A noted critic addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimentalpoetry.Silence as Susan M. Schultz argues here is an intellectual and aestheticforce... » 

A noted critic addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimentalpoetry.Silence as Susan M. Schultz argues here is an intellectual and aestheticforce largely unacknowledged that is a characteristic feature of much avantgarde poetry from Hart Crane to Susan Howe a strategy deployed by variouspoetic academic and aesthetic partisans in efforts to quell competingdiscourse and also a potent aesthetic strategy in itself.In a collection of case studies Schultz examines specific incidents of silenceand the impasses it creates in the poetic and academic landscape. She looks atthe issue of professionalism in both poetic practice and the academy whichhas become the caretaker of much of modern and contemporary poetry and theircompeting values. She explores clothing and fashion as central metaphors forthis professionalism what are the outfis and intellectual fashions of theday? especially the metaphor of language as clothing in the poetry of LauraRiding Charles Bernstein and LoisAnn Yamanka. Schultz further explores theproblem of formalism in the work of Riding and Crane whose extremity inexperimentation led to their silencing by the poetic establishment a problemlater overcome by poets such as John Ashbery and Bernstein. And she examinessilence as an aesthetic strategy in itself particulary in the work of Howewho wresltes with the Puritan legacy of male professors in the clergyministering to female confessors.The result is an extended meditation on the precarious balance amoung competingforcesformalism professionalism gender and voicein understanding andliberationg poetic discourse from the realms of silence and theimpasses itcreates.Susan M. Schultz is Professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoaand Publisher of the literary press Tinfish which specializes in experimentalpoetry from the Pacific. Editor of The Tribe of John Ashbery and ContemporaryPoetry her «