This book was a long time in the making. I'm deeply grateful to John Yau, Peter Gizzi, Kit Schluter, Margaret Galey, and Shanna Compton for their brilliant and dedicated labor as well as to the many folks along the way whose conversations, input, and notes enriched these essays. Special thanks go to Ingrid Nelson whose faith in my work has been unflagging.
After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.
"Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism is a treasure book of lively reading, research, and erudition, bringing salutary attention to the work of eight recent American poets deserving wider and deeper engagement. It is a book of elegant collation and crucial reckoning, lifted high out of the ordinary by brilliant, resonant insights and Pritchett’s fluid, cadence-rich writing—ever exact, ever adroitly qualified, ever with a rightness of touch—a juggling of weight and attunement he even makes look easy. The book offers an essential, exemplary study of important areas of concern in experimental poetry and poetics that are not often enough examined. Pitch perfect and scary smart, it had me smiling, tearing up, and crawling under my bed to hide."
Nathaniel Mackey
"I have long known Patrick Pritchett to be one of our most able critics of modern poetry, but the cumulative intelligence and imaginative understanding of these essays is something else again. Taken together, they present an argument for poetry—gnostic, messianic, and against the grain of language and history—that is as highly refined and as beautiful as any I have encountered. Pritchett’s erudition is profound but always handled with grace; it enables him to bring in other voices to support his reading at all the right moments. His clarity is a gift. Pound, Oppen, Niedecker, Olson, Ronald Johnson, Palmer, DuPlessis, Taggart, Sobin, Fanny Howe: Pritchett illuminates them all with skill, attention, and abiding love."
Norman Finkelstein
"In this brilliant and astonishingly clear study of late modernist poets—Oppen, Niedecker, Palmer, Sobin, Fanny Howe, and others—Patrick Pritchett demonstrates what truly engaged critical scholarship can become: not a form of light, but a mode of transformation, for as the practice of midrash teaches, the living text begins with commentary. With Pritchett we learn that war, in its endless horrors and outrages, whether in the 20th-century or now, can never adequately be written “about,” it can only be written through and with. As it breaks us again, we must respond in kind, with a broken and sorrowful poetics. The poem, in other words, is a burnt offering. The apophatic poets Pritchett reads with such loving attention and outstanding care un-say what cannot be said. Out of the ruins and the ash, an un-whole holiness emerges."
Julie Carr
"Poetry survives, even flourishes, not simply because it is read, but because of what poets themselves have had to say about it in all its variety and particularity. The poet Patrick Pritchett’s Make It Broken is an illuminating group of essays on modern and contemporary poetry whose chief distinction is the breakdown of form—fragmentation, parataxis, montage, or what Pritchett calls "radical formal disjunction." His lucid readings of sometimes difficult poems will make the reading of these poems a new adventure."
Gerald Bruns
