Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Four Lectures

Four Lectures

Rodefer, Stephen
Young, Geoffrey

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 1681379325
ISBN13: 9781681379326
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Apr 22 2025
Pages: 80
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.70 Depth: 8.10
Language: English
Originally published in the 1980s and out of print until now, Rodefer's four long poems are milestones in American avant-garde poetry.

Stephen Rodefer was an innovative, singular American writer--a student of Charles Olson's often associated with the Language poets but whose eclectic, energetic verse defies categorization and embraces a worldly lyricism all Rodefer's own. Four Lectures--first published in 1982 by Geoffrey Young's legendary press The Figures and long out of print--is widely considered to be his masterpiece. It is a book of four long poems that explore the radical possibilities of language through a generous, intimate collage of sights and sounds, voices and images, drawn from the poet's world. In city-block-like stanzas by turns philosophical and political, playful and playing for keeps, with freewheeling reference to everything from Shakespeare to Looney Tunes to Iceberg Slim and much else besides, Rodefer boldly reimagines the modern philosophical poem exemplified by T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for an inundating, fragmentary age in which there are more photographs in the world than there are bricks.

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