  |
|
 |
The Resistance to Poetry BY James Longenbach University of Chicago Press, $25.00 Near the end of The Resistance to Poetry, James Longenbach quotes Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams: "Dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking." Throughout nine small and expertly constellated essays, Longenbach demonstrates that poems too are a form of thinking: a resistance to the clear-cut, uncomplicated thought that tries to pin them down as statements. Longenbach shows how poetry resists its readers by resisting, himself, stock definitions of terms such as "free verse," "disjunction," and "wonder." In his hands, and with a minimum of fuss, these terms become usefully kaleidoscopic. He is also a free-range reader who mends fences, able to move from Charles Bernstein to Ellen Bryant Voigt in a single seamless meditation on the varieties of omission in poetry. And though he has an excellent eye for the microscopic and interstitial workings of poems, he also never demands the last word on them. Instead, he wants us to enjoy the ways that poems keep us hanging: far from being a postmodern trick, he argues, undecidability in poetry is as old as "Western Wind." Discussing Hamlet's use of the word "or" in his "To be or not to be" soliloquy, Longenbach speaks for his own project: "The sound of this kind of 'or' is the sound of thinking in poetry—not the sound of finished thought but the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical process of discovering what it might be thinking." The excitement of such a process, as it's shaped and sounded in language, is what drives this compact and exponentially provocative book. Buy this book Amazon Barnes and Noble Book Sense |
| |
|
SEARCH |