Elliott Carter's Late Music

The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music, including his own earlier work. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995. Special emphasis is placed on Carter's settings of contemporary modernist poetry from John Ashbery to Louis Zukofsky. In readable and engaging prose, Elliott Carter's Late Music illuminates a body of late work that stands at the forefront of the composer's achievements.

The Paradigm of the Void: Louise Glück’s Post-Confessional Deadlock

Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Louise Glück emerges as one of the major and most important American poets of the late 20th and early 21st century. What does this centrality tell us about the trajectory that the American poetry has traced since modernism? I attempt to offer a critical evaluation of Glück’s post-confessional stylistic, developed between the debut Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), by setting it in contexts that are historical and, later in the paper, psycho-theological. First, I treat her formula as a double response – to the modernist legacy of T. S. Eliot and to the challenges of postmodernity. Faithful to Eliot’s urge to transcend the biographical by connecting it with the transcendental, Glück resists the skeptical thesis of the demise of grand narratives, and writes in defiance of the postmodernist poetics of such poets as John Ashbery. Not undermining the biographical foundation of the lyric – the way Ashbery has done in his linguistic excess – she strives to make it paradigmatic. However, in this heroic search for a paradigm, Glück proposes a deeply ambiguous modification of Eliot that I characterize in psycho-theological terms. Following Agata Bielik-Robson’s research, I characterize Glück’s metaphysics as a form of Thanatic Lacanian Gnosticism. At this level we confront the costs of Glück’s post-confessionalism: a serious impairment of all those aspects of the self that make it an embodied and gendered human being.

Interview with Alí Calderón

In 2018, Mexican poet Alí Calderón interviewed Charles Bernstein for his influential web magazine Círculo de poesía. The interview is published here in English for the first time. Bernstein addresses the poetics of “hybridity” and the possibilities for poetic disruption. The discussion ends with Bernstein's then new poem, written for John Ashbery on the day he died.

Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal

The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions, confessionalism, and certain self-centeredness. Poetry is a private matter for both. Both have poetics built on the “oddness that stays odd,” as Bernstein himself put it, paraphrasing Pound's “news that stays news.” Both are aimed at renovating the language, and the verses of both are built on fragmentation, collage, moving from one statement to another without preparation. However, in Ashbery, whose poems are surreal, these transitions are smoother, based on an apparent connection, what Bernstein calls “hypotaxis” or “associative parataxis.” In contrast, Bernstein's poetry is built on parataxis; it is “bumpy,” in the poet's own words.

The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde Strategiesunder the Formal Subsumption of Art

Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, both the French and the American avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the development of a similar aesthetic tendency in response to encroachments upon the restricted production of their respective literary fields by external forces. This tendency, which I call a “poetics of presence,” is a gambit for textual immediacy—what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht terms “presence effects,” as opposed to “meaning effects.” Through readings of theoretical works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the one hand, and poems by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, on the other, I demonstrate the character of the poetics of presence in the French and American contexts, concluding ultimately that in both cases such strategies function to preserve a formal subsumption of artistic labor under conditions of restricted production, as against the threading incursions of the real subsumption of that labor to which external forces—capital, politics—would subject it.

Queer Poetic Time

This chapter argues that the representation of ‘queer’ time in postmodernist poetry extends beyond sexuality to encompass heterodox approaches to temporality more broadly. It starts by considering English poet Philip Larkin, suggesting how he reworked modernism within burlesque forms to evoke shifts in spatio-temporal scale. The second section, ‘Against Chrononormativity’, extends this analysis across various American postmodernist poets, arguing that interrogations of normative temporality in relation to gay sexuality (particularly in Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn) can be understood as commensurate with reconstitutions of linear time in the work of John Ashbery and Louise Glück. It concludes by drawing comparisons with two Australian postmodernist poets, John Tranter and Les Murray, both of whom seek to reorient the direction of time. It discusses Tranter’s crossing of postcolonial theory with formalism, while also examining how Murray draws upon Indigenous culture and human/animal relations to reconfigure Western culture from a posthumanist perspective.

Mistaking on Purpose

This concluding chapter measures this book's argument about mistake against poems that openly describe the process and feeling of mistaking. Can poets use their own mistakes productively and still be mistaken? What does their trying to do so say about the nature of mistakes in poetry more broadly? The chapter explains that when poets celebrate the unconscious creativity associated with error, they likewise confirm mistake's inevitability—and the importance of acknowledging it. Touching on the work of several contemporary poets, including John Ashbery, Paul Muldoon, and Geoffrey Hill, it positions mistake alongside other elements of poetic craft and suggests that the critical urge to deny mistaking is often at odds with the process it means to defend. Finally, the chapter tells a story of making via poets who usually treat their mistakes as flaws worth mentioning, not excusing.