Mark Irwin

Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry. (Peter Lang, NY, 2017)

Monster explores abstraction through spatial, temporal, and conceptual distortion and disjunction in contemporary American poetry, and references contemporary visual art as it argues that memorable and resonant poetry often distorts form, image, concept, and notions of truth and metaphor. Discussing how changes in electronic communication and artificial notions of landscape have impacted form and content in poetry, Monster redefines the idea of what is memorable and original through a broad range of poets including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Laura Kasischke, W.S. Merwin, Mary Ruefle, Arthur Sze, and James Tate. Considering the impact of myth on originality, the book’s final chapter views contemporary and modern poets through the lens of three archetypal figures: “Orpheus, Parzival, & Bartleby: Ways of Abstraction in Poetry.”