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Towards a Poetics of Liminality in “this space between spaces”: The Shore Lines of Contemporary American Poetry
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René Dietrich
Published/Copyright:
January 16, 2009
Abstract
This essay discusses shore poems of four American poets of the latter half of the 20th century: W. S. Merwin, Elizabeth Bishop, A. R. Ammons and Denis Johnson. In reference to Whitman, the shore appears as a space created by poets for reflecting their status as well as for staging cultural conflicts of ambivalences. It is argued that the significance of the shore must be seen in regard to the critical discussion of the limit, in which liminality, advocated by Victor Turner, has become a key concept. It is thus the object of this essay to sketch a poetics of liminality for the contemporary poetry of the American shore. The focus hereby lies on the struggle with the limits of poetic language, the instable status of the poet as a figure of the in-between, and the social critique these shore-poets level against an America which marginalizes all that questions and does not fit into the ideological mainstream.
Published Online: 2009-01-16
Published in Print: 2007-December
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