Restages fundamental debates about the relationship between poetry
and music Orphic Bend: Music and Innovative Poetics explores the
impact of music on recent pioneering literary practices in the
United States. Adopting the myth of Orpheus as its framework,
Robert L. Zamsky argues that works by Charles Bernstein, Robert
Creeley, John Taggart, Tracie Morris, and Nathaniel Mackey restage
ancient debates over the relationship between poetry and music even
as they develop work that often sharply diverges from traditional
literary forms. Opening each chapter with a consideration of the
orphic roots of lyric, Zamsky integrates contemporary debates over
the prospects and limitations of humanism, the meaningfulness of
gesture and performance, and the nature of knowledge with the
poetics of the writers under consideration, grounding his analysis
in close readings of their work. The myth of Orpheus is used as a
lens throughout the book, its different facets illuminating
sometimes dramatically different aspects of the shared framework of
poetry and music. In the case of Bernstein, for instance, Zamsky
highlights Ezra Pound's meditations on the relationship between
poetry and music (the ground upon which Pound seeks to recapture
the lost possibilities of the Renaissance) and Bernstein's incisive
critique of Pound. For her part, Morris emphasizes the performative
power of spoken language, foregrounding the fact that all spoken
language bears cultural, communal, and personal marks of the
speaker, improving an ensemble self even within the most elemental
features of language. Meanwhile, in Mackey's work, the orphic voice
of the poet powerfully reaches toward an order of knowledge in
which poetry and music are nearly indecipherable from one another.
In this sense, music and the musicality of poetic language are the
gateways for Mackey's Gnosticism, the mechanisms of initiation into
a realm, not of secrets to be learned, but of visionary knowing
that continuously unfolds. The text explores a range of musical
influences on the writers under consideration, from opera to
different iterations of jazz, and underscores the variety of ways
in which music informs their work. Many of these writers
effectively present a theory of music in their invocations of it as
an inspiration for, or as an analog to, poetic practice. Zamsky's
focus on poetry and music echoes important interdisciplinary
studies on literary modernism, a period for which the importance of
music to literary practice is well established and extends that
discussion to the contemporary context. In doing so, Orphic Bend
provides an important opportunity to consider both the specific
legacy of modernism, and to situate contemporary writers in broader
historical contexts.
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