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COPYRIGHT 2002 West Chester University
Ashury, John. 2000. Other Traditions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $22.95 hc. 192 pp.
The problem with much critical work on poetry, especially where the word "tradition" appears in its title, is that too often the discourse is grounded in the wrong place. Discussions originating around the subject of canon typically care more for the maintenance of diagnostic frameworks (in the Foucaultian sense) for poetry than they do the work they seek to frame. Not that considering context is a bad thing-- heaven knows we learned something from the New Critical decades. But when the task of locating certain poets and their work within a given historical or aesthetic lineage supersedes direct engagement with poetry--even when the discussion acknowledges alterity, plurality and fragmentation as part of the bargain of such placements--then we've got it all backwards.
When writing about poetry, begin with poetry. Which is exactly what John Ashbery does in...
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