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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries. 2 vols. Volume One: Issues and Institutions. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996. xi + 172 pp. $54.95; $16.95 paper.
In essays on contemporary American poetry and poetics published over the course of the past decade, Hank Lazer has sought to delineate the energies of what has variously been described as poetic postmodernism, the poetic avant-garde, or, to use Lazer's own phrase, an "oppositional" poetic. Much of Lazer's work has been focused on the range of American poetic writing lying outside the domain of what Charles Bernstein has called the "official verse culture," a culture defined by "mainstream" institutions of American poetry such as the major trade and university presses, the academic creative writing programs, and the committees administering major prizes and awards.(1) The poetry and poetics in which Lazer is most interested, and for which to a considerable extent he writes as an advocate, is largely defined by the movement known as Language writing. Although Lazer's two volumes of collected essays address a wider spectrum of poetries than the "Language" label suggests, most of the poets he discusses at length in Opposing Poetries are either self-declared "Language writers" or poets closely associated with the movement.
While the production of American poetry may still be dominated--numerically, at least--by the kind of mainstream lyric Lazer describes as the "well-crafted lyric of personal epiphany" (1: 99), there are also, as he argues, "many fine, important, and challenging poetries being written today," most of which "are inaudible in mainstream critical analyses, in the models used in creative writing courses, and in the `major' American...
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