Defensive Measures

Book excerpt: Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense. It demands a defense, it would seem, because it is perpetually in crisis - not only in regard to its utility and its aesthetic appeal (or the vigor of its renunciation of such an appeal), but in regard to its generic existence. Upton defines a generative conception of defense and examines in a new light the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Gluck, and Anne Carson. In writing about Bishop. Upton puts this well-regarded poet in a new framework, aligning her work with that of three poets whose aesthetics might be viewed as antithetical to her own ...