Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics

Prior to Meaning collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

"McCaffery gives us a sense of what learning would be like if it could free itself from the seminar room. The great thing is his pleasure in language and in the subjects of his investigation. Like all pleasures this one is deeply contagious." --Gerald Bruns, University of Notre Dame