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I am Otherwise: The Romance between Poetry and Theory after the Death of the Subject examines the contemporary poet's relationship with language in the age of theory. As the book works through close readings and interpretations of Adrienne Rich and Harold Bloom, John Ashbery and Paul de Man, Jorie Graham and Maurice Blanchot, and Barrett Watten and Jacques Lacan, it shows how the main psychological modes of contemporary poetry and the postmodern poet are anxiety, irony, abjection, and destitution. The book ultimately concludes that the new theoretical poetry self-consciously renders the effect of critical theory in its own construction. Whereas poets of the past tarried with nature, self, or philosophy, poets of our time unite lyric feeling with literary theory itself. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

I Don't Remember This... At All
This book is very well written.However, I do not remember writing it.Apparently, I am also a Dr. of the English language... I was unaware of this as well.If any knows me, or could help me with this predicament I would appreciate your help very much.I am currently in Kansas but I think I'm supposed to be teaching in Louisville... weird.

Unbelievable...
Alex Blazer was my professor at U of L, and when I bought this book I knew it would be amazing before I read a single word.This guy is a genius, and helps his students learn in the most creative ways...my final paper was the hardest thing I've ever written, but he made it worth while.Buy the book.We are lucky to have an author of this calibur in our generation.

Holy Cow!
This book blew my mind. I personally know the author: he is my professor and friend (we saw a movie and went to dinner together, twice), and is a complete genius. Buy this book if you love anything! ... Read more

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Join Professor Helen Vendler in her course lecture on the Yeats poem "Among School Children". View her insightful and passionate analysis along with a condensed reading and student comments on the course.

How does a poet repeatedly make art over a lifetime out of an arbitrary assignment of fate? By asking this question of the work of four American poets--two men of the postwar generation, two young women writing today--Helen Vendler suggests a fruitful way of looking at a poet's career and a new way of understanding poetic strategies as both mastery of forms and forms of mastery.

Fate hands every poet certain unavoidable "givens." Of the poets Vendler studies, Robert Lowell sprang from a family famous in American and especially New England history; John Berryman found himself an alcoholic manic-depressive; Rita Dove was born black; Jorie Graham grew up trilingual, with three words for every object. In Vendler's readings, we see how these poets return again and again to the problems set out by their givens, and how each invents complex ways, both thematic and formal, of making poetry out of fate.

Compelling for its insights into the work of four notable poets, this book by a leading critic of poetry is also invaluable for what it has to tell us about the poetic process--about how art copes with the obdurate givens of life, and about the conflict in art between the whim of fate and the artist's will to choose. ... Read more