Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
"To Teach is to Learn Twice" captures the sentiment behind how and animates why Daniel Morris decided to gather the following pieces into a meaningful pattern in this volume. Morris discovered some of the poets he writes about in this book when he was in his teens and twenties: William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Allen Grossman, Peter Dale Scott, and Louise Gl ck. These essays, however, reflect his "learning twice" about how to engage with their poetry as a seasoned teacher and scholar working in a different cultural environment when compared to the social world of his student days. The intimate tone - especially evident in chapters that recall his student years in the Boston area in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- reflects the personal nature of his "thirty year poetry workshop" as a teacher, literary critic, and poet. This book, then, is as much bildungsroman as it is a work of criticism.
Synopsis
In sixteen chapters devoted to avant-garde contemporary American poets, including Kenneth Goldsmith, Adeena Karasick, Tyrone Williams, Hannah Weiner, and Barrett Watten, prolific scholar and Purdue University professor Daniel Morris engages in a form of cultural repurposing by "learning twice" about how to attend to writers whose aesthetic contributions were not part of his education as a student in Boston and Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s when new formalism and post-confessional modes reigned supreme.
Morris's study demonstrates his interest in moving beyond formalism to offer what Stephen Fredman calls "a wider cultural interpretation of literature that emphasizes the 'new historicist' concerns with hybridity, ethnicity, power relations, material culture, politics, and religion." Essays address from multiple perspectives--prophetic, diasporic, ethical--the vexing problems and sublime potential of disseminating lyrics--the ancient form of transmission and preservation of the singular, private human voice across time and space--to an individual reader, in an environment in which e-poetry and digitalized poetics pose a crisis (understood as both opportunity and threat) to traditional page poetry.