Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back

Loydell, Rupert ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2730-8489 (2020) Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back. In: Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back. Dalkey Archive, Illinois. ISBN 9781628973310

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Abstract / Summary

H. L. Hix invited many of the most influential voices in contemporary poetics to respond to two well- known statements about poetry: W. H. Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen,” composed at the beginning of World War 2, and Theodor Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” written in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The poets were free to interpret the statements in whatever way they choose and then react to them. Counterclaims gathers together those responses: incisive, varied, but always interesting. They reveal as much about the aesthetics of the individual poets as they do about the nature and function of poetry in our times.

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". . . this project seeks not to take a position on, but to further an ongoing process of, poetics. It seeks not to assert a claim but to perform a heuristic, not to settle on one aesthetic or one institutional arrangement for poetry, but to fulfill a principle of continuing dialogue and distributed engagement."

In Counterclaims, renowned poet H. L. Hix has amassed the responses of more than one hundred and fifty of his fellow writers, scholars, and artists to a singular problem, simultaneously a set of questions and a call-to-arms: whether the old truths inherent in 20th-century poetics can still be adhered to today, or whether new truths might take their place and what might they be? The answers collected in this volume from many of the greatest luminaries of their generation, writers young and old, from diverse backgrounds and cultures, form the basis of a new conversation; a step forward, not toward any one monolithic thesis or manifesto, but toward a new and ever adapting notion of poetry.

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