Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance

Daniel Tiffany

oct 2009 · University of Chicago Press

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Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop?  Infidel Poetics examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture.

Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations—networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde—Daniel Tiffany shows that obscurity in poetry has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies.  For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres—thieves’ carols, drinking songs, beggars’ chants—a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal substance, a demimonde for sale.

Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy logos of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to Mallarmé, Infidel Poetics offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.

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Daniel Tiffany is the author of five books of poetry and literary criticism, including Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (named one of the "Best Books of 2000" by the Los Angeles Times) and the forthcoming Dandelion Clock. In addition, he has published translations of works from French, Greek, and Italian. His poems have appeared in Tin House, Boston Review, and the Paris Review, and his critical essays on poetry and poetics have been published in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and Modernism/Modernity.  He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.