Reading the Difficulties: new from University of Alabama Press (discount offer)

Reading the Difficulties
Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry

Edited by Thomas Fink (CUNY), Judith Halden-Sullivan (Millersville University, PA)
Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series: Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, series editors 

360pp
Paperback: 978-0-8173-5752-8
Ebook: 978-0-8173-8720-4
Retail Price: $34.95
Sale Price: $24.47

plus: buy this book and get these terrifc books for $5: 
Brian M. Reed PHENOMENAL READING 
Jerome Rothenberg POETICS & POLEMICS
Steve McCaffery THE DARKNESS OF THE PRESENT 

To order, call 800-621-2736 through February 28, 2014 and reference discount offer MCP141

On Reading the Difficulties:
Definitions of what constitutes innovative poetry are innumerable and are offered from every quarter. Some critics and poets argue that innovative poetry concerns free association (John Ashbery), others that experimental poetry is a "re-staging" of language (Bruce Andrews) or a syntactic and cognitive break with the past (Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian). The tenets of new poetry abound. But what of the new reading that such poetry demands? Essays in Reading the Difficulties ask what kinds of stances allow readers to interact with verse that deliberately removes many of the comfortable cues to comprehension-poetry that is frequently nonnarrative, nonrepresentational, and indeterminate in subject, theme, or message. Some essays in Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan's collection address issues of reader reception and the way specific stances toward reading support or complement the aesthetic of each poet. Others suggest how we can be open readers, how innovative poetic texts change the very nature of reader and reading, and how critical language can capture this metamorphosis. Some contributors consider how the reader changes innovative poetry, what language reveals about this interaction, which new reading strategies unfold for the audiences of innovative verse, and what questions readers should ask of innovative verse and of events and experiences that we might bring to reading it.

Contents:
Reading the Difficulties -- Thomas Fink and Judith Halden-Sullivan
Thank You for Saying Thank You -- Charles Bernstein 
Reading and Reading -- Elizabeth Robinson 
Of Course Poetry Is Difficult / Poetry Is Not Difficult -- Hank Lazer 
Articulating a Radical and a Secular Jewish Poetics:Walter Benjamin, Charles Bernstein, and the Weak Messiah as Girly Man -- Stephen Paul Miller 
Reading the Posthuman Subject in The Alphabet -- Burt Kimmelman 
Cooking a Book with Low-Level Durational Energy;or, How to Read Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies -- Kristen Gallagher 
Engaging with (the Content of) John Bloomberg-Rissman’s 2nd NOTICE OFMODIFICATIONS TO TEXT OF PROPOSED REGULATIONS -- Eileen R. Tabios 
Bursting at the Seams: Exploding the Confines of Reification with Creative Constraints in Sleeping with the Dictionary -- Carrie Conners 
The Game of Self-Forgetting:Reading Innovative Poetry Reading Gadamer -- Judith Halden-Sullivan
The Utopian Textures and Civic Commons of Lisa Robertson’s Soft Architecture -- Christopher Schmidt 
Problems of Context and the Will to Parsimony: Reading “Difficult” Recent U.S. Poetry -- Thomas Fink 
Some Notes on bpNichol, (Captain) Poetry, and Comics -- Paolo Javier 
Crossing the Corpus Callosum: The Musical Phenomenology of Lisa Jarnot -- Jessica Lewis Luck 
Extrapolatia -- Sheila E. Murphy 

"The question of how to read difficult poetry (in this case, poetry written explicitly in the Modernist, or avant-garde, tradition) is a familiar subject, so a volume of this kind is a significant contribution to the field." --Joel Bettridge, author of Reading as Belief: Language Writing, Poetics, Faith

"One of the strongest aspects of this project is the inclusion of critical assessments of very new work, such as Kristen Gallagher's on Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies. This high standard of contemporaneousness is how and where I set my mark as I read across the essays." --Al Filreis, author of Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-1960