From Library Journal
Rifkin (English, Univ. of Alabama) is concerned less with poetry than with "the multi-lateral space of avant-gardist identity formation." Her book is an odd compilation of materials, containing references to "positions of modified dominance," "revolutionaries," "social trajectories," and "the business of writing." The author's central argument is that postwar American anti-Establishment poets were as ambitious and career oriented as mainstream poets. Her coordinates for this discussion are Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted BerriganDnot so much for their poetry as their "forging...avant-garde poetic career[s] in a climate of inchoate anxiety over masculine authority and cultural centrality." Recommended for those who want to read about big Foucaultian concepts and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theories applied to the Berkley Poetry conference of 1965 and for those who are comfortable thinking of poets as revealing careers rather than lives.DScott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Book Description
"An engaging study of four major postwar American poets that ranges confidently over a significant amount of twentieth-century literary and intellectual history."-Tyrus Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book-Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan-the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground. Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets' ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon. "Career Moves breaks new ground, convening a topic that can't quite be said to have existed before now: the fluid realm between intention and act, glimmered purpose and subsequent publication, individual impulse and institutional codification. She has chosen for extended illustration a persuasive matrix of materials, ranging from manuscripts to conventional publications, and incorporating such unique sites as the public reading, the epistolary exchange, and the mimeographed little magazine."-Jed Rasula, Queens University "Rifkin's marvelous close readings are alive to all that is happening on the page, including the culture-wide discursive battles that are central to any poem's autonomy."-Bob Perelman, University of Pennsylvania "Rifkin advances a 'sociopoetics' of authorship in which the poetic career replaces the canon as the site of literary reception. A much-needed institutional history of four anti-institutional poets."-Michael Davidson, University of California, San Diego "Rifkin conveys with immediacy, freshness, and nuance the processes by which four poets, fashioning and manipulating institutional environments, went about constructing themselves and the communities of readers and writers who would sustain the avant-garde revolution."-Lynn Keller, University of Wisconsin-Madison


From the Publisher
Rifkin's study of four major post-war American poets (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan) addresses an increasingly timely literary question: how do writers craft their careers and how does our literary canon get defined? The result is a collective group portrait that reveals how American literature found its distinctive voice after the war, and how the business of writing has become an increasingly sophisticated career choice.


About the Author
Libbie Rifkin is assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Alabama.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

Rifkin (English, Univ. of Alabama) is concerned less with poetry than with "the multi-lateral space of avant-gardist identity formation." Her book is an odd compilation of materials, containing references to "positions of modified dominance," "revolutionaries," "social trajectories," and "the business of writing." The author's central argument is that postwar American anti-Establishment poets were as ambitious and career oriented as mainstream poets. Her coordinates for this discussion are Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan--not so much for their poetry as their "forging...avant-garde poetic career[s] in a climate of inchoate anxiety over masculine authority and cultural centrality." Recommended for those who want to read about big Foucaultian concepts and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theories applied to the Berkley Poetry conference of 1965 and for those who are comfortable thinking of poets as revealing careers rather than lives.--Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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