Disjunctive Poetics

Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of noncanonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social, and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them, as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their traditions and dissociated from their cultures. The line of America, poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but the deconstructive aspect, which emphasizes the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openness of the creative process. Providing close reading of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Basil Bunting, Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan, and Susan Howe, the book explains how these writers describe the modern experience in a multi-cultural world by displacing commonly accepted cultural icons and by loading their language with multiple potential meanings.