Poetics

Robinson, Josh ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9191-0629 2016. Poetics. The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 24 (1) , pp. 379-398. 10.1093/ywcct/mbw018

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Abstract

This chapter discusses three works published in the field of poetics (broadly conceived) during 2015, exploring their commonalities, mutual implications, compatibilities and tensions. It begins with a discussion of Marjorie Perloff’s Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays , focusing in particular on the author’s programmatic (and frequently polemical) declaration of her principles in the book’s preface. It discusses the implications of her evaluative and prescriptive approach, and brings to light some of the tensions that it involves, with particular relation to her instructions concerning theory and its relationship to the study of poetry. It then turns to Reginald Gibbons’ account of How Poems Think , analysing the implications both of his conceptual optic of ‘working against the grain’—a way of thinking developed in dialogue with Donald Davie and Hélène Cixous—and of the way in which it both illuminates and is illuminated by the engagement with poems. Focusing on Gibbons’ analyses of rhyme, it examines the resources offered by his comparative approach, drawing on readings of French, German, Greek and Russian poetry as well as that written in English, and considers the ways in which poetics learns from and comes to resemble poetry in its ambitious attempt to formulate a prose account of the thinking of verse technique. It ends by discussing Rebecca Sanchez’s Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature , and in doing so considers both the resonances of Gibbons’ account of the resources of language for poetries of non-spoken languages, and Sanchez’s account of the implications and potential resources of the analysis of American Sign Language poetry for literary studies more generally.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1077-4254
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	9 June 2016
Date of Acceptance:	16 May 2016
Last Modified:	28 Nov 2024 06:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/91707

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