Radium of the Word

Craig Dworkin is professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Reading the Illegible, No Medium, and Dictionary Poetics, as well as ten books of poetry, most recently, The Pine-Woods Notebook.

• List of FiguresIntroductionOne    The Prosaic ImaginationTwo    The Onomastic ImaginationThree    The Logic of the Work (on P. Inman)Four    The Logic of Print (on Russell Atkins)Five    The Logic of Spacing (on N. H. Pritchard)Six    The Logic of Registration (on Andy Warhol)AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

“We count on Dworkin to say the smartest things about contemporary poetics, so the smartness of Radium of the Word comes as no surprise. What does come as a surprise is the book's first sentence: ‘This book proposes a methodology.’ And it does not disappoint. Dworkin is reinventing the practice of reading by unscrewing the locks on its doors. Not close, not distant, not surface, not formal, not historical, not reparative, not paranoid reading. This book bypasses adjectives and heads straight for the nouns: the death penalty, paper cuts, opera queens, gossip, songs, riots, print, quotation marks, homelessness, names, the typeset line, spaces, prose. Oh, and poetry. This is a difficult book that everybody should read.”