Intro -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Linearity, Anomaly, and Anachronism: Toward an Archaeology of the New -- 1. Cacophony, Abstraction, and Potentiality: The Fate of the Dada Sound Poem -- 2. Corrosive Poetics: The Relief Composition of Ronald Johnson's Radi os -- 3. Interpretation and the Limit Text: An Approach to Jackson Mac Low's Words nd Ends from Ez -- 4. Transcoherence and Deletion: The Mesostic Writings of John Cage -- 5. A Chapter of Accidents: Disfiguration and the Marbled Page in Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman -- 6. From Muse to Mousepad: Informatics and the Avant-Garde -- 7. Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap -- 8. "To Lose One's Way" (For Snails and Nomads): The Radical Labyrinths of Constant and Arakawa and Gins -- 9. Difficult Harmony: The Picturesque Detail in Gilpin, Price, and Clark Coolidge's Space -- 10. The 'Pataphysics of Auschwitz -- 11. The Instrumental Nightingale: Some Counter-Musical Inflections in Poetry from Gray to Celan -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.

The Darkness of the Present includes essays that collectively investigate the roles of anomaly and anachronism as they work to unsettle commonplace notions of the "contemporary" in the field of poetics.   In the eleven essays of The Darkness of the Present, poet and critic Steve McCaffery argues that by approaching the past and the present as unified entities, the contemporary is made historical at the same time as the historical is made contemporary.   McCaffery's writings work against the urge to classify works by placing them in standard literary periods or disciplinary partitions. Instead, McCaffery offers a variety of insights into unusual and ingenious affiliations between poetic works that may have previously seemed distinctive. He questions the usual associations of originality and precedence. In the process, he repositions many texts within genealogies separate from the ones to which they are traditionally assigned.   The chapters in The Darkness of the Present might seem to present an eclectic façade and can certainly be read independently. They are linked, however, by a common preoccupation reflected in the title of the book: the anomaly and the anachronism and the way their empirical emergence works to unsettle a steady notion of the "contemporary" or "new.".

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.