This book has been a long time in the making, so the list of people I feel I should acknowledge stretches to the crack of doom; for the sake of brevity, I will mention only a few by name. First, of my many friends and colleagues at Columbia University, without whose excellent companionship and awesome intellectual acumen I would surely be lost, I single out Brent Edwards and Jean Howard, who provided sharp and insightful readings of early versions of the manuscript, as well as Molly Murray, James Shapiro, and Sarah Cole for their ongoing support, both institutional and personal. Junior professors—you know who you are—rock! Michael Taussig, with whom I cotaught a graduate seminar on the dialectical image, has been an inspiring interlocutor and all around mate. I would also like to thank my brilliant Columbia students, graduate and undergraduate, former and present, who have contributed more than they can know to what appears in this book.
Over the years, I have floated many of my ideas about allegory and poetic form in sundry conferences, talks, and casual conversations with a host of brilliant critics, friends, and scholars: in particular the “New Mexico” crowd—Craig Dworkin, Anne Jamison, Stephanie Sobelle, Ondrea Ackerman, Matt Hofer, Scarlett Higgins, J. B. Bryan, and John Tritica—but also Brian Reed, Paul Grimstad, James Livingston, Ursula Heise, Andrew Schelling, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Peter Nicholls. My two best New York City buds, Bruce Andrews and Paul Stephens, have been constant companions and excellent partners in crime; they are constantly pushing my envelope. I owe an incalculable debt to Marjorie Perloff, who was and continues to be an inspiration and a model; the earliest pieces I wrote for the book—the chapters on Louis Zukofsky, Clark Coolidge, and Peter Inman—were originally conceived and written under her expert guidance. I also thank my Columbia University Press editor, Philip Leventhal, whose infinite patience and good will I fear I nearly exhausted.
Portions of this study were composed at the New York Public Library, where I had the good fortune to be a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers during the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. Huge thanks to Jean Strouse and her excellent staff as well as love and gratitude to the intrepid crew of fellows with whom I bunked for “the best year our lives” in Room 225. I also thank Kornelia Freytag of Ruhr Universität Bochum, the University of Pennsylvania Poetics Colloquium, Elisabeth Frost of Fordham University, and the Poetry and Philosophy Symposium at New York University for opportunities to present portions of this work in public.
Finally, I thank my family—my wife, Cherrymae; our daughter, Azara; our son, Chris—for their patience and love. You are an inspiring bunch and literally the lights of my life.