The Difference Is Spreading : : Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems / / ed. by Anna Strong Safford, Al Filreis.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• MitwirkendeR: Filreis, Al,; Safford, Anna,
• HerausgeberIn: Filreis, Al,; Safford, Anna Strong,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (272 p.)

Since its inception in 2012, the hugely successful online introduction to modern poetry known as ModPo has engaged some 415,000 readers, listeners, teachers, and poets with its focus on a modern and contemporary American tradition that runs from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson up to some of today's freshest and most experimental written and spoken verse. In The Difference Is Spreading, ModPo's Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford have handed the microphone over to the poets themselves, by inviting fifty of them to select and comment upon a poem by another writer.The approaches taken are various, confirming that there are as many ways for a poet to write about someone else's poem as there are poet-poem matches in this volume. Yet a straight-through reading of the fifty poems anthologized here, along with the fifty responses to them, emphatically demonstrates the importance to poetry of community, of socioaesthetic networks and lines of connection, and of expressions of affection and honor due to one's innovative colleagues and predecessors. Through the curation of these selections, Filreis and Safford express their belief that the poems that are most challenging and most dynamic are those that are open—the writings, that is, that ask their readers to participate in making their meaning. Poetry happens when a reader and a poet come in contact with one another, when the reader, whether celebrated poet or novice, is invited to do interpretive work—for without that convergence, poetry is inert.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Divya Victor on Walt Whitman, Canto 11 from “Song of Myself” (1855) -- 2 Rae Armantrout on Emily Dickinson, “The Brain—is Wider than the Sky” (c. 1862) -- 3 Ron Silliman on Gertrude Stein, “A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass” (1914) -- 4 Bob Perelman on Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” (1914) -- 5 Rachel Blau DuPlessis on H.D., “Sea Rose” (1916) -- 6 Yosuke Tanaka on Ezra Pound, “The Encounter” (1916) -- 7 Christian Bök on Marcel Duchamp and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, “Fountain” (1917) -- 8 Tonya Foster on Claude McKay, “If We Must Die” (1919) -- 9 Lytle Shaw on Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man” (1921) -- 10 Julia Bloch on William Carlos Williams, “The rose is obsolete” (1923) -- 11 Jennifer Scappettone on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, “XRAY” (1924) -- 12 Craig Dworkin on Bob Brown, from GEMS (1931) -- 13 Rodrigo Toscano on Genevieve Taggard, “Interior” (1935) -- 14 Mark Nowak on Ruth Lechlitner, “Lines for an Abortionist’s Office” (1936) Close here -- 15 Robert Fitterman on Mina Loy, “The Song of the Nightingale Is Like the Scent of Syringa” (c. 1944) -- 16 Davy Knittle on Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (1955) -- 17 Jake Marmer on Bob Kaufman, from “Jail Poems” (1960) -- 18 Danny Snelson on Jackson Mac Low, “Call me Ishmael” (1960) -- 19 Fred Wah on Robert Creeley, “I Know a Man” (1962) -- 20 Marjorie Perloff on Frank O’Hara, “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)” (1964) -- 21 Aldon Lynn Nielsen on Langston Hughes, “Dinner Guest: Me” (1965) -- 22 Sina Queyras on Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus” (1965) -- 23 Herman Beavers on Gwendolyn Brooks, “Boy Breaking Glass” (1967) -- 24 Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué on Barbara Guest, “20” (1968) -- 25 Tyrone Williams on Amiri Baraka, “Incident” (1969) -- 26 Sarah Dowling on Lorine Niedecker, “Foreclosure” (1970) -- 27 Michael Davidson on Larry Eigner, “birds the” (1970) -- 28 Christie Williamson on Tom Leonard, “Jist Ti Let Yi No” (c. 1974) -- 29 Laynie Browne on Bernadette Mayer, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1976) -- 30 Charles Bernstein on Lyn Hejinian, from My Life (1980) -- 31 Al Filreis on Cid Corman, “It isnt for want” (1982) -- 32 Adam Fitzgerald on John Ashbery, “Just Walking Around” (1984) -- 33 Stephen Collis on Susan Howe, from My Emily Dickinson (1985) -- 34 Nick Montfort on Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Shorter American Memory of the Declaration of Independence” (1988) -- 35 Eileen Myles on James Schuyler, “Six Something” (1990) -- 36 Simone White on Erica Hunt, “the voice of no” (1996) -- 37 Mónica de la Torre on Erica Baum, from Card Catalogues (1997) -- 38 erica kaufman on Joan Retallack, “Not a Cage” (1998) -- 39 Lyn Hejinian on Lydia Davis, “A Mown Lawn” (2001) -- 40 Elizabeth Willis on Rae Armantrout, “The Way” (2001) -- 41 Sharon Mesmer on Michael Magee, from “Pledge” (2001) -- 42 Rachel Zolf on Eileen Myles, “Snakes” (2001) -- 43 Edwin Torres on Anne Waldman, “Rogue State” (2002) -- 44 Amber Rose Johnson on Harryette Mullen, “Elliptical” (2002 -- 45 Jena Osman on Caroline Bergvall, “VIA” (2003) -- 46 Imaad Majeed on Charles Bernstein, “In a Restless World Like This Is” (2004) -- 47 Bernadette Mayer on Laynie Browne, “Sonnet 123” (2007) -- 48 Douglas Kearney on Tracie Morris, “Africa(n)” (2008) -- 49 Tracie Morris on Jayne Cortez, “She Got He Got” (2010) -- 50 Erica Hunt on Evie Shockley, “a one-act play” (2017) -- List of Contributors -- Index