A chapter on Twentieth Century Blues in Mark Scroggins' The Mathematical Sublime

Mark Scroggins, a fine poet and scholar of Zukofksy (among others) has collected a number of his essays on subjects ranging from Andrew Marvell to Rae Armantrout, Beowulf to Ronald Johnson, from the high modernists to Language Poetry and the contemporary avant-garde. He also includes his piece on my Twentieth Century Blues which I have had in manuscript for many years. It is great to see it collected in this volume, The Mathematical Sublime from The Mad Hat Press. (Details here)

Marjorie Perloff's blurb hits the feel of the book just about right:


What makes the fugitive reviews and informal essays collected in The Mathematical Sublime so remarkable is that their author is unpredictably brilliant and persuasive about such a wide-ranging and seemingly eclectic body of work. What other critic could move so readily between Language Poetry and the New Formalism, between anthologies of  contemporary secular Jewish poetry and the theological niceties of Geoffrey Hill, between Robert Sheppard’s Twentieth Century Blues and Susan Howe’s “hauntologies”? … You never quite know which poetries or critical studies he will like, but he is always persuasive in making his case for them…. It’s an electrifying performance!

Follow Mark's blog here. 

And there's a lot more about Twentieth Century Blues here.