Michael Heller

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Biographical note:  Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. Among his many books are Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2003), Knowledge, In The Builded Place, Wordflow and Living Root. His critical book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches received the Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. He is the recipient of many awards including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, NYFA and The Fund for Poetry.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710577
ISBN-10:  1844710572
ISBN-13:  9781844710577
Author:  Michael Heller
Title:  Uncertain Poetries
Series:  Reconstruction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTK
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  264pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  396 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This book is concerned with the complex and uncertain nature of twentieth century poetry and poetics. Dealing with such major figures as Lorca, Rilke, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Niedecker, Duncan and Oppen and of more contemporary poets and poetry in the modernist and post-modernist lineage of Pound and Williams, the essays explore the work of these poets to see how it embodies our contemporary skepticism concerning language, representation and reality, showing that even as the poems depict or create values, they appear to be haunted by the possibility of inadequacy. Thus one of the book’s major themes concerns how contemporary poets embody uncertainties, yet manage, in virtually the same breath, in the same line or stanza, to articulate both affirmation and doubt. Questions of form and meaning are discussed in the essays covering individual poets and their poems as well as in those which deal with contemporary avant garde movements, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry, poetics and considerations of the act of writing itself. As well, these essays try to say something about the literary environment of contemporary poetry. Poetry today is, for the most part, inflected by the American experimentalism of Walt Whitman, the “make it new” of innovators such as Pound and Williams and by infusions of European dada and surrealism into the poetic psyche. More recently, in avant-garde poetic movements, as in contemporary criticism, structuralist and post-structuralist thought have had much influence. These availabilities, this book hopes to show, have produced an unparalleled richness of poetry and thought about poetry, offering not only a reflection of our uneasiness but also an active shaping force which, through the power of poetic language, provides the hope of meaning for both history and experience.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Preface
The Uncertainty of the Poet
Deep Song: Some Provocations
‘Translating’ Form: Pound, Rilke and the Contemporary Poem
The Narrative of Ezra Gorgon Pound or History Gothicized
Rethinking Rilke
Notes on Stevens
The True Epithalamium
The Objectified Psyche: Marianne Moore and Lorine Niedecker
Imagining Durable Works: Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Wintergreen Ridge’
Typology of the Parabolist: Some Thoughts on the Poems Of David Ignatow
William Bronk’s Poetics of Silence and Form’s Vertiginous Trace
Armand Schwerner: The Semiotician of Self Work
Towards our Mallarmé
The Poetics of Unspeakability
Diasporic Poetics
Journey to the Exterior of the Symbol
Poetry Without Credentials
Encountering Oppen
Avant-garde Propellants of the Machine Made of Words
Aspects of Poetics
Notes on Lyric Poetry or at the Muse’s Tomb
Works Cited

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Unpublished endorsement :  For decades, Michael Heller has been making in his poetry one of the most careful explorations we have of the lyric imagination. For nearly as long, readers have relied on Conviction’s Net of Branches as their gateway into understanding the Objectivists. In 2000, Heller offered us Living Root, one of the great spiritual autobiographies in the American poetic idiom. What a pleasure to have these essays, then, collected in Uncertain Poetries, as an affirmation of the depth and seriousness of Heller’s engagement with lyric properties, and as a testament to the vibrancy of his thought and to the admirable intensity of his questioning mind.

Peter O’Leary
author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness

Unpublished endorsement :  Michael Heller is not only one of our finest poets; he is also one of our best thinkers and prose writers, someone for whom thought is aesthetic. In this volume poetry is the object of exquisite meditations that show it to be alive, delicate—and yet the most powerful force in human affairs. Written under the aegis of an Uncertainty that embodies the condition of modernity, Heller’s prose is at once supremely intelligent and knowing, deeply philosophical and ruminative, and utterly graceful. What other poet or scholar could be more illuminating? Heller’s contribution to our understanding of the poetic act, language, more broadly civilization, is truly extraordinary. It will remain with us for a very long time.

Burt Kimmelman

Unpublished endorsement :  At last we have a generous representative gathering of Michael Heller’s essays on poetics. One of our boldest, most thoughtful, and least tendentious of poets, Heller here demonstrates that the same is true for him as reader and critic. Deeply schooled in the contradictory (or use his term, “uncertain”) traditions of international modernism, Heller has always had a most discerning eye—and at times, a scathing voice—for the true and the meretricious in contemporary poetry. We need Heller’s insights now more than ever. This is a book of the utmost importance.

Norman Finkelstein