Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—Now It's Out! Here's What's in It!



Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme—my latest book of essays—has just rolled hot off the presses at MadHat Press.  What's it all about? Well, the jacket copy gives you an overview (and a few complimentary blurbs):

What is the community for poetry? What is its fate, its future? Poet and critic Robert Archambeau begins Inventions of a Barbarous Age with these questions before ranging over the ridges and valleys of the contemporary poetry scene, pausing on the way to investigate mystic and Gnostic poetry, the norms of criticism, and the poetics of camp and the sublime. Taking in poets from W. H. Auden to Kenneth Goldsmith, and topics from poetic comedy to poetic tribalism, Archambeau is one of poetry’s great omnivores, and numbers among the leading poetry critics of his generation. 
Robert Archambeau is fascinated by the place poets stake out for their art, the claims they make about the relationship of poetry and power; and he is (sometimes uncomfortably) shrewd in ferreting out the motivations for such claims. His essays have the advantage of the best occasional writing—immediacy, a sense of responsiveness, conversationality—but Archambeau is also a “big ideas” critic, spinning his momentary interpretations of texts into penetrating insights about the place of poetry in the world.
—Mark Scroggins 
Archambeau writes prose that’s consistently welcoming, curious, and free of the anxiety that marks so much criticism.
—Jonathan Farmer, Slate Magazine
A notable poet/critic, Archambeau’s a perfect example of how one person can take on both roles.
—Barry Schwabsky, The Nation
Archambeau is one of our smartest poetic sociologists, and he tackles the biggest problems facing poetry in our time.
—Norman Finkelstein, Contemporary Literature
If you want to see someone having fun while thinking provocatively about contemporary poetry, try Archambeau. I always do.
—Stephen Burt 
Archambeau has perfect pitch.
—Marjorie Perloff 
If you really want to know about the book, though, here's the table of contents, along with a few notes on each essay:

I. The Future, The Present

            You Will Object: Four Futures for Poetry
            Poetry as ubiquitous, as commodified, as self-obsessed, as community-building. You don’t like one future? Try another!
            Who is a Contemporary Poet?
            In which I continue an old argument with Kenneth Goldsmith about what counts as contemporary. The fight is called off when Giorgia Agamben clobbers us both.
            The Future of Genius
            Does the old category of ‘genius’ have a future? The origin and destination of a category of literary analysis, with reference to Brooklyn hipsters in Warby Parker glasses.
            Invitation to the Voyage: Notes on the Trajectory of the Poetic Image
            How the literary image changed from Dante to Baudelaire, and what that says about where it has been and may be heading.
            Charmless and Interesting: The Conceptual Moment in Poetry
            What Conceptualism has going for it and what it doesn’t do very well, with reference to the old aesthetic category of “charm” and the newly-re-theorized category of the “interesting.”  As in “Conceptualism? Well, it’s… interesting…”
            Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Contemporary Rhyme in Poetry
            How has rhyme changed since it ceased being an unexamined norm in poetry? How can it be done well now? With a lot of talk about Anthony Madrid’s amazing unpublished history of rhyme and an examination of Michael Robbins’ The Second Sex, among other books.

II. Poetry and Community

            When Poetry Mattered
            Poetry matters most when things are really, really bad.  We should be so lucky that poetry matters less here than elsewhere, now than then.
            The Disinheritance of the Poets
            What happens when privileged people get kicked out of the realm of power and money and end up in the realm of poetry? More about rich white guys elbowing other people out of the way, intentionally or otherwise.
            In Solitude, In Multitude: Crowds and Poetry
            A quick trip through the 19th and 20th centuries of flâneurs, introverts, countercultural snobs, and poets othered for their identity, with reference to Crowds and Power.
            Between Facebook and Montparnasse: Poetry’s Lonely Time
            Long story short: we live at the moment of dialectical synthesis between bohemian enclaves and the academic dispersion of the poets across the vastness of all those rectangular states.
            Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark Scroggins
            Wow, did Scroggins not like this.
            So a Poet Walks into a Bar: Notes on Poetry Readings
            Just what the hell is a poetry reading all about? Find out now, via rhetorical theory!

