Overview
- Synthesizes concepts of “myth” and “charm”
- Examines contemporary poets’ cult status and the particular charm of their writing
- Studies mythopoetics to understand the making of the figure of the poet and poetic communities
Part of the book series: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (MPCC)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes traces a tradition of revolutionary self-mythologising in the lives and works of Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes, as a significant trefoil in twentieth-century English language poetry. All three had untimely deaths, excited a collective homage, and developed cult followings that reverberate today. This book tracks the transmission of the poem as charm, the poet as charmer, and the reinstitution of troubadour erotics as a kind of social poetics. Starting with Orpheus, the book refreshes the myth of the poet as mythmaker, examining how myths of “self” and “nation” are regenerated for the twenty-first century and how persons-as-myths are made in community through coteries of artists and beyond. Duncan Bruce Hose’s critical vocabulary, with its nucleus of mythos, searches the edges of phenomenal enquiry, closing in on the work of “glamour”, “aura”, “charm”, “possession”, “phantasm”, the “daemonic”, and the logic of haunting in the continuing being of these three poets as “charismatic animals”.
Reviews
“This book is about three poets—Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes—in a network of inheritance and affiliation…bound together by a set of mythologies which established and renewed itself during each of their lifetimes. Lives, works, and acts of transmission come under equal scrutiny in a book whose presiding term, “charm”, makes legible the extraordinary powers of attraction exercised by O’Hara, and the horizontal and vertical networks of courtship, collaboration, and haunting that were generated by his presence and re-energised posthumously. The style of the book is itself charismatic: the thinking and writing is wholly distinctive for its serious wit, brilliantly managed shifts of tone and register, and wonderful lucidity across the larger arc of the argument.”
¬— 'Fiona Green, Associate Professor of American Literature, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge'
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Duncan Bruce Hose is a poet, scholar and painter. His published books include Testacles Gone Walkabout (2021), The Jewelled Shillelagh (2019), Bunratty (2015), A Book of Sea-Shanty (2014), One Under Bacchus (2011) and Rathaus (2007).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Pursuit of Myth in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan and John Forbes
Book Subtitle: Prick'd by Charm
Authors: Duncan Hose
Series Title: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94841-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-94840-5Published: 05 April 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-94843-6Published: 06 April 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-94841-2Published: 04 April 2022
Series ISSN: 2634-6052
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6060
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 306
Number of Illustrations: 17 b/w illustrations
Topics: Poetry and Poetics, Poststructuralism, Twentieth-Century Literature, North American Literature, American Culture