2005
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
144
Number of Pages
Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ...
Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
5
5 STARS
20%
4 STARS
60%
3 STARS
20%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
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Author
Lee Upton
Author · 6 books
Lee Upton is the author of thirteen books. Her short story collection The Tao of Humiliation received the BOA Short Fiction Prize. Her awards include the Lyric Poetry Award and The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America; the Pushcart Prize; the National Poetry Series Award; and the Miami University Novella Award. Her collection of essays, Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy, received ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award in the category of books about writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, Poetry, Harvard Review, FIELD, American Poetry Review, and in numerous journals and anthologies.
