Robert Archambeau examines the influence of the poet and critic Yvor Winters on his final generation of graduate students at Stanford in the early 1960s: Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, James McMichael, John Matthias, and John Peck. Archambeau divides the poets into two groups, laureates and heretics. Hass and Pinsky, each of whom served multiple terms as United Sates Poet Laureate, achieved both popular recognition and institutional renown. In contrast, the poetic accomplishments of Matthias, McMichael, and Peck (and to some extent Winters himself), the "heretics," have not resulted in wide readership or institutional canonization. Archambeau begins with the context of the modernist poetics Winters first espoused and then rejected. The story that follows--of how his five most prominent students accepted, rejected, or transformed Winters's poetics, and how these poets went on to greater or lesser degrees of success in the field of late twentieth-century letters--illuminates the cultural politics of poetry in our own day. The author provides close readings of poems by this diverse group of poets, places their careers and works in the context of their times, and traces the relationship between American literary history and American canons of literary taste from the 1930s to the present day. Laureates and Heretics is an important contribution to American literary history and American poetry. "I know of no other study of twentieth-century American poetry that so carefully and interestingly treats the works and careers of a single figure (Yvor Winters) and five of his students. The varying critical and public fates of Winters and the poets who worked under him make a fascinating study, even gesturing toward a global history of postwar American poetry." --Mark Scroggins, Florida Atlantic University "This book is about the complexities of the relation between Yvor Winters and five former students as those complexities emerge in the poems themselves. Within these terms, it is exemplary because, unlike most critics and reviewers, Archambeau is not out to polemically endorse any specific position Winters himself took; he is as interested in departures from Winters' orthodoxy as in adherence; he is an extraordinarily sensitive reader of a considerable range of poetry." --Evan Watkins, University of California, Davis

Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Archambeau, Robert

History & Criticism

University of Notre Dame Press

Poetry and Uselessness: From Coleridge to Ashbery (Among the Victorians and Modernists)

Routledge

The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at the end of the twentieth century. This volume introduces the work of this significant American poet to readers previously unfamiliar with it and enriches the reading of those who have long admired it. The essays collected here treat Matthias's career from its beginnings under the tutelage of John Berryman and Yvor Winters through its engagement with modern and postmodern poetics. With contributions from John Peck, Michael Anania, Peter Michelson, and ten other critics, Word Play Place is the first sustained treatment of the poetry of this writer who stands outside the mainstream of American poetry in our time, and is guided by an aesthetic that has not been easy to define. This collection emphasizes how readers ought to approach Matthias's work in all its ambition, its richness, and its strangeness.

Word Play Place: Essays On The Poetry Of John Matthias

United States

SWALLOW PRESS+

<p>W.H. Auden famously claimed "poetry makes nothing happen." That may or may not be the case, but the idea that poetry makes nothing happen has, itself, been extremely influential, and has made a great deal happen in the world. This book examines several of the main currents in literary history as that influential idea flows through poetry and into the wider world. Since the invention of the idea, it has influenced theories of education; helped legitimize the entry of the middle class into political life; spawned ideas of symbolism that are still with us; formed a bulwark protecting literary culture from the commercial world; helped create the artistic subculture of bohemia; informed queer discourse and identity; and helped create both contemporary literary taste and the institutions that support it. Through chapters on figures from Coleridge and Tennyson to Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery, we see how maintaining that poetry has no use in the world has been and remains a very powerful―and useful―idea.</p>

Poetry and Uselessness (Among the Victorians and Modernists)

Alice B. Toklas is Missing

Genre Fiction

Regal House Publishing

In one way or another most of the poems in "Home and Variations" are about displacement. Sometimes this is literal, but more often there is another kind of displacement at work. It can be a matter of finding American homes for European-derived poetics, as it is in poems like "Two Short Films on the Translation of the European Imagination to America" or, say, "Experimental Researches on the Irrational Embellishment of Chicago," (which takes a form from Andre Breton and repurposes it for the American midwest). The textual raiding, sampling, and splicing that we see in many of many of the poems (most notably "Citation Suite") can be seen as a way of making the self at home in an initially alien textual environment - a reworking of text to make the available discourse into a habitable (and, inevitably, hybrid) space. The sources for splicing include everything from David Bowie to William Blake, often in the same poem. The process is a kind of mutation of the global textual DNA to fit local

Home And Variations

Poetry

Salt Pub

The essays of The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World set out to survey not only the state of contemporary poetry, but also the poet's relationship to politics, society, and literary criticism. In addition to pursuing these topics, The Poet Resigns peers into the role of the critic and the manifesto, the nature of wit, the poetics of play, and the persistence of modernism, while providing detailed readings of poets as diverse as Harryette Mullen and Yvor Winters, George Oppen and Robert Pinsky, Pablo Neruda and C.S. Giscombe. Behind it all is a sense of poetry, not just as an academic area of study, but also as a lived experience and a way of understanding. Few books of poetry criticism show such range”yet the core questions remain clear: what is this thing we love and call poetry, and what is its consequence in the world?

Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics)

University Of Akron Press

What if Franz Kafka, that master of frustration, failure, and despair, had written the ancient Sanskrit sex manual The Kama Sutra? Robert Archambeau explores this question in the illustrated series of parables that begins his collection The Kafka Sutra. Other questions behind the pieces in this book concern glam rock, fatherhood, Afro-Caribbean and Belgian Surrealism, Conceptualism, Hiroshima, the sad lot of the English professor, and similar vital matters of these, our troubled times.

The Kafka Sutra

MadHat, Inc.

<p>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.</p>

Inventions of a Barbarous Age: Poetry from Conceptualism to Rhyme

Essays & Correspondence

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Books by Archambeau, Robert