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Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe is a 1992 book by literary scholar Peter Quartermain.

Overview
Introduction

Chapter 1: "A Narrative of Undermine": Gertrude Stein's Multiplicity

Chapter 2: Recurrencies: No. 12 of Louis Zukofsky's Anew

Chapter 3: "Instant Entirety": Zukofsky's "A"

Chapter 4: "Not at All Surprised by Science": Louis Zukofsky's First Half of "A" - 9

Chapter 5: "Actual Word Stuff, Not Thoughts for Thoughts": Williams and Zukofsky

Chapter 6: "Only Is Order Othered. Nought Is Nulled": Finnegans Wake and Middle and Late Zukofsky

Chapter 7: "To Make Glad the Heart of Man": Bunting, Pound, and Whitman

Chapter 8: Six Plaints and a Lament for Basil Bunting

Chapter 9: Exploring the Mere: A Note on Charles Reznikoff's Shorter Poems

Chapter 10: Robert Creeley What Counts

Chapter 11: "Go Contrary, Go Sing": Robert Duncan 1919-1988

Chapter 12: Writing as Assemblage: Guy Davenport

Chapter 13: And the Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe

Epilogue: "Everybody Who Was Anybody Was There": After Modernism, After Celebrity, John Dos Passos

Reception
Brian Conniff in American Literature: Peter Quartermain has been among the very few critics devoted to the seminal and experimental line of American poetry that runs roughly from Louis Zukofsky's An "Objectivists" Anthology (1931) through the work of poets typically associated with Black Mountain College, to the recent innovations of Lorine Niedecker, Michael Palmer, and Guy Davenport.

He is a fine reader of such difficult poems as Stein's "Lifting Belly," Zukofsky's Anew, and Howe's "Scattering as Behavior toward Risk." From the apparent impenetrability of these works, Quartermain uncovers a contest between reference and autonomy, unity and multiplicity, meaninglessness and hints of meaning, the desire for completion and the need for continuation—until, as he writes of Williams, the search for fixed meaning gives way to a delightful "play of the mind" (63).

Hazel Smith in Australasian Journal of American Studies: Disjunctive Poetics includes a stimulating introduction, very detailed and perceptively close readings of Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe, Basil Bunting, Charles Reznikoff and others, and some unusual additions such as an essay on writer, lecturer and intellectual, Guy Davenport. This is mainly a collection of previously published essays and consequently seems, at times, to lack a developing argument (it does not completely follow through the implications of the introduction). But the scope of the book is wide-ranging and it provides some really excellent textual analysis. It includes some discussion of non- American poetry (Basil Bunting) and the work of Robert Duncan, which might seem to belong to a very different line of development in American poetry than Stein's.

Megan Williams in Contemporary Literature: Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics offers one important historical context within which to place Howe's adherence to plural voices and beginnings. Quartermain suggests that one of the major influences on the twentieth-century American writer been the influx of immigrants. The pluralization of American culture has challenged notions of a monolithic culture, language, and history. The authors Quartermain examines share a historical context characterized by "[t]he increasingly uncomfortable misalignment, which relegated certain writers to submerged, eruptive, and insurrectional activity within and beside accredited modes." This position "was exacerbated in America by the linguistic disruption and even demolition of empowered cultural patterns through the agency of foreign immigration."

Alan Golding in Contemporary Literature: Compared with these rich discussions of the substantial final chapters on Davenport reading of Howe's poetics out of the first Behavior toward Risk"), some of the intervening the short notes on Charles Reznikoff, Duncan-have a "filler" quality about them. echo certain of the book's major themes main's claim that we can indeed talk about rather than merely some disjunctive sophisticated discussion of Basil Bunting's, prosody around the contrast between "desirable" or "self-sufficient" object ("will see from this distinction how Quartermain almost archaically New Critical language program.) It is precisely his concern for that makes Reznikoff hard to fit into a he might otherwise seem to belong. If of Bunting's work, "the word as thing" while Duncan earns "disjunctivist" status tion of system, formal integrity, and Christopher Beach shows in ABC of Influence, Romantic bias of his own tradition. Quartermain spirit nicely both in this obituary for Duncan longer memoir/elegy for another lost piece, anecdotal, informal in style and heavily on Bunting's life than on his poetry, biography of Bunting this emphasis has its uses. While Quartermain's close readings detailed than Perloff's, they are also consistent with his claim that

