Tony Lopez

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Biographical note:  Tony Lopez is best known as a poet and performer of poetry: the author of the widely-acclaimed and much anthologized False Memory (Salt), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2003 and best poetry book of the year in the Guardian also in 2003. Winner of awards for poetry from The Society of Authors, The Wingate Foundation and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, he has given readings throughout UK and Europe and several nationwide reading tours in USA and Canada. He teaches in England at the University of Plymouth where he was appointed the first Professor of poetry in 2000.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710829
ISBN-10:  1844710823
ISBN-13:  9781844710829
Author:  Tony Lopez
Title:  Meaning Performance
Series:  Reconstruction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-06
Extent:  236pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  354 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 is an extraordinary and genuinely groundbreaking study of the most challenging contemporary poetry written today in both USA and UK. Presented originally as a series of public lectures and talks, Tony Lopez takes us with him in this new collection of essays, through the most penetrating analysis of abstract and difficult postmodern poetry written on both sides of the Atlantic. He attends to important American poets, such as the ‘Language’ poets, their Avant-garde predecessors and the New York School, who are largely unknown and unread in Britain, including David Antin, Lyn Hejinian, Ted Berrigan, and Bob Perelman, together with better known American poets such as John Ashbery. He reads radical British poets not widely known in America such as J.H. Prynne, Denise Riley, Allen Fisher, Andrew Crozier, Edwin Morgan and W.S. Graham, presenting new work also on the international writings of Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood. He shows how these poets articulate beauty in their writings, how they attend to life’s human complexity and engage with issues of widespread public concern. These essays show an exceptional range and familiarity with different traditions of radical writings, with the different histories of American and English poetry, making links to the most widely studied and best known of modernist writers such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. What is truly remarkable about Lopez’s study of the most demanding recent poetry is the constant lucidity, the lack of jargon and complete clarity of his critical writing which shows a profound regard for his readers, specialist and non-specialist alike.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Limits of Reference and Abstraction in American Poetry
W. S. Graham's Elegies and St Ives
Repetition and Innovation in Contemporary poetry
‘Powder on a Little Table’: Berrigan’s Sonnets and 60s Poems
sequel lines
Poetry and Performance
Graham and the 1940s
The White Room in the New York Schoolhouse
Innovative Poetry in English
Pound and Postmodern British Poets
Oppositional Englishness: National Identity in Basil Bunting’s ‘Briggflatts’
Pound and Contemporary Poetry
Thomas A. Clark, Nationality, Modernism
Sequential Meaning in Ezra Pound’s ‘Cathay’
T.S. Eliot and W.S. Graham

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from Innovative Poetry in English

Some recently–published anthologies of English–language poetry have demonstrated that there is a wide range of innovative poetic practice and achievement that is at odds with the standard rather restricted view of what constitutes post–war poetry in England. When I use the term ‘restricted,’ what I mean is the lineage that runs from Larkin to Hughes, then to Harrison, the Martians, and the so–called New Generation poets. Against this rather narrow and reductive tendency we should identify the poets included in the anthologies A Various Art, The New British Poetry, Conductors of Chaos, and Other: British and Irish Poetry 1970–1990. That these anthologies have been published by major publishing houses and distributed widely shows that there is progressively less centralised control of print media, and that the small but powerful group of people who have for some time dominated the centre of literary publishing no longer have such a firm grip as they were previously able to maintain. What used to be called the ‘mainstream’ poetry world has fragmented into a series of narrow localisms which are bound up in constructing and maintaining national identities against their erosion by uncertain contemporary political structures and globalised economic markets. This process is replicated through identity politics by each group that defines itself in opposition to a ‘mainstream’ white middle–class cultural elite. In the current edition of the reference work Contemporary Poets (Detroit: St James Press, 1996) doubt is expressed about the survival of a common readership for poetry in English. It is noted that there is poetry for sale in bookshops across the English–speaking world, but that it is not the same poetry in each place and it follows that the traditionally most important publishers can by no means be confident of an automatic central position in the trade. The focus has moved towards the local and towards fragmentation into particular markets. This is much more the case (and it is bound to be so) for that commonplace free–verse poetry of autobiographical anecdote which communicates a special sense of particular identity. Each new constructed identity focused on locality and region through particular personal experience (what dull creative writing classes call ‘finding a voice’) tends to undermine a common culture and to look nostalgically inward and backward. A ‘mainstream’ confessional free–verse American poetry moves on with little regard for anywhere else. But in America there has been for many years a more plural and inclusive publishing of poetry, so that even from Europe we are aware of the Objectivists, the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance, the New York School, the Language poets. We have the American anthologies of the Twentieth–century avant–garde in poetry, including those recently edited by Messerli, Hoover, Rothenberg & Joris. The poetry that has been marketed as New Generation British poetry seems to be focused on replays of the northern scholarship girl and boy (learned from Dennis Potter, Willy Russell and Tony Harrison) and on brandnames of regionalism and nostalgia. A similar but more breezily confident attitude may be discovered in the nationalist literatures of Scotland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

For many years, alongside these now imploding ‘mainstreams,’ there have been poets whose liminal writings question assumptions about selfhood, identity and subjectivity, poets whose investigations of language necessarily involve the same issues as those explored in the most influential recent literary and cultural theory: the social construction and the inscription of gender identity, the relations between ideology and economy, colonial history and race, the politics of language, literary form and canonicity. A key characteristic of this writing would be to focus our attention as readers onto language itself, rather than focusing only on experience, as if language were merely a transparent medium. In this sense, the kind of poetry I mean to describe is liminal in its presentation of language as a mediating threshold between our senses of internal and external experience. In poetry this investigation has taken many forms: through strategies which delay and confound simple naturalisation, through the development of procedural and aleatory techniques of composition, through the questioning of ‘natural’ seeming speech–based and free–verse poetics, the suspension and confusion of gender–identity, the deformation of advertising rhetoric, the radical revision of pastoral, the development of open and serial forms, the recovery of separate ‘expert’ vocabularies and so on. The poets involved in these writing practices are no longer members of a series of defensive and marginal avant–garde enclaves, defined against a unified centre, but neither are they a coherent international community. There are however networks of communication and exchange, and (as the sales of some of the anthologies mentioned above shows) there is a readership which is no longer separated along national boundaries.

Unpublished endorsement :  Almost all critical work on contemporary experimental poetry is theory-driven: it works out arguments and exemplifies them by the poetry. Tony Lopez knows the theory better, so he begins with practice. He brilliantly shows how the innovations in these poems are driven by syntactic possibilities, appreciations of new possibilities of rendering time, possibilities of organizing textures of discourse, and by a fascination with what had seemed impermeable borders between the arts. Therefore he pays better attention to both the intelligence of the poets and the portability or imaginative uses of the poems. And in doing that he brings new life to their modernist predecessors like Stein and Pound because he intricately develops how their innovations bring continuing vitality to the present.

Charles Altieri, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Unpublished endorsement :  Lopez experiences poetry with an exemplary intensity; he performs this intensity in this striking book on British and American innovative poetries. Meaning Performance articulates in an intimate and engaged fashion Lopez’s passionate assessments of poets’ acts, forms, modes, poetics, mutual influences, careers and cultural values.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis