Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject Ron Silliman’s Albany Susan Howe’s Buffalo

published in Albany, Critical Inquiry, 25 (Spring1999), 405-434.

The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body–in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is […]

New Definitions of Lyric (A Response)

Published in New Definitions of Lyric, ed. Mark Jeffreys (New York: Garland Press, 1997): pp. 243-53.

Whatever the word lyric connotes in the late twentieth century, there seems to be a consensus, at least among the […]

Still Time for Surprises

STILL TIME FOR SURPRISES

published in Thumbscrew, 18 (Spring 2001): 46-48.

John Ashbery: Your Name Here. Manchester: Carcanet. £7.95

David Herd. John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. £45.00.

* * *For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year—a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate?