Purple Passages
Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley, and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Mar 15 2012 | Archive Date Sep 01 2012
Description
What is patriarchal poetry? How can it be both attractive and tempting and yet be so hegemonic that it is invisible? How does it combine various mixes of masculinity, femininity, effeminacy, and eroticism? At once passionate and dispassionate, Rachel Blau DuPlessis meticulously outlines key moments of choice and debate about masculinity among writers as disparate as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, choices that construct consequential models for institutions of poetic practice.
As DuPlessis writes, "There are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture: not in production, dissemination, or reception; not in objects, discourses, or practices; not in reading experiences or in interpretations." And, as she reveals in careful and enthralling detail, for the poets at the center of this book, questions of masculinity loomed large and were continuously articulated in their self-creation as writers, in literary bonding, and in its deployment.
These gender-laden choices, debates, and contradictions all have a striking influence today. In this empathic yet critical historical polemic, DuPlessis reveals the outcomes of these many investments in the radical reconstruction of masculinity, in their strains, incompleteness, tensions-and failures. At the heart of modernist maleness and poetic practices are contradictions and urgencies, gender ideas both progressive and defensive.
In a striking book on male behavior in poetic
dyads, the third book in a feminist critical trilogy, DuPlessis tracks
the poetic debates and arguments about gender that continuously affirm
patriarchal poetry.
Critic and scholar, poet and essayist with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis is professor emerita at Temple University, with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. She is the author of Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Purple Passages completes this feminist trilogy of essays on poetry and poetics. Among her numerous other books are Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle, and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934. Since 1986, DuPlessis has been engaged in a long poem project, collected in several book-length installments.
Advance Praise
"In writing that nods to various ways her analyses mean and might mean, Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Purple Passages is situated within a discussion current in U.S. poetry criticism-that is, it is a conversation among friends, some of whom are also poet-critics. Nevertheless, DuPlessis also writes within a more generalized U.S. critical language of literary and cultural studies. I appreciate that situatedness, just as I admire her assiduousness in mentioning, crediting, including, and writing in relation to recent relevant U.S. and U.K. critical work."-Lisa Samuels, author, Mama Mortality Corridos and Anti M
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781609380847 |
| PRICE | $39.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 256 |
