How do we know that Emily Dickinson wrote poems? How do we recognize a poem when we see one? In Dickinson's Misery, Virginia Jackson poses fundamental questions about reading habits we have come to take for granted. Because Dickinson's writing remained largely unpublished when s…
"The resistance to poetry is quite specifically the wonder of poetry. Considering a wide array of poets, from Virgil and Milton to Dickinson and Gluck, Longenbach suggests that poems convey knowledge only inasmuch as they refuse to be vehicles for the efficient transmission of k…
Poems convey knowledge, argues Longenbach, but do so in forms that work against their being facile vehicles for the efficient transmission of knowledge. This self-resistance is the source of the reader's pleasure: we read poetry not to escape difficulty but to embrace it.
Focusing on the significance of sensation, this study develops a Deleuzian poetics of reading through an examination of contemporary innovative poetry.
Breathtaking poetry -- Petrifaction -- Anti-memorial elegy -- Lapidary -- On a raised beach -- Stone thresholds -- Dilapidation and singing stones -- A shower of needles -- On the tip of the tongue -- Trying times. "In this important new intervention, leading poet and critic Jo…
