Kirjahaku

Innovative study that sees much of twentieth-century American poetry as enacting, in language, pragmatic philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." American poetry has long engaged questions about subject and object, self and environment, reality and imagination, real and ideal that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment. Kristen Case's book argues that American poets from Emerson to Susan Howe have responded to the central problems of Western philosophy by performing, in language, the continually shifting relation between mind and world. Pragmatism, recognizing the futility of philosophy's attempt to fix the mind/world relation, announces the insights that these poets enact. Pursuing the flightsof pragmatist thinking into poetry and poetics, Case traces an epistemology that emerges from American writing, including that of Emerson, Marianne Moore, William James, and Charles Olson. Here mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "part and parcel of Nature." Case presents a new picture of twentieth-century American poetry that disrupts our sense of the schools and lineages of modern and postmodern poetics, arguing that literary history is most accurately figured as a living field rather than a line. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and twentieth-century American poetry. Kristen Case is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington.

An immersive, beautifully illustrated revelation of Henry David Thoreau’s final project—a monthly almanac of natural phenomena.In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “general phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time. Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

Divided into six dissimilar but related sections, Little Arias, simultaneously draws on and problematizes the linguistic roots of aria. On one hand Case’s tight poems (almost always delivered in the first person) do feel like small songs sung inwardly and quietly between the symbol crashes of the wide world and its chorus of voices. However, where operatic arias are all about the solo, Case prefers the duo. Her arias enter into conversation with philosophers, writers, children, and most often, memory. Memory is both self and not-self, both voice and not-voice; and yet, as poets, we re-make it all the time. Case explores this concept masterfully in the elegantly haunting “Miscarriage” and “Being with One Absent.” But she is at her best when mixing memory and influence in the quote-inspired segment of twelve poems, entitled Twelve Sentences.

A meditation on the centrality of predation to the Western lyric tradition. In dialogue with Wittgenstein's “On Certainty,” Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt,” among other works, Kristen Case's poems and lyric essays unearth the ways violence both disrupts and enables our ways of knowing—or approximating knowledge of—one another.