From Library Journal
Rifkin (English, Univ. of Alabama) is concerned less with poetry than with "the multi-lateral space of avant-gardist identity formation." Her book is an odd compilation of materials, containing references to "positions of modified dominance," "revolutionaries," "social trajectories," and "the business of writing." The author's central argument is that postwar American anti-Establishment poets were as ambitious and career oriented as mainstream poets. Her coordinates for this discussion are Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted BerriganDnot so much for their poetry as their "forging...avant-garde poetic career[s] in a climate of inchoate anxiety over masculine authority and cultural centrality." Recommended for those who want to read about big Foucaultian concepts and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theories applied to the Berkley Poetry conference of 1965 and for those who are comfortable thinking of poets as revealing careers rather than lives.DScott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan and the American Avant-Garde FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Rifkin (English, Univ. of Alabama) is concerned less with poetry than with "the multi-lateral space of avant-gardist identity formation." Her book is an odd compilation of materials, containing references to "positions of modified dominance," "revolutionaries," "social trajectories," and "the business of writing." The author's central argument is that postwar American anti-Establishment poets were as ambitious and career oriented as mainstream poets. Her coordinates for this discussion are Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan--not so much for their poetry as their "forging...avant-garde poetic career[s] in a climate of inchoate anxiety over masculine authority and cultural centrality." Recommended for those who want to read about big Foucaultian concepts and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theories applied to the Berkley Poetry conference of 1965 and for those who are comfortable thinking of poets as revealing careers rather than lives.--Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\
Booknews
The relationship between "making it new" and "making it" is examined in the careers of four postwar "outsider" poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan. Rifkin (English, University of Alabama) makes the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as careerist as their mainstream peers, and shows how the nature of these poets' ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. She clarifies the link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon, offering a social history of literary ambition in American in the 1950s-60s. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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