What is it about?
The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. The book explains how such seemingly difficult poems might be read as an exploration of ordinary language, and how readers of such poetry can enter a community of readers, consisting not simply of individual readers but also the poet and other poets. In such a community, poets have no more authority than readers.
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Why is it important?
While much has been written about the sense that Language Writing, like Ron Silliman's and Lyn Hejinian's poetry, or John Ashbery's poetry, are reader-focused, a fuller discussion of what this means for the relations between the reader and the text has been missing. In my book, I show that their poems foster a reciprocal relation between readers, writers, and texts.
Perspectives
My starting point for this book was the sense that poetry like Ashbery's, Hejinian's and Silliman's is often perceived as unnecessarily difficult. I hope that this approach would help even those readers who are not already vastly familiar with contemporary experimental poetry to engage with it.
Elina Siltanen
University of Turku
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This page is a summary of: Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry, September 2016, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/fillm.4.
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