Two Articles of More Use than Hoagland

Here are two articles I'd recommend over the recent piece by Tony Hoagland in the March 2006 Poetry:

• Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergval," Jacket 23.


• Charles Altieri, "Reading for Affect in the Lyric: From Modern to Contemporary."

I recommend them over Hoagland because they actually engage with investigative/experimental/disjunctive literature rather than just drawing lines around one's own practice in order to confirm it. They are also imbued with a generous humanism to which Hoagland aspires but does not quite achieve.

Perloff argues a point that has often struck me—much investigative poetry pays no attention to the sound of language. She then discusses two poets (Bök & Bergval) who do pay attention to sound and how that may open up additional directions.

Altieri finds a way to talk about emotion that avoids collapsing into sentimentality and shows how affect (his preferred term) operates in investigative poetry. It shows the rigor, intelligence, and humanism that has characterized his work from the beginning. This essay is much more compelling and interesting than his expressivist project of the 70s and early 80s. Altieri's home page at Berkeley includes additional current articles.

Altieri's essay is an early version of an article published in Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr, eds. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). I heartily recommend Poetry and Pedagogy. However, it is only available in an absurdly expensive hardcover edition.