Ingenious Pleasures - (Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century) by Drew Gardner (Paperback)

About the Book

By tracing the impulses of punk rock, trash film, and camp through poetry, Drew Gardner sheds light on a literary tendency that has been part of poetry's DNA all along: uncovering the poetic values hidden in unpoetic things. This unique anthology introduces readers to collage-driven poetry that embodies the sensibilities of punk, trash, and camp in a line of writing that cuts through received taxonomies of movements, influences, and styles. Moving through the twentieth century, the poetry focuses on the unexpected, the anarchic, the demotic, the absurd, the irreverent, the coarse, the rude, and the deliriously playful. It marks an alternative strain of modernism that stretches from one side of the century to the other and includes such diverse voices as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Russell Atkins, Sun Ra, and Bernadette Mayer, along with many other well-known and lesser-known poets. Readers of Ingenious Pleasures will delight in experiencing poetry as they never have before.

Book Synopsis

By tracing the impulses of punk rock, trash film, and camp through poetry, Drew Gardner sheds light on a literary tendency that has been part of poetry's DNA all along: uncovering the poetic values hidden in unpoetic things. This unique anthology introduces readers to collage-driven poetry that embodies the sensibilities of punk, trash, and camp in a line of writing that cuts through received taxonomies of movements, influences, and styles. Moving through the twentieth century, the poetry focuses on the unexpected, the anarchic, the demotic, the absurd, the irreverent, the coarse, the rude, and the deliriously playful. It marks an alternative strain of modernism that stretches from one side of the century to the other and includes such diverse voices as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Russell Atkins, Sun Ra, and Bernadette Mayer, along with many other well-known and lesser-known poets. Readers of Ingenious Pleasures will delight in experiencing poetry as they never have before.

Review Quotes

"With ingenuity, perversity, and an encyclopedic recall of the deep tracks and B-sides of the last hundred years of poetry, Drew Gardner has provided a user's manual for those ready to update to Modernism 3.0."--Craig Dworkin, author of Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

"An antidote, a strident reply, a raspberry even to all those who talk about poetry as a genre of comfort, as a solace, as a High Art with no room for absurdity, anger, and insult. Also a rollicking fun read."--Juliana Spahr, author of Well Then There Now

"More indispensable than Wilson the Volleyball in Tom Hanks's Castaway, no desert island should be without a copy of this uniquely ingenious and wildly pleasurable tome of treasures. This anthology charts a new history and a new way forward for experimental poetics."--Paul Stephens, author of absence of clutter: minimal writing as art and literature