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| Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry. John Ashbury. Lyn Hejinian. Ron Silliman. Elina Siltanen Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2016
| Book Synopsis
The
poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer
endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative
which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as
Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated
detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful
exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this
spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the
community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including
the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in
which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that
language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get
started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds
of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or
could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers
are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of
language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered
self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of
contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than
readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves
as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together
with their readers.
Table of Contents
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