{"product_id":"what-are-poets-for-gerald-l-bruns-9781609380809","title":"What Are Poets For?: An Anthropology of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics","description":"\u003cp\u003eConceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns's magisterial \u003ci\u003eWhat Are Poets For?\u003c\/i\u003e explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores.\u003c\/p\u003eNaturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses--for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth.\u003ci\u003eWhat Are Poets For?\u003c\/i\u003e is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Gerald L. Bruns\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 1609380800\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781609380809\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e University of Iowa Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 06\/01\/2012\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 260\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.75lbs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eSize:\u003c\/b\u003e 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.70d","brand":"Gerald L. Bruns","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":43938747056383,"sku":"9781609380809","price":39.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/products\/img_8694cb10-a65b-447e-9115-2113618e520b.jpg?v=1681437493","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/what-are-poets-for-gerald-l-bruns-9781609380809","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}