Dictionary Poetics

Dictionary Poetics analyses book-length poems from a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure their work. Spanning most of the 20th century, this study investigates poems by Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen (two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s), Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh (two “Language Poets” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively), and Harryette Mullen (a post-Black-Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s). By reverse-engineering poems, this study sets the critical record straight on multiple counts. Moreover, reading these poems in tandem with their source texts puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde poems are nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Indeed, beyond the particular arguments and local readings, Dictionary Poetics argues that the new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics maps and articulates the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.