Daniel Morris, <i>Essays and Interviews on Contemporary American Poets, Poetry, and Pedagogy: A Thirty-Year Creative Reading Workshop</i>

The 16-word title suggests that there is a lot going on in this peripatetic, promiscuous, and ambitious book. It is organized around the author’s professional journey: from Northwestern to Boston University, and Brandeis (where Morris studied with Alan Grossman and Frank Bidart), to Harvard (where Morris taught in the History and Literature Department), to Purdue University where for 30 years Morris taught as a professor of English. It is a story of a poet and critic engaging in regional cultures of the experimental arts while navigating the inevitable parochialisms of intellectual life.The intellectual range of these 16 essays and interviews is delightfully engaging. Morris includes discussions of, among others, Kathleen Spivak, Allen Grossman, Louise Glück, Norman Finkelstein, Barrett Watten, Tyronne Williams, Hannah Weiner, Daniel Y. Harris, Adeena Karasick, Amiri Baraka, Tom Fink, Peter Dale Scott, with a penultimate chapter on Phillip Guston, the influential American painter who was the subject of Morris’s job talk at Purdue in 1994, and to whom Morris returns in 2002 at the Philip Guston Now retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Together, the essays and interviews offer a kind of grand tour of the more (as well as less) familiar narratives of American poets, poetry, and poetics, both in and outside the classroom. Readers can expect fresh and at times surprising connections among poets and ideas—from the experimental literary cauldron of modernism through the experimentalist projects of objectivism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, conceptualism, posthumanism, and multimedia poetics.Not incidental to this intellectual chronicle is the formative (and generative) presence of William Carlos Williams. He was one of two poets Morris read in graduate school “with devotion” (the other was Louise Glück). In fact, Morris wrote a dissertation on Williams that would appear as his first book, The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self (1995). In this collection, the essay “Preserving William Carlos Williams: Populism, Curation, and late Avant-Gardism in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Duchamp Is My Lawyer and Thomas Lux’s ‘Refrigerator, 1957’” offers an account of how two contemporary poets preserve Williams’s modern poetics. Morris argues that Williams “encourages readers to focus on parts of the world that they might otherwise ignore” (50). To make his case, he begins with a commentary on “Between Walls,” a poem from the 1930s in which Williams attends to “the back wings / of the // hospital where / nothing // will grow” (CP1 453). For Morris, the distinctiveness of Williams as an “urban modernist” is his application of “form and language to curate a place where ‘lie / cinders // in which shine / the broken // pieces of a green / bottle’” (50).What follows is a brilliant reading of Williams alongside the conceptual poet and critic Kenneth Goldsmith––who, not incidentally, is founder of UbuWeb, a website repository for visual and concrete and sound poetry artifacts—and Tom Lux’s poem “Refrigerator, 1957.” Morris demonstrates how poetry “serves the late avant-gardist function of providing a conservational space of archival memory” (56). Reading the chapter, one can imagine Morris guiding his Purdue students through the rewards of an inter-textual and meta-textual method of reading. “By reframing the material culture of everyday life, Duchamps’s ‘Fountain,’ Goldsmith’s transcription of the entire September 1, 2000 issue of the New York Times in Day (2003), and Williams’s forgive-me note in ‘This is Just to Say’” (55), alongside Tom Lux’s “Refrigerator, 1957,” Morris explains, we come to appreciate more fully “Williams’s imagistic gambit: [that] well-managed language can offer preservationist value to what is precious, vanished, and vanishing” (60).In the final elegiac essay, entitled “Conclusion: Goodbye Heavilon Hall,” Morris concludes his 30-year creative writing workshop with a heartfelt in memoriam for recently deceased poets and critics before turning to an autobiographical retrospective on the occasion of the demolition of the building that housed the English department at Purdue. This coda to the book registers not only the end of a 30-year career but the erosion of a once-thriving department—the latter, of course, an indicator of the unsettling cultural precarity of literary studies and the humanities.The mood of this final essay will not be unfamiliar to the generation of academics who have dedicated their lives to teaching and scholarship in the first decades of the twenty-first century. For these readers, Morris’s intellectual retrospective will resonate as a deeply ethical project: a redemptive chronicle of the struggles and rewards in a life-long commitment to poetry and poetics, the history and culture of ideas, and the art of pedagogical practice, all of which come together in this story of a poet and critic who has fashioned a convincing and consequential intellectual life.