Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

Literature & Fiction

McCaffery, Steve

Essays & Correspondence

Northwestern University Press

Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

Prior To Meaning

The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectivelyinvestigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonplace notions of the “contemporary” in the field of poetics. In the eleven essays of The Darkness of the Present, poet and critic Steve McCaffery argues that by approaching the past and the present as unified entities, the contemporary is made historical at the same time as the historical is made contemporary. McCaffery’s writings work against the urge to classify works by placing them in standard literary periods or disciplinary partitions. Instead, McCaffery offers a variety of insights into unusual and ingenious affiliations between poetic works that may have previously seemed distinctive. He questions the usual associations of originality and precedence. In the process, he repositions many texts within genealogies separate from the ones to which they are traditionally assigned. The chapters in The Darkness of the Present might seem to present an eclectic façade and can certainly be read independently. They are linked, however, by a common preoccupation reflected in the title of the book: the anomaly and the anachronism and the way their empirical emergence works to unsettle a steady notion of the “contemporary” or “new.”

The Darkness of the Present: Poetics, Anachronism, and the Anomaly (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

History & Criticism

University Alabama Press

Conceived in 1976 and published in 1980, LEGEND exemplifies the political and linguistic commitments of then-nascent Language writing. Coauthored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, the work was composed on typewriters and developed through the mail. The twenty-six poems in the volume bring together every possible permutation of collaborative authorship in one-, two-, three-, and five-author combinations, revealing the evolution of distinctive styles against and in conversation with others. Along with a complete reproduction of the original text, LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context includes a critical introduction by editors Matthew Hofer and Michael Golston, a generous selection of material from the authors' correspondence, and a new collaborative piece by the authors. This book will be an essential resource to students and scholars in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.

LEGEND: The Complete Facsimile in Context (Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics)

Bernstein, Charles

Andrews, Bruce

Silliman, Ron

DiPalma, Ray

University of New Mexico Press

The Theory of Sediment

Poetry

Talonbooks, Ltd.

The Toronto Research Group was an eighteen year collaboration and friendship between the late bpNichol and Steve McCaffery. In addition to reports on translation; the book-as-machine; and the search for non-narrative prose; this collection includes an informative introduction by McCaffery; a new report on performance; Reading and Writing: The Toronto Research Game’; and much hitherto unpublished material. From scholasticism to pop-up books, the Book of Nature to comic strips, these frequently witty, often irreverent and methodically mischievious reports document a vital era, not only in the intellectual growth of two individuals, but in the history of critical collaboration in North America. With a revised format, additional bibliography and profuse illustrations, this book will prove to be of inestimable value to anyone tracing the poetic archeology of the seventies in Anglophone Canada.

Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine- The Collected Research Reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973-1982

Nichol, BP

Talonbooks

Fiction. Announcing the long-awaited reprint of Steve McCaffery's rare 1984 intervention into fiction (if "fiction" indeed this be). Taking its inspiration from Jeremy Bentham's "Panopticon Papers" McCaffery's PANOPTICON shatters all omnivison in a tour de force of formal innovation, theoretical comment and narrative critique. In PANOPTICON narrative stutters, repeats itself, sequence is deranged and complicated by a multi-media presence on the page of grids, film bands and acoustic channels. On its first appearance Charles Bernstein hailed the book as "as perhaps the exemplary 'antiabsorptive work'" and William McPheron claimed its first appearance as "an extraordinary act of revolution and charity." Out of print for over twenty years, this new edition is enhanced by the availability of a revised audio recording of the book, its three voices, one male, two female teasing out the gender complexities of PANOPTICON. McCaffery has also added an Introduction to the book and has revised the text entirely.

Panopticon

Nightwood Editions

Literary Criticism. Second Edition. Co-published with Nightwood Editions, Toronto, NORTH OF INTENTION is thedefinitive collection of Steve McCaffery's critical writing, spanning theyears in which he solidified his reputation as English Canada's mostaccomplished experimental writer. It is a must for any serious student ofcontemporary poetry and poetics and a testament to McCaffery's persistentrefusal to barter with NAFTA-like terms of traditional exegesis. "NORTH OF INTENTION is a panoramic, erotic, anti-accumulative collectionof essays centering on the formally investigative North American poetryof the 1970s and 1980s. McCaffery's high-theoretical performances reclaimliterary theory for engaged literary practices"—Charles Bernstein.

North of intention : critical writings, 1973-1986

Roof Books

Knowledge never knew

Véhicule Press

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