Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem

Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth-Century American Long Poem reads major figures including Charles Olson, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe and Rachel Blau DuPlessis within a new approach to the long poem tradition. Through a series of contextualised close readings, it explores the ways in which American poets developed their poetic forms by engaging with a variety of European phenomenologists, including Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Consolidating recent materials on the role of Continental Philosophy in American poetics, this book explores the theoretical and historical contexts in which avant-garde poets have developed radically new methods of making poems long. Matthew Carbery offers a timely commentary on a number of major works of American poetry whilst providing ground-breaking research into the wider philosophical context of late twentieth-century poetic experimentation.

Matthew Carbery is an Early Career Researcher currently living in Cambridge, UK. He is also an editor of EPIZOOTICS! literary magazine, and his poetry has been published in Tears in the Fence, Blackbox Manifold, CTRL+ALT+DEL, Otoliths, Stride and Dead King Magazine.