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 Poets of Rapallo

Why did poets from the United States, Britain, and Ireland gather in a small town in Italy during the early years of Mussolini’s regime? These writers were—or became—some of the most famous poets of the twentieth century. What brought them together, and what did they hope to achieve? The Poets of Rapallo is about the conversations, collaborations, and disagreements among Ezra and Dorothy Pound, W.B. and George Yeats, Richard Aldington and Brigit Patmore, Thomas MacGreevy, Louis Zukofsky, and Basil Bunting. Drawing on their correspondence, diaries, drafts of poems, sketches and photographs, this book shows how the backdrop of the Italian fascist regime is essential to their writing about their home countries and their ideas about modern art and poetry. It also explores their interconnectedness as poets and shows how these connections were erased as their work was polished for publication. Focusing on the years between 1928 and 1935, when Pound and Yeats hosted an array of visiting writers, this book shows how the literary culture of Rapallo forged the lifelong friendships of Richard Aldington and Thomas MacGreevy—both veterans of the First World War—and of Louis Zukofsky and Basil Bunting, who imagined a new kind of “democratic” poetry for the twentieth century. In the wake of the Second World War, these four poets all downplayed their relationship to Ezra Pound and avoided discussing how important Rapallo was to their development as poets. But how did these “democratic” poets respond to the fascist context in which they worked during their time in Rapallo? The Poets of Rapallo discusses their collaboration with Pound, their awareness of the rising tide of fascism, and even—in some cases—their complicity in the activities of the fascist regime. The Poets of Rapallo charts the new direction for modernist writing that these writers imagined, and in the process, it exposes the dark underbelly of some of the most lauded poetry in the English language.

The Roads to Rapallo

This chapter charts the arrivals of the poets to Rapallo, beginning with Pound and Yeats, and extending to Richard Aldington, Thomas MacGreevy, Basil Bunting, and Louis Zukofsky. It surveys the complex history of Pound and Yeats’s relationship, their individual motivations for going to Italy, and their ideas about Mussolini’s promise as a political and cultural leader.

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.

Erotic Barbarity: Othon

This chapter introduces the specificities and hallmarks of Straub and Huillet’s films through a close study of their 1969 film Eyes Do Not Want to Close at All Times or Perhaps One Day Rome Will Allow Herself to Choose in Her Turn, adapted from Pierre Corneille’s play Othon: literary works adapted to the letter, their use of cinematic composition and space, and direct location sound. Finally, it introduces the troubadour Arnaut Daniel and his complex, subtle poetic structures, later picked up by Louis Zukofsky, which echo the cinematic structures of Straub and Huillet’s films.

Introduction

This chapter defines the scope of the book Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema, beginning with Jacques Rivette’s proposal of a kind of ‘objectivity’ in cinema and the ways in which films by Jean- Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet have adhered to it almost to the letter in their use of pre-existing texts adapted seemingly without interpretation. It introduces an American poetry movement, Objectivism, and the poetic theories and axioms of Louis Zukofsky, highlighting their similarities to the filmmaking of Straub and Huillet.

Objectivity and Objectivities

This chapter defines what the concept of “objectivity” meant for Straub and Huillet and the history and recurrence of the term in modern literature. It details the history of the Objectivists, a group of formally radical, leftist, and mainly Jewish poets who emerged in 1930s America under the influence of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and whose major representatives include Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Reznikoff. They received little attention in their time and only marginal attention decades later, but their working methods and philosophies are strikingly similar to the cinematic practices of Huillet and Straub.