III. Mystics and Gnostics

            A Stranger from the Sky: Sun Ra as Poet and Alien
            Why haven’t we been taking Sun Ra seriously as a poet? He’s closer to T.S. Eliot than fans of either of them are likely to want to admit.
            The Open Word: An Essay and a Letter for Peter O’Leary
            The most linguistically audacious Catholic mystic in poetry since Gerard Manley Hopkins.
            A Scribe and His Ghosts: The Poetry of Norman Finkelstein
            Norman Finkelstein: because you needed proof that wit and mysticism could work together.
            “That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness
            This is really about the challenge Duncan’s insistence on the reality of myth poses to modern consciousness, and to Duncan himself. I mean, I’m not sure we really can read Duncan the way he wanted us to.
            Kenneth Rexroth’s Other Worlds
            In which I argue that Robert Hass owes a lot to Rexroth, and that Rexroth understood the sublime intuitively.
            A Strange and Quiet Fullness: The Uncanny Charles Simic
            In which I argue that despite some Cold War attitudes that don’t hold up all that well, Simic is the real deal when it comes to the uncanny in poetry.
            John Crowe Ransom’s Quarrel with God
            Long story short: a preacher’s kid starts to doubt God, has his doubts confirmed in the First World War, writes a defense of Christianity that is really an attack on Christianity, and develops a poetic based on these beliefs. It hardens into a dogma and damages the poetry, but it couldn’t really have been otherwise.
            History, Totality, Silence
            This is the most “high theory circa 1995” title of anything I’ve ever written. It brings in Walter Benjamin, John Matthias, and Levinas.

IV. Others

            An ABC of Gertrude Stein
            This is pretty much what it sounds like. G is for Genius, N is for Narcissim…
            The American Poet as European, or Egon Schiele’s Ladder
            This is mostly about aesthetic distance and what it can do for, or to, you.
            Poetry Ha Ha
            I don’t think we’re really good at talking about comedy in poetry. This is my attempt. A lot of Henri Bergson, a bit of Freud and Hobbes, and some funny stuff from Aaron Belz.
            Camping Modernism: Timothy Yu's Chinese Silences
            Why I think Tim Yu’ 100 Chinese Silences is a necessary rethinking of Modernism via pastiche and the aesthetics of camp.
            Ambiguous Pronouns are Hot: On Rae Armantrout
            In which Rae Armantrout does the voice of Paris Hilton (remember Paris Hilton?) and makes some crazy things happen with gender and power.
            If I Were A Freudian This Essay Would Be Called “The Mother’s Penis”:
                        A Note on Daisy Fried
            Another take on gender and power in poetry.
            Poetics of Embodiment
            If you don’t read Swedish, you should probably go hang out outside Jennifer Hayashida’s house and set off fireworks to praise her for translating Karl Larsson—because he knows how to explain the way embodiment comes into contact with language and power and lays open the dark disparities of our moment.  Also, there’s stuff about Joy Division.

V. On Criticism

            Hating the Other Kind of Poetry
            In which I examine what’s at stake in partisan poetry sniping, and try to understand my own sense that it’s a mug’s game.
            The Work of Criticism in the Age of Mechanical Recommendation
            What can a critic do that a recommendation algorithm can’t?
            The Avant-Garde in Babel
            What we talk about when we talk about the avant-garde, and why we’re probably all talking about different things. My attempt (with much help from Per Bäckstrom) to purify the language of the critical tribe.
            Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest!
            This is really a kind of poetics of camp, along with an argument for why we need such a thing. It takes a turn through Kant and Schiller and back out via Situationist thinking about “the sepulcher of aesthetic disinterest.”
            The Abject Sublime, or: Jean Genet’s Vaseline
            Because a queering of the sublime via the abject shows us just how bad we usually are about distinguishing between different types of beauty, and because Jean Genet is the poet laureate of abjection.

VI. Afterword

            Death of a Bookseller

            This is really an elegy for a man who taught me as much as any of my professors. He ran a dusty bookshop in Chicago. Both he and the store are gone, and always with me.

You can find the book on Amazon and at the MadHat website, as well as at the more poetry-and-litcrit-friendly sort of bookstore (try the Grolier Poetry Bookshop if you're near Harvard Square).

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