Front cover image for Career moves : Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American avant-garde

Career moves : Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American avant-garde

How much did making it new have to do with making it? For the four ""outsider poets"" considered here, the connection was everything. Both a social history of literary ambition in America in the 1950s and 1960s and a collective literary biography, this is an account of postwar poetry underground.
Print Book, English, ©2000
University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, ©2000
Criticism, interpretation, etc
viii, 172 pages ; 24 cm
9780299168407, 9780299168445, 0299168409, 0299168441
42717004

Career Moves

Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde
By Libbie Rifkin

The University of Wisconsin Press

Copyright © 2000 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-299-16844-5

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................................................viiINTRODUCTION  Reading the Poetic Career............................................................................3CHAPTER 1  Charles Olson's "Queer University": Institutionalizing Postwar Avant-Gardes.............................13The Theory of the Avant-Garde and Practice.........................................................................14"His Life, His Mouth, and His Poem": Articulating Institutions.....................................................17Permanent Revolution and the Construction of the Contemporary......................................................27CHAPTER 2  "The Company of Love": The Collaborated Careers of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.....................32"Both a Poet and an Historian": Reading Professions................................................................35Maximus' Epic Exclusions...........................................................................................38"What's On between Us Is a Methodology": The Correspondence and Its Institutions...................................44"In the Field, Away from People": Ethnography, Amateurism, Ethics 58Creeley and "The Business".........................................................................................66CHAPTER 3  The Legacy of Louis Zukofsky............................................................................72"Looking for a Place to / Bury-Ricky": Objectification and Desire in Early "A".....................................78Late "A," Bottom, and the Logic of "Love"..........................................................................91"Now That I'm an 'Acquisition'": The Texas Archive and the Collected Subject.......................................102CHAPTER 4  "Worrying about Making It": Ted Berrigan's Social Poetics...............................................108"My Name a Household Name": Making Reputation......................................................................109The Sonnets and the Sonneteer......................................................................................113Assembling Vocation................................................................................................115"Writing a Name for a Day": Poetic Occasion, Poetic Artifact.......................................................120"Alone and Crowded, Unhappy Fate": Editorship and/as Authorship....................................................128CONCLUSION  Unnatural Acts and the Next Acts.......................................................................136Language Writing Institutions......................................................................................139A Contemporary Career..............................................................................................142Notes..............................................................................................................149Works Cited........................................................................................................161Index..............................................................................................................169


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