Agency, social authorship, and the political aura of contemporary poetry

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements This article was prepared for delivery at the conference Authorship and the Turn to Language, Universität Tübingen, Germany, 1–4 December 2005. I am very grateful to the convener of the conference, Professor Barrett Watten, Wayne State University (then a Fulbright professor at Tübingen), for giving the opportunity to attend this conference. Notes Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author’ in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (eds.), translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 269 & 264. Ibid., p. 264. See Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003) and Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos, 2007). But also perhaps the text in dissemination – paper, binding, font – the physical look of text, some of which authors may choose, and which are certainly part of what a reader registers and reads. Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 42. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 142. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marble paper: toward a feminist history of poetry, ML – Modern Language Quarterly, 65.1 (2004), pp. 102–104. Also in Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), pp. 102–104. DuPlessis, Blue Studios, pp. 102–104. Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 146. Ibid. Tony Lopez, About Cambridge, http://jacketmagazine.com/20/lopez-about.html [accessed 10 December 2005]. Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003). Erín Moure, O Cidadán (Toronto: Anansi, 2002). Caroline Bergvall, Goan Atom (Cambridge, UK: REM Press, 1999). Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America (New York: New Directions, 1994). Anne Blonstein, Scroll, Dusie Issue2, www.dusie.org/blonstein.html [accessed 9 May 2007]. Cecilia Vicuña, Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1992). Carla Harryman, Mirror Play (presented 30 November 2005 in Tübingen, Germany). Ibid., p. 103. See Jean-Jacques Lecercle, The Violence of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ [accessed 21 November 2005]. Charles Bernstein, The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1987), p. 44. Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995), p. 68. Moure, O Cidadán (Toronto: Anansi, 2002), p. 1. See Jena Osman, Syllabus. Documentary Poetics, http://www.temple.edu/creativewriting/faculty/osman/Teaching.htm. Barrett Watten, Progress/Under Erasure (Copenhagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005), p. 27. Ibid., p. 6.