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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Indeterminacy
1. Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’
2. Poetics of speed: Mediation in Maximus
3. Mycopoetics: Cage’s Mushroom Book
4. Olson, lists and archives
5. Ideas in Cage’s I-VI
6. Models and mereology
7. Typos
Conclusion: Nonunderstanding
Bibliography
Discography
Index
About the author
Brendan C. Gillott is Praeceptor in English at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Summary
How do readers approach the enigmatic and unnavigable modernist long poem? Taking as the form's exemplars the highly influential but critically contentious poetries of John Cage and Charles Olson, this book considers indeterminacy – the fundamental feature of the long poem – by way of its analogues in musicology, mycology, cybernetics and philosophy. It addresses features of these works that figure broadly in the long poem tradition, such as listing, typography, archives, mediation and mereology, while articulating how both poets broke with the longform poetic traditions of the early 1900s. Brendan C. Gillott argues for Cage’s and Olson’s centrality to these traditions – in developing, critiquing and innovating on the longform poetics of the past, their work revolutionized the longform poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Foreword
Outlines the role of ‘indeterminacy’ in reading modernist long poems by way of the longform poetry of John Cage and Charles Olson.
Additional text
Brendan Gillott wonderfully adumbrates the centrality of indeterminacy in the works of John Cage and – more surprisingly – Charles Olson. By showing how structures and strategies of indeterminacy are not merely fundamental to Olson and Cage’s compositional practices, but are necessary elements of readers’ approaches to their work, Gillott sets out a new and provocative framework for reading these writers’ important long poems.
