Dictionary PoeticsPub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0006
C. Dworkin
{"title":"The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the Poetry of Tina Darragh","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 considers the work of Tina Darragh, which repeatedly turns to various dictionaries as explicit sources. Once again, reading the poems in tandem with the particular dictionaries used in their composition corrects previous critical accounts of the work and its origins. The chapter argues for the significance of Darragh’s interest in optical illusions and the continuation of that interest in her 1981 collection On the Corner to Off the Corner, where a comparison of the dictionaries used as its sources reveals a visual interest in the typography and graphic illustrations of the dictionary page. The comparisons further reveal that like Coolidge (as discussed in Chapter 5), Darragh understands the dictionary not just as typographical material, but as a three-dimensional object.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116963891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.7","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 4 focuses on two books: The Cave, by Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (published in 2009), and Coolidge’s The Maintains (1974). Attending to the collaborations’ claims of negative ontology and the shifting nexus of particular terms reveals the intertext at the heart of the book: Carl Andre’s contemporaneous sculpture Equivalents I-VIII. Indeed, the chapter follows the implications of the collaboration’s proposals to make an argument for considering the book itself as sculpture. Following from that sculptural reading, and the book’s equation of caverns and dictionaries, the chapter turns to The Maintains, alongside its dictionary source text, in order to detail the way in which it excavates the dictionary with an understanding of the reference book’s physical, typographic and sculptural space.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"54 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123856662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dictionary PoeticsPub Date : 2020-05-05DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0007
C. Dworkin
{"title":"Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823287987.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 6 considers Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge (1995), based in part on Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and the American Heritage Dictionary, in the context of the OuLiPo and Mullen’s other poetic engagements with the dictionary. Through a careful attention to her specific dictionary borrowings and the cryptic play of anagram, palindrome, and paragram in Muse & Drudge, the chapter explicates the poem’s argument for and enactment of miscegenation. Drawing on Michael Riffaterre’s theory of the hypogram and Jacques Derrida’s theory of the signature, the chapter uncovers the motivating poetic force of the proper name in Mullen’s poem. Together, these readings complicate the received critical accounts of Mullen’s sources and the very ways in which we imagine the relation between source-text and poem.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123976184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.6","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 3 focuses on George Oppen’s first two books, the lost 21 Poem (discovered in 2017) and Discrete Series (published in 1934). Considered by critics to be inscrutably gnomic, unrelated, and discontinuous (indeed, “discrete”) a reconstruction of Oppen’s source text—the Oxford English Dictionary, which had been completed to much celebration in 1928 just as Oppen was writing his poems—reveals his exhaustive inclusion of even the specialist definitions of certain key words. In addition to establishing continuities among the putatively discrete poems, the chapter offers fresh historical readings of modern mechanism (automobiles and elevators) that populate his poems and that served in turn, for William Carlos Williams, as the figure for the poems’ own lexical machinations. Furthermore, the logic of the signifier that structures the dictionary reveals an unexpected self-portraiture at work, across Oppen’s œuvre, in certain figures of glass enclosures and windows.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116576045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.4","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 1 focuses on Louis Zukofsky’s 1928 Thanks to the Dictionary, which retells the Biblical story of King David through language drawn primarily from a single dictionary page. Previous critics have been unable to locate the particular editions of the two dictionaries used by Zukofsky, but with those source texts read in tandem with Zukofsky’s poem, we are able to determine his method of composition and to dispel the notion that his work is the result of aleatory chance. Moreover, a close comparison of his source texts reveals telling deviations from the putative one-page rule, including an elided reference to Karl Marx, underscoring the political resonance of David in the era of Stalin, and a buried reference to Ricky Chambers which transforms the genre of Zukofsky’s poem into an elegy.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129393539","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A”","authors":"C. Dworkin","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.5","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 2 shifts its focus to Zukofsky’s long poem “A”, uncovering oblique political references to contemporaneous tensions in Jerusalem, the Triangle Factory fire, and African American musical revues. In addition to discovering the source of Zukofsky’s definition of “Objectivism” and clarifying local interpretive cruxes, the chapter elaborates the transitive principle by which seemingly unrelated terms (blood, tide, horse, pulse) and figures (Bach, Marx, Moses) are concatenated like the dictionary’s own structure of definitions. Zukofsky not only quotes from the dictionary, but he mimics its mode: condensing various denotations from distant discursive registers under a single word (such as camel) and lacing expanding networks that connect several—but not all—of the terms in transitive series. Accordingly, while any given line may seem oblique and incomplete, when read as a network the text reveals its most cryptically opaque phrases to be fully explained.","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":" 19","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132157744","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the Poetry of Tina Darragh","authors":"S. B. Flexner, L. Hauck","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11990qk.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":143594,"journal":{"name":"Dictionary Poetics","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123951650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}