A provocative overview of avant-garde American poetry of the past 25
years that raises important questions about the practice of criticism
Simulcast offers long overdue, highly opinionated, and penetrating
examinations of a flourishing movement in American letters by one of its
most perceptive practitioners. The four "experiments" in literary
criticism gathered in this volume vary in style and point of view. Taken
together, they reassess the fundamental relationship between poetry and
criticism.
"The Anti-Hegemony Project" is a satire, employing the rhetoric of
journalism and the colloquial exchanges of online fan groups to analyze
one of the earliest appearances of a poetry community on the World Wide
Web: the "Poetics List" maintained at the State University of New York,
Buffalo. "Poe's Poetics and Selected Essays" is a collection of
polemical essays on subjects ranging from modernism to language poetry.
The third experiment, "The Literati of San Francisco," is a detailed
portrait of the figures and ideas at the heart of an important literary
scene a decade after language poetry's inception. The final essay, "A
Short History of Language Poetry," provides a less polemical, more sober
and even-handed analysis of that movement from its origins to the
present and its prospects for the future.
These critical interventions and essays are important studies of an
evolving poetic field, but they also represent an evolution in criticism
itself. Friedlander's unorthodox methodology is to create a critical
text by rewriting prior examples of criticism, among them Jean Wahl's A
Short History of Existentialism and Edgar Allan Poe's "Literati of New
York City." The resulting critiques are themselves a kind of poetry.
They explore the issues of style versus substance, artifice versus
authenticity, and plausibility versus truth, while the shifts in
perspective call into question the authority of any one critical
account.
