Overview

Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture, and Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 is an expansive and incisive examination of the patterns of connectedness in contemporary art and poetry. Allen Fisher—a highly accomplished poet, painter, critic, and art historian as well as a key figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s and 1970s—has a close and discerning connection to his subjects. In Imperfect Fit, Fisher focuses on the role of fracturing, ruptures, and breakages in many traditional ties between art and poetry, as well as the resulting use of collage and assemblage by practitioners of those arts. Fisher addresses, among other subjects, destruction as a signifier in twentieth-century art; the poetic employment of bureaucratic vocabularies and “business speak”; and the roles of public performance and memory loss in the fashioning of human knowledge and art. Commonplace notions of coherence, logic, and truth are reimagined and deconstructed in this study, and Fisher concludes by suggesting that contemporary culture offers a particularly robust opportunity—and even necessity—to engage in the production of art as a pragmatic act. Scholars of art, poetry, and aesthetics will be engaged and challenged by this insightful work.

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9780817358723

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These extraordinary essays by poet and painter Allen Fisher are foundational texts for contemporary UK poetics. For more than thirty years, Fisher has developed highly original, practical aesthetics based on a deep understanding of physics and psychology as well as art history, poetics, and philosophy. His poetry and his art works have consistently explored the ethics and aesthetics of the interrelatedness of science, art, and everyday life. In this essential book, Fisher persuasively gives the arts new scale and relevance in a scientific era. -Peter Middleton, author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry Few books about poetics are as hopeful and wide ranging as this one. Imperfect Fit should put an end once and for all to modernism's nostalgia for order as it describes varieties of a more pertinent practice in poetry and art. -Keith Tuma, editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry

These extraordinary essays by poet and painter Allen Fisher are foundational texts for contemporary UK poetics. For more than thirty years, Fisher has developed highly original, practical aesthetics based on a deep understanding of physics and psychology as well as art history, poetics, and philosophy. His poetry and his art works have consistently explored the ethics and aesthetics of the interrelatedness of science, art, and everyday life. In this essential book, Fisher persuasively gives the arts new scale and relevance in a scientific era. -Peter Middleton, author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry Few books about poetics are as hopeful and wide ranging as this one. Imperfect Fit should put an end once and for all to modernism's nostalgia for order as it describes varieties of a more pertinent practice in poetry and art. -Keith Tuma, editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry

Author Information

Allen Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, art historian, and performer associated with the British Poetry Revival. He is an emeritus professor of poetry and art at Manchester Metropolitan University and the author of several publications, including Sputtor, Gravity as a consequence of shape, and the seminal work Place.

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