Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service and the Character of True Reading

Abstract

“Bruce Andrews is not a poet,” a professor to whom I had shown Andrews’ Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened as an undergraduate told me. (I can’t remember what he said Andrews was, but it wasn’t complimentary.) I am not entirely sure Andrews would disagree with the characterization, although he might point out that nobody else is a poet either, at least not in the sense my professor meant the word. Andrews likens his role as an author to that of an editor: he weaves together slices of political speech, overheard conversation, pop culture, and literature, and in the process examines how intellectual, cultural, and literary production occurs through shifting social relationships, not from the minds of isolated individuals.