Lee Upton

"In civilian histories, her fourth book of poetry, Lee Upton portrays contemporary culture as the many-eyed, monstrous Argus and explores the common gestures among people and among cultures that constitute "foreign relations." Formally ambitious, ranging from short, allusive lyrics to long, intricately patterned sequences, Upton's poems reflect on complicity in and vulnerability to violence. Her poems also explore moments of hard-won triumph for the vivid, provocative people who inhabit them."--BOOK JACKET.

93 p. ; 21 cm

"Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman."--Publisher's description.

This study argues for a new reading of Bogan, whose complex position in regard to gender makes her one of the most provocative of the major modernists. Lee Upton analyzes the ways in which Bogan's poetry reflects unconscious processes marked by women's experiences, and she also explores both the implicit and the explicit violence that the poems embody in their opposition to psychological and social constraints. Rather than a repressed poet as she is figured in much contemporary criticism, Bogan is seen as self-consciously studying repression in poems of extreme confrontation, reflecting an aesthetic of difference, and intimating the workings of the unconscious. Upton argues that Bogan based her authority on her allegiance to the subversive unconscious rather than on cultural law. . Upton investigates Bogan's themes of obsession and release, among the primary psychic activities that her poetry charts. Obsession is portrayed as excessive preoccupation with betrayal in love and psychological engulfment, particularly as it is embodied in an unnamed force and culturally positioned to deny the female poet's "breath," and thus her art. In Bogan's allegiance to the lyric, the impassioned "cry," she expressed her desire to understand obsession. Increasingly beset by her own imaginative silences after the publication of her third book, Bogan sought to dramatize the process of release from obsessive fears of betrayal and entrapment.

The Muse of Abandonment examines personal and cultural forms of abandonment in the poetry of Charles Wright, Russell Edson, Jean Valentine, James Tate, and Louise Gluck. These poets register the tremors of the post-modern exhaustion of universals and a conflicted desire for authenticating presences. The first book to study these poets as members of a generation, The Muse of Abandonment analyses the poets' recasting of confessional and surrealistic legacies and discusses their reflections on coercion of thought and behavior, and an atmosphere in contemporary culture that would trivialize private sensibility.

In her most ambitious collection of poems to date, Lee Upton extends and deepens her experiments with perception and language. Drawn into the orbit of her poems are multiple figurations - a Dante-inspired guide and a Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, Hamlet's Gertrude, and Lewis Carroll's Alice - and Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, Louise Bogan, and Sylvia Plath. While investigating elements of women's biological, emotional, and spiritual experiences that prove particularly recalcitrant to language, she draws her attention to the "relentless experiment" of pregnancy and childbirth. Upton examines fleeting moments when objects are seen at the periphery of vision and draws upon the language we use in contemplating the psychic aftereffects of contemporary violence, dispossession, and exclusion.