The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics

Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Poetry History & Criticism, Theory
Cover of the book The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics by Jeanne Heuving, University of Alabama Press
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
Author: Jeanne Heuving ISBN: 9780817389093
Publisher: University of Alabama Press Publication: May 19, 2016
Imprint: University Alabama Press Language: English
Author: Jeanne Heuving
ISBN: 9780817389093
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Publication: May 19, 2016
Imprint: University Alabama Press
Language: English

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of physical sex and desire.
 
In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”
 
Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.
 
The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is a probing examination of how the writing of sexual love undergoes a radical revision by avant-garde poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, the exploration of love by poets—long a fixture of Western poetic tradition—is thought to be in decline, with love itself understood to be a mere ideological overlay for the more “real” entities of physical sex and desire.
 
In The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics, Jeanne Heuving claims that a key achievement of poetry by Ezra Pound, H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, Nathaniel Mackey, and others lies significantly in their engagement with the synergistic relations between being in love and writing love. These poets, she argues, have traded the clichéd lover of yore for impersonal or posthuman poetic speakers that sustain the gloire and mystery of love poetry of prior centuries. As Robert Duncan writes, “There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call ‘falling in love.’”
 
Heuving claims that this writing of love is defining for avant-garde poetics, identifying how such important discoveries as Pound’s and H.D.’s Imagism, Pound’s Cantos, and Duncan’s “open field poetics” are derived through their changed writing of love. She draws attention to how the prevailing concept of language as material is inadequate to the ways these poets also engage language as a medium—as a conduit—enabling them to address love afresh in a time defined through preoccupations with sexuality. They engage love as immanent and change it through a writing that acts on itself.
 
The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics ascribes the waning of love poetry to its problematic form: a genre in which empowered poetic speakers constitute their speech through the objectification of comparatively disempowered subjects, or beloveds. Refusing this pervasive practice, the poets she highlights reject the delimiting, one-sided tradition of masculine lovers and passive feminine beloveds; instead, they create a more nuanced, dynamic poetics of ecstatic exploration, what Heuving calls “projective love” and “libidinized field poetics,” a formally innovative poetry, in which one perception leads directly to the next and all aspects of a poem are generative of meaning.

More books from University of Alabama Press

Cover of the book Poor but Proud by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Earline's Pink Party by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Keep Your Airspeed Up by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Lost City, Found Pyramid by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Heaven's Soldiers by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Master of the Air by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)/El contragolpe (y otros poemas horizontales) by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book In the Middle of Nowhere by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Motorcycling Alabama by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book The Scalawag In Alabama Politics, 1865–1881 by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Twilight of a Golden Age by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Among the Garifuna by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Kissed By by Jeanne Heuving
Cover of the book Iron and Steel by Jeanne Heuving
We use our own "cookies" and third party cookies to improve services and to see statistical information. By using this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy