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9780809323234 Academic Inspection Copy

Paratextual Communities

American Avant-Garde Poetry Since 1950
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Susan Vanderborg examines the role of paratexts - notes, prefaces, marginalia, and source documents - in shaping the reading communities for American experimental poetry published since 1950. Since 1950, Vanderborg notes, American avant-garde poetry has been dominated by two seemingly contradictory impulses: a disruption of language as transparent communication and a need to contextualize the poets' word games for readers. For many authors, the solution has been the creation of a split text - a difficult, elliptical, disjunctive poetry accompanied by more accessible paratexts: creatively arranged essays, notes, source histories, and other references that serve as necessary complements to the poetry rather than as secondary commentary. Paratexts, which tend to be more colloquial and readable than the poetry, provide a forum in which to discuss issues of audience and community. Vanderborg examines both the innovations and the limitations of paratexts in redefining the poet's community, using the writing of six poets who represent different stages in the evolution of this form: Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Lorenzo Thomas, and Johanna Drucker.
Susan Vanderborg is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, specializing in twentieth-century American experimental poetry.
"In this deft and engaging study, Vanderborg astutely reconfigures (and sometimes dramatically reverses) the relation between primary and secondary texts in three generations of American avant-garde poets. By exploring the paratexts that these poets produced to explain their own central texts, she reveals how each poet's lexical and semantic distortions can be understood as strategies to create a new sense of poetic community. . . . And in the process, she also provides a splendid introduction to the pleasures, the complexities, and the provocations of the postmodern avant-garde poem."-Edward Brunner, author of Cold War Poetry
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