Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry

Argues that if poems are to matter in American culture, they must be read rather than theorized over.

Holding Patterns provides a sympathetic criticism of poems, one that avoids the appliance of criticism and that self-consciously persists in close readings of texts as the directing force of its argument. Presently, contemporary literary criticism and contemporary poetry in America seem at cross-purposes. Indeed, current literary critics seldom address the poems of their contemporaries. Whil...