Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry: Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

During the second half of the twentieth century, avant-garde American poets experimented with procedural forms—inventive, predetermined methods or rules for generating poetry. In Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry, David Huntsperger suggests that this mode of poetic production calls attention to the changing dynamics of intellectual labor at large. Procedural forms foreground literary labor, and in doing so, they remind us of the extent to which other forms of intellectual production have become formulaic. In this book, Huntsperger combines explication of avant-garde poetry with a discussion of the rapidly changing forms of labor in the postindustrial United States.