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| Document Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| All Authors / Contributors: |
Matthew J Marr |
| ISBN: | 1901704106 9781901704105 |
| OCLC Number: | 159935144 |
| Notes: | Includes index. |
| Description: | 138 p. ; 24 cm. |
| Responsibility: | Matthew J. Marr. |
Table of Contents:
Back Cover Description:
Literary self-consciousness is an impulse informing poets from Homer on through the splintered line of his poetic descendants. And, as poetic modes have evolved, so too have variations on the metapoetic practice. But can the problematics of the writing craft be expected to engage the contemporary reader of poetry—a figure who is awash in a world of dynamic, competing media and, thus, increasingly difficult to attract, inspire, and maintain? This question is especially relevant to modern Spanish verse, where self-reflexive poetry is cultivated toward ends that often draw attention to the lyrical genre’s condition of “exhaustion” as a literary medium. The dejected poem about the impossibility of writing, the solemn poem on the ineffable, the poem that zealously aspires to purge poetic language itself, the theory-laden meditation on the collapse of the sign: all are conventions of modern Spanish metapoetry, and all cast a shadow of crisis on the state of the genre. As if a self-fulfilling prophecy, such writerly pessimism plays its own role in poetry’s fall from grace among readers.
Postmodernism seeks to reclaim this reader, and readability itself, for contemporary poetry. Within the Spanish poetic scene of the 1980s and 1990s, several practitioners of postmodernism wrest the metapoetic sensibility from the tired confines of the tradition from whence it most immediately came, reshaping it in playful, theatrical, and even comic ways—an undertaking which reinvigorates, and ultimately reorients, the Spanish lyrical genre at large. In Postmodern Metapoetry and the Replenishment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre, 1980-2000, Matthew J. Marr explores the imaginative reinvention of poetic self-consciousness by such poets as Javier Salvago, Luis García Montero, Vicente Gallego, Felipe Benítez Reyes, Carlos Marzal, and Roger Wolfe. Through a series of colorful close readings, an eye toward historical contextualization, and the fruitful application of postmodern theory, the present volume offers a refreshingly upbeat take on what is, for some of the most prominent new voices in Peninsular verse at the end of the twentieth century, a key subgenre in an innovative poetics of creative renewal.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements 7
I. “Meta-methodological Matters”: A Critical Orientation and Investigative Framework for the Present Study 9
II. Metapoetry as a Front in the Struggle against
the Novísimos 19
1. The Consecration of a Poetic Generation: The Novísimos as a Hegemonic Phenomenon 19
2. Postnovísimo Metapoetry as Critical Fiction: A Border-line Discourse Forging a Literary Space Apart 29
III. Poesis as Experience: Process Mimesis and Genre Reconfiguration in Postnovísimo Verse 51
1. The "Metapoetics" of Modernism and Postmodernism in Recent Peninsular Verse 51
2. The Dynamic Play of Process Mimesis in the Postnovísimo Lyric 61
3. "The truest poetry is the most feigning": The Function of Metapoetry in Restoring Poetry's Status as Fiction 75
IV. Beyond the Burden of Poetic Solemnity: Postmodern Humor as Joyful Wisdom in the Metapoetry of Roger Wolfe 85
1. Poetry and Humor as Strange Bedfellows 85
2. "Nada de esto te viene en el manual": Metapoetic Humor and the Deflated Poetic Ideal in the Works of Roger Wolfe 95
3. Is Nothing Sacred?" Comic Self-Derision as a Vacation from Responsibility 108
V. Conclusion 117
VI. Works Cited 121
INDEX 129
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