeant Jones and White Alice
Poetry. ". . . Lytle Shaw has carried out often disruptive, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes melancholy explorations into the processes through which the world gets made into an object of knowledge. But what is the lobe of the book's title? A lobe is a roundish projection, a part of something to which it is attached by the very fissure that also creates it. A lobby could serve as an architectural example, its fissures the walls, doors, stairs, and elevators which connect it to the rest of the building. But not all lobes are material. Knowledge-creates lobes of a sort (hence the interest in Diderot). More precisely, it is about the fissures that form the known, the fissures that form knowers and that leave them (us) dangling in the wind"-Lyn Hejinian. A SIDE OF CLOSURE also available at SPD.
Frank O’Hara’s writing is central to any consideration of 20th century American poetry. This collection of essays, the first to be dedicated to O’Hara in nearly two decades, asks why O’Hara remains so important to 21st century readers and writers of poetry. The book is transatlantic in tone, combining American scholarship with a wide sampling of British writers. For many, O’Hara’s distinctive appeal depends on his witty depictions of urban experience, his relationship to the painters of Abstract Expressionism and the exhilarating immediacy of his poetic voice. Yet these chatty and approachable qualities coexist with a testing engagement with currents in European and American modernism. Frank O’Hara Now offers a comprehensive picture of the poet, presenting the conversational insouciance of the writing alongside its more intransigent features.
In Reading Duncan Reading, thirteen scholars and poets examine, first, what and how the American poet Robert Duncan read and, perforce, what and how he wrote. Harold Bloom wrote of the searing anxiety of influence writers experience as they grapple with the burden of being original, but for Duncan this was another matter altogether. Indeed, according to Stephen Collis, “No other poet has so openly expressed his admiration for and gratitude toward his predecessors.” Part one emphasizes Duncan’s acts of reading, tracing a variety of his derivations—including Sarah Ehlers’s demonstration of how Milton shaped Duncan’s early poetic aspirations, Siobhán Scarry’s unveiling of the man...
"Lyn Hejinian's work increasingly explores poetry's relation to knowledge... But rather than abstract frameworks, one finds in A Border Comedy a serial poem in fifteen 'books, ' coyotes, geese, didactic asides, horses, philosophical anecdotes, hawks, intercourse, wasps, Russian Formalist literary terms, goats, pigs, ravens and a great deal of urinating. It is through this particularity that Hejinian invents a poetic pedagogy at home with its forgiveness to itself, poised both to topple and attain intellectual authority, happily open to its lack of totalizing system... Situating her project more broadly within intellectual history, she writes: 'Digressing in a didactic tale will teach one to ...
A portrait of the diverse literary cultures of New York from its beginnings as a Dutch colony to the present.