Radium of the Word

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The artist Edgar Degas once wrote to his friend the poet Stephane Mallarme to complain that he could never write a satisfactory poem, even though he was full of ideas. "My dear Degas, " Mallarme replied, "one doesn't write poetry with ideas, one writes poetry with words." Mallarme's point about the materiality of language, self-evident though it may be, is one that people who care about poetry often forget, and that Craig Dworkin underscores with fresh insight and contemporary relevance. A highly regarded critic and conceptual poet, Dworkin argues that an attention to the material form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending above all to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Dworkin traces otherwise hidden networks across the surface of texts and reveals patterns that can be significant without being symbolic-fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message. He considers prose as a dynamic literary form, with examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, and Guillaume Apolliniare. And he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde: P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N . H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics"--