Histories of Selves: Space, Identity and Subjectivity

Abstract

The objectivist concern with placing experience within its context provides some indications earlier on in the twentieth century of the kind of poetry that might emerge from reconfigurations of time and place. The process of contextualization dissolves notions of figure and ground that identify ground as space and in a supporting role to the figure as time. In his essay ‘An Objective’, Louis Zukofsky describes the role of context in poetry:

A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries — The context — The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it — The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars — A desire to place everything — everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with, a context.—

A poem. The context based on a world — … The desire for inclusiveness — The desire for an inclusive object.

(Zukofsky 1981, p. 15)