Damaged Life: Poems after Adorno’s Minima Moralia

This is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about T.W. Adorno, taking a lead from various passages in his most accessible and engaging book Minima Moralia. The poems, like the book, are a complex amalgam of politics (always their ultimate focus) with philosophy, sociology, cultural commentary, aesthetic theory, and – not least – autobiographical reflections. The latter range from Adorno’s fondly nostalgic reminiscences of early childhood to thoughts of how school-playground bullying prefigured Nazi violence and how the experience of US exile in the 1940s evoked those same memories. The poems are examples of ‘creative criticism’, a genre that in this case allows the interaction of Adorno’s hard-pressed negative dialectics with a range of exacting poetic forms, metrical arrangements, and rhyme-schemes. They are ‘formalist’ in the active – properly dialectical – sense of deploying such structural resources to draw out meanings and implications that are latent or unspoken in the source-text. The book is thus on the one hand a tribute to Adorno’s unequalled powers as a social critic and cultural-political theorist and on the other a case for the kind of poetry that engages issues beyond the narrowly personal remit of much contemporary verse.

Details

• Series: utopos poetry #3
• Tags: poetry; formal verse; poetical commentary; Theodor Adorno
• Formats: Softbound and Ebook
• Pages: 253 pp.
• File size: 1037 kB (ePub)
• First edition published: 1 December 2021
• ISBN (Softbound): 978-82-93659-25-9
• ISBN (Ebook): 978-82-93659-26-6