My Poetics - by Maureen N McLane

About the Book

"This new collection from the acclaimed poet and critic Maureen McLane works in an innovative register of essayistic writing: conversable yet grounded in scholarship, close-readerly but far-seeing. McLane's encounters with poems and modellings of poetry illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. With characteristic brilliance, McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems shape our condition and conditioning as sentient creatures? How do they generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surround--to the environment--and how do specific poems activate that relation? What is the difference between a poetry of "finding" rather than of inspiration? And how should we understand poetries invested in "the notational" and others committed to "projects" (as many contemporary poets are, as Wordsworth was in his Prelude)? As these questions suggest, My Poetics does not offer a brief for or against a position on poetry. Instead, its artful arrangement of readings and divagations (and even, occasionally, verse) show us a way to be with poems and poetics"--

Book Synopsis

Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry.

In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar--but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane's essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions: How do poems generate modes for thinking? How does rhyme help us measure out thought? What is the relation of poetry to its surroundings, and how do specific poems activate that relation?

If, as Wallace Stevens wrote, "poetry is the scholar's art," My Poetics flies under a slightly different banner: study and criticism are also the poet's art. Punctuated with McLane's poems and drawing variously on Hannah Arendt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, and other writers and poets, My Poetics is a formally as well as intellectually adventurous work. Its artful arrangement of readings and divagations shows us a way to be with poems and poetics.

Review Quotes

"My Poetics develops a sustained claim for poetry as a necessary art in the face of historical crisis and ecological calamity, a form of patterned making that cultivates resistant and responsive attention. Such attention is on full display in McLane's acutely sensitive engagements with a wide array of poets and poems. Equally attentive to the material conditions that shape poetry today and to the untimely histories of poetic practices and forms, My Poetics develops a bracing and nuanced investigation of the thinking that makes poetry and that poetry generates, again and anew. My Poetics will be an essential, enduring resource for readers and practitioners of poetry."-- "Margaret Ronda, author of "Remainders: American Poetry at Nature's End""

"By turns meditative and exhilarating, My Poetics is a dazzling companion to McLane's prodigious body of work. A moving, musical work of both criticism and art."-- "Anahid Nersessian, author of "Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse""

"McLane's spirited defense of poetics is a speculative ballad of clamorous voices approaching, yet averting, the sublime. Ever re-grounding in the world's whorl, McLane still reaches for stars, fiddling with rhyme / at the edges of time."-- "Charles Bernstein, author of "Topsy-Turvy""

About the Author

Maureen N. McLane is the Henry James Professor of English and American Letters at New York University. She is the author of four works of prose, most recently, My Poets and Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry, and eight books of poems, including What You Want, This Blue, and Some Say.