one must attend to the materiality never does he read with the intent he consistently provides information use of archival material, sound textual reminiscence. I stress this point because and Quartermain can sometimes seem mate close readers, closet New Critics. bother to read closely now that notions text have become theoretically suspect. both show that close reading can produce out leading to premature closure.

Elizabeth Maslen in Critical Survey: Disjunctive Poetics focuses on some of the most challenging experimental poets of this century as they explore language, its unreliability and pluralities of meaning and of readings. Quartermain argues persuas- ively that Stein's anti-authoritarian writing 'cultivates its own indeterminacy of meaning because it takes place in and is part of a world that is itself indeterminate."

Quartermain shows, America's pluralistic heritage shifted experimental writing away from the totalising impulses of Modernism towards a sense of the perenially provisional status of both text and language.

Clive Meachen in Journal of American Studies: Quartermain is to be congratulated for the steady and expert light he throws on his chosen corner of an ever-expanding field.

Ulla Dydo in Modern Philology: Disjunctive Poetics: its high-minded, forbidding title seems to announce a new theory heavy with latinate words of adversative relations, but no, this is a book of readings that sparkle as lively particulars.

Quartermain explores texts that arrest the mind by their striking inventions—and their difficulties. He sketches—the all too modest word is his—the process of deciphering them, never for him a mere academic exercise or application of technique. He reads with the benefit of years of experience; a fine visual and auditory sense of the physical life of texts; knowledge of linguistics, phonetics, and morphology; familiarity with literary history and philosophy. In research libraries here and abroad he has studied his authors' process of writing in manuscripts, drafts, notes, letters, and many have been friends, especially Zukofsky and Bunting. Above all, however, in a voice altogether his own, Quartermain writes out his struggle to read his texts as personal experience.

Burt Kimmelman in Paideuma: Bettridge's argument is grounded in the position Quartermain's canonical study of twenty years ago, Disjunctive Poetics. Quartermain details the events of the last century and more—which constitute an intellectual paradigm shift developments in science, technology, and other fields of human endeavor, perhaps captured in Henry Adamss comment that "the child born in 1900 would then be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple" (in Quartermain 186)—ultimately to talk about what Quartermain sees was "the central preoccupation" of then-experimental writers intent on responding to a new world. They "[recognized] that in preconstituting the world we de-liberate our experience, thereby foreordaining the real; [thus] their central insistence [was] on the autonomous nature of the poem as part of an indeterminate physical and socioeconomic world." The Modernists conceived of the poem as object. As Quartermain observes, Modernist "objects are difficult to read, because they challenge our assumptions about the processes of reading, about what constitutes 'value', about knowledge and about 'knowing'. A poem as a decontextualized object creates enormous problems for reader [...]" (5). LangPo, then, is not really, in some fundamental way, different from the work of a writer like Gertrude Stein or Louis Zukofsky (claimed as forbears by Bernstein, Andrews, et al.).

Jeffery Moser in Rocky Mountain Review: Therefore, Stubborn Poetries advances not just Quartermain's purposes and excitement but each of our own sense of rationale for academic inquiry and intensity for re-engaging with current poetry. This book succeeds an earlier work by Quartermain titled, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge UP, 1992). In Disjunctive Poetics, Quartermain examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers. Certainly, Stubborn Poetries is foundational for reappraising postmodernism and twentieth century language and literature which counter mainstream writing. Quartermain has at long last set down his scholarly reflections, ideals, and truisms about poetry and poetics from over 30 years of teaching and criticizing contemporary poetry.