This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement.
Preface.- Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming.- 1. Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice.- 2. Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence.- 3. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins' and Peter Hughes' Petrarch.- 4. Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure.- 5. Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney.- 6. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest Prose.- 7. The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed.- 8. Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry.- 9. The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher.- 10. Geraldine Monk's Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act.- 11. Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney's Sin Signs.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.
