Monster

Mark Irwin received his PhD in English/comparative literature from Case Western Reserve University and his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including American Urn: New & Selected Poems (1987–2014). He has also translated two volumes of poetry. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, NEA, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is Associate Professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.

List of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – Distortion & Disjunction in Contemporary American Poetry – Poetry, Reality, & Place in a Placeless World of Global Communication – Toward a Wilderness of the Artificial – The Poem as Concept – Three Notions of Truth in Poetry – Raising Poetry to a Higher Power – Poetry & Memorability – Poetry & Originality: "Have you been there before?" – Origin, Presence, & Time in the Poetry of W. S. Merwin – Jorie Graham: Kite’s Body & Beyond – A Romp through Ruefleland: Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems & Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures – Orpheus, Parzival, & Bartleby: Ways of Abstraction in Poetry – Bibliography – Author Index – About the Author.

“This important work of literary and cultural criticism probes the essential issues of poetry today. For example, distortion in poetry may now be necessary to its truth-function, a broken language for a broken world. Are we so distracted by the buzz of electronic media that lyric silence, along with nature, has receded into the past? Is anything real or, as it often seems, a virtual creation? Quoting Alfred Jarry, ‘I call Monster all original and inexhaustible beauty,’ Irwin reminds us that monstrosity is inherent in the new. Every great work of art, from Picasso’s Guernica to W.C. Williams’ plainspoken objectivism, emerges as a monster. As the author writes in his wonderful essay, ‘The Emergency of Poetry’: ‘Poetry is born of crisis or will seek it, often beginning in medias res —the middle where the danger is.’ It is then a question if art can heal or does the cultural wound lie open. My response to reading this book was immediate. It made me want to write something.”—Paul Hoover, Editor, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology