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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:
Joseph M. Conte 