Dick Higgins: Pattern Poetry: Guide to an Unknown Literature (1987)

“Pattern poetry–poetry from before 1900 that fuses literature and visual art–has existed since the times of ancient Crete and Egypt. Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures.

This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.”

Publisher SUNY Press, 1987
ISBN 0887064140, 9780887064142
x+275 pages

Review: Piotr Wilczek (Pamiętnik Literacki, 1989, PL).

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EPUB (updated on 2023-9-25)

Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith (eds.): Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011)

“In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways.

In Against Expression, editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments. Charles Bernstein has described conceptual poetry as “poetry pregnant with thought.” Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.

Dworkin and Goldsmith, two of the leading spokespersons and practitioners of conceptual writing, chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors including Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp to the most prominent of today’s writers. Nearly all of the major avant-garde groups of the past century are represented here, including Dada, OuLiPo, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and Flarf to name just a few, but all the writers are united in their imaginative appropriation of found and generated texts and their exploration of nonexpressive language. Against Expression is a timely collection and an invaluable resource for readers and writers alike.”

Publisher Northwestern University Press, 2011
Avant-garde & Moderism Collection series
ISBN 0810127113, 9780810127111
593 pages

Reviews: Brian M. Reed (American Book Review), Stephen Burt (London Review of Books), Peli Grietzer (LA Review of Books), Richard Kostelanetz (Mayday), Andrew McCallum (English in Education), Samuel Vriezen’> (deReactor, NL).
Commentary: Sam Rowe (Full Stop).
Interview with Craig Dworkin (Katie L Price, Jacket2).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2014-12-12)

Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin (eds.): The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009)

“Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin break that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.

Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the connections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays take on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.

A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.”

With contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, Susan Stewart, Leevi Lehto, Yunte Huang, Rosmarie Waldrop, Richard Sieburth, Gordana P. Crnković, Steve McCaffery, Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein, Hélène Aji, Yoko Tawada, Susan Howe, Rubén Gallo, Antonio Sergio Bessa, Johanna Drucker, Ming-Qian Ma, Brian M. Reed, Kenneth Goldsmith

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226657434, 9780226657431
352 pages

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PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-8-12)