Skip to main content

Coming to Terms with the American Long Poem: Introduction

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem

Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ((MPCC))

Abstract

In this introduction, Carbery illuminates the role phenomenological philosophy has played in the composition of long poems in America. The diverse group of poets explored in the book—George Oppen, Robin Blaser, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, Nathaniel Mackey and Rachel Blau DuPlessis—have all created extended poetic projects and are motivated by or in places touch upon ideas expressed in the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In establishing the groundwork of this argument, Carbery discusses recent critical approaches to long poem, before presenting a detailed account of the role of phenomenology in American poetics.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Works Cited

  • Allen, Dick. ‘The Forest for the Trees: Preliminary Thoughts on Evaluating the Long Poem.’ The Kenyon Review 5.2 (1983): 78–82. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Peter. Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern Long Poem. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1991. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bram, Sharar. Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead: An Essay on Poetry. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butterick, George. A Guide to the Maximus Poems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Byrd, Donald. Charles Olson’s Maximus. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois, 1980. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Case, Kristen. American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe. Suffolk, UK: Camden House Press, 2011. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conte, Joseph and R. S. Gwynn. Unending Design: Forms of Postmodern Poetry. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. ‘Seriality and the Contemporary Long Poem’. Sagetrieb 11.1–2 (1992): 35–45. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. American Poets Since World War II. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena. Trans. David Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Of Grammatology. [1976]. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———.‘The Other’s Language: Jacques Derrida Interviews Ornette Coleman, 23 June 1997’. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture. Trans. Timothy S. Murphy. Oklahoma, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997: 319–329.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Writing and Difference. [1967]. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques and Derek Attridge. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dickie, Margaret. On the Modernist Long Poem. Iowa, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. ‘Considering the Long Poem: Genre Problems’. Webpage. University of Sussex Lecture, 2008. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/readings/issues/issue4/duplessis_on_Consideringthelongpoemgenreproblems. [Date Accessed: 23 September 2017]. Web.

  • ———. ‘After the Long Poem’. Dibur Literary Journal. Issue 4: The Long Poem (Spring, 2017).

    Google Scholar 

  • Fender, Stephen. The American Long Poem: An Annotated Selection. London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 1977. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallberg, Robert Van. ‘Olson’s Relation to Pound and Williams’. Contemporary Literature 15 (1974): 15–48. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hanrick, William. Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought. New York, NY: State University of New York Press. 2011. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hatlen, Burton. ‘The Long Poem’. Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature. 2017. http://literature.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-715 [Date Accessed: 3 September 2018]. Web.

  • Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. [1931]. Trans. M. Nijhoff. The Hague, 1960. Print.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. [1928]. Trans. James Churchill. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Idea of Phenomenology. [1907]. Trans. L. Hardy. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 1999. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Ideas. [1913]. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jaussen, Paul. Writing in Real Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Keller, Lynn. Forms of Expansion: Recent Long Poems by Women. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Basic Philosophical Writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Totality and Infinity. [1961]. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999a. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Otherwise Than Being, Or, Beyond Essence. [1974]. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999b. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • McHale, Brian.‘Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Long Poem’. The Yearbook of English Studies 30 (2000): 250–262. Print.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. ‘Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry’. Narrative (May 2001): 161–170. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Obligation Towards the Difficult Whole: Postmodern Long Poems. Birmingham, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Claude Lefort. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’. Basic Writings. Ed. Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 2003: 69–84. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The World of Perception. Ed. and Trans. Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Ed. Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Phenomenology of Perception. [1945]. Trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Middleton, Peter. ‘The Longing of the Long Poem’. Jacket2 40 (2010). http://jacketmagazine.com/40/middleton-long-poem.shtml [Date Accessed: 23 September 2017]. Web.

  • Moran, Dermot. Ed. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge, 2000. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997a. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———.Collected Poems. Ed. George Butterick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997b. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Muthologos. Ed. Ralph Maud. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2010. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Olson, Charles and Anne Charters. Charles Olson: The Special View of History. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1970. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Olson, Charles and George F. Butterick. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Oppen, George. Selected Prose, Daybooks and Papers. Ed. Stephen Cope. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spiegelberg, Herbert. The Context of the Phenomenological Movement. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 1981. Print.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Waldrop, Rosmarie. ‘Charles Olson: Process and Relationship.’ Twentieth Century Literature. 23.4 (1977): 467–486. Print.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitehead, Alfred. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. [1929]. New York, NY: Free Press, 1978. Print.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zahavi, Dan. ‘Phenomenology’. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy. Ed. Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2010: 661–692. Print.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Carbery, M. (2019). Coming to Terms with the American Long Poem: Introduction. In: Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05002-3_1

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics