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Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word
Ghostlier Demarcations Modern Poetry and the Material Word Author:Michael Davidson Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-centur... more »y poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materialityfrom the holograph manuscript to the printed bookDavidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.« less