Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing The Lyric Marjorie Perloff SAFETY FIRST brief fast has made me dangerously thirsty for juice. — Craig Dworkin, Motes (2011)[i] 1. Dejà vu? What happens to poetry when Everybody is a Poet? In a recent lecture that poses this question, Jed Rasula [...]
In the 1980s, “language poetry” was such a dominant force in U.S. avant-garde circles that we are only now beginning to realize that something we might designate as “post-language” poetry has come into its own. Peter Gizzi and Elizabeth Willis, for example, studied at Buffalo and Brown with Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and Rosmarie Waldrop, yet Gizzi’s […]
In 1959 Frank O’Hara wrote an ode called “Hôtel Transylvanie,” which begins:
Shall we win at love or shall we lose
can it be
that hurting and being hurt is a trick forcing the love
we want to appear, that the hurt is a card
and is it black? is it red? […]