Sentence/Sentience An Exploration of Unbounded Linguistic Assemblage within Experimental Poetics

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Bartholomew-Ortega, Kristen

Keywords

Poetry, Experimental Poetry, Language Poetry, Ashbery, John, Heidegger

Area of Concentration

British and American Literature

Abstract

Experimental Poetry is a difficult type of poetics that is addling in its expansiveness and ambiguity. Enormous attention is paid to the materiality of the poetry--the way it inhabits the page, the spaces, the margins, the positions of letters--becomes subject to a pernicious poetic playground that shuffles our expectations of reading, perhaps to "reveal" something about language. Tan Lin, Susan Howe, and John Ashbery are, indeed, interested in language, particularly a poem's materiality, the words on the surface. Yet what they each manage to "reveal" transcends materiality, transcend objects and the concepts of objects. Their poetry reveals language's tenuous grasp on meaning, and meanings rather mercurial articulation within language.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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