I’m very pleased to announce the e-book republication of Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry by Cornell University Press in February 2016.

Drawing on the work of contemporary American poets from Ashbery to Zukofsky, Joseph M. Conte elaborates an innovative typology of postmodern poetic forms. In Conte’s view, looking at recent poetry in terms of the complementary methods of seriality and proceduralism offers a rewarding alternative to the familiar analytic dichotomy of “open” and “closed” forms.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Defining a Postmodern Poetics
Seriality and Proceduralism: A Typology of Postmodern Poetry

SERIAL FORM

The Infinite Serial Form

The Unbound and the Uneven: Robert Duncan’s Passages
Against the Calendar: Paul Blackburn’s Journals
One Thing Finding Its Place with Another: Robert Creeley’s Pieces

The Finite Serial Form

The Dark House: Jack Spicer’s Book of Language
The Subway’s Iron Circuit: George Oppen’s Discrete Series
Sounding and Resounding Anew: Louis Zukotsky and Lorine Niedecker

PROCEDURAL FORM

A Predetermined Form

Renovated Form: The Sestinas of John Ashbery and Louis Zukofsky
Canonic Form in Weldon Kees, Robert Creeley, and Louis Zukofsky

A Generative Device

Constant and Variant: Semantic Recurrence in Harry Mathews, William Bronk, and Robert Creeley
Arbitrary Constraints and Aleatory Operations: Harry Mathews and John Cage

A Polemical Conclusion: The Language Poetries and the New Formalism

Notes

Index

 

Unending Design is available across major e-book platforms:

Amazon Kindle

Apple iBooks

Barnes & Noble Nook

Kobo