An Ever-Renewed Experience of Its Own Beginning: Conclusion

Abstract

In this final concluding chapter, Carbery brings together the interdependent inquiries carried out in Phenomenology and the Late Twentieth Century American Long Poem with a view to consolidating the intertwined narratives of poetic extension and phenomenological inquiry explored throughout the book. The poets in the preceding chapters are phenomenologists only in part because they work in poetry through readings of phenomenology, but largely because they carry out the work of phenomenology by writing long poems. Carbery argues that long poems written in the ‘open tradition’ of Charles Olson are always inherently phenomenological. He returns to two questions posed in the book’s introduction: (1) How does phenomenology appear in the late twentieth-century American long poem? and (2) What does the rubric of ‘poetic extension’ offer the study of the long poem?