Poetry & the Dictionary

Andrew Blades is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Piers Pennington completed his doctoral studies at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

• Part 1: Poetry and the Dictionary1.  IntroductionAndrew Blades and Piers Pennington2.  ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary’: Poets and Dictionaries, Dictionaries and PoetsCharlotte Brewer3.  Poetry in the Oxford English Dictionary: A Quantitative ProfileDavid-Antoine Williams4.  Lexicography in Modern PoetryMatthew SperlingPart 2: British and Irish Poetry and the Dictionary5.  Jamieson, Jargons, Jangles, and Jokes: Hugh MacDiarmid and DictionariesMichael Whitworth6.  Not even inventedDeborah Bowman7.  Proper Names, the Dictionary, and the Poetry of ExperimentPiers Pennington8.  Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’Mia GaudernPart 3: American Poetry and the Dictionary9. Briefer Mentions and Lyrical Lexicons: Marianne Moore’s Responses to Dictionaries in The Dial and ObservationsTara Stubbs10. A Collected Unconscious: James Merrill’s DictionariesAndrew Blades11. ‘All Things are Words of Some Strange Tongue’: Dictionary Definition Form in Contemporary American PoetryKate Potts12. Long Poems about Everything: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016Giles Goodland

Reviews‘This fascinating collection of essays offers a set of new perspectives on experimental poetics as a tradition and as a current practice. This will be a book of substantial interest to scholars, critics, students and readers of contemporary poetry.’ Professor Andrew Roberts, University of Dundee