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Jonathan Monroe's most recent book, Demosthenes' Legacy, a cross-genre work of prose poetry, poetics, and short fiction, was published by Ahadada Books in early 2009.
Author of A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre (Cornell), and co-author and editor of Poetics of Avant-Garde Poetries (Poetics Today), Poetry, Community, Movement (Diacritics), Writing and Revising the Disciplines (Cornell), and Local Knowledges, Local Practices: Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell (Pittsburgh), he has published widely in the areas of modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, innovative poetries of the past two centuries, avant-garde movements and their contemporary legacies, writing and disciplinary practices, and interdisciplinary approaches in literary and cultural studies. His verse and prose poetry, short fiction, and cross-genre writing have appeared as well in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Epoch, Harvard Review, /nor New Ohio Review, Verse, Volt, and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where he is a former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, George Reed Professor of Writing and Rhetoric, and Director of the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, he has been a recipient of fellowships from the DAAD and ACLS and has served as a member of the Institute for International Education's Fulbright selection committee for creative writing as well as of the steering committee for Cornell's Institute for German Cultural Studies. His current project, following recent work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the Caribbean, focuses on postcoloniality, globalization, and contemporary poetry and poetics of the Americas.
What others say about Demosthenes’ Legacy
In Jonathan Monroe’s Demosthenes’ Legacy, the oracular orator nicknamed Demo travels a playful, intricate “path to unknowing.” Through a lifetime of rolling “word pebbles” in his mouth, as “language falters through its paces,” the quest for eloquence is transformed. In Demo’s virtual landscape, “net waves” of speech unravel and “audible suasions” conduct the reader through a “digital pluriverse” where “pronouns retain their right to grieve”. Beauty and knowledge emerge in language’s “predilection for uncertainty.” Experiencing language from within leads this Demo to a profound embrace of impermanence.
—Cecilia Vicuña
In this jeweled, aureate abecedary, Jonathan Monroe assembles an anachronistic account of Demosthenes’ “world beyond flesh.” What we find, delicious surprise, is a time porous with our time, aching for articulation. Clipped juxtapositions comprise each compact entry, vowels echo across the interiors, and sonic marvels are tapped to the dry-wall-stud of the prose with ringing nails. The legacy is our own. Monroe’s tensile prosody is masterful and the pleasures of the poems are exuberant.
—Forrest Gander
Is Demosthenes’ Legacy a translation of a real Demosthenes or his words or is it, as the impossibility of translation, fiction creating a character? Just as the word “kinesthesia” translates the sensation of movement (as if the word translates “muscle sense”), Jonathan Monroe’s fragments in Demosthenes’ Legacy are, as only immediate events, “Nobody’s narrative, no one’s dream.” The assembled fragments are Monroe’s comparison to modern media? Monroe’s playful text is a virtual “muscle sense” of the nature of event at all: “Webs released in matching threads.”
—Leslie Scalapino
And so I asked myself: Is Deleuzean stuttering brought to bear on classicizing rhetoric? In any event, stuttering proves eloquent throughout Monroe’s writing, by providing a thoughtful way to utter a poetics. Demosthenes’ Legacy is the fine consequence of this deliberative process.
—Marjorie Welish |
