Make it Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism by Patrick Pritchett

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After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

After the disaster of World War II, Ezra Pound’s exhortation to poets to “make it new” lay in shambles. The essays in MAKE IT BROKEN assert that a certain group of poets, taking their cue from both Pound and George Oppen, employed modernist strategies of interruption, negation, and seriality to recharge poetry with a moral acuity and formal audacity. By writing from inside the ruins, poets like Michael Palmer, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Fanny Howe use the very brokenness of language to redeem the poem in the wake of catastrophe.

About the Author

Patrick Pritchett is the author of six book-length collections of poetry, including Sunderland (2023), Refrain Series (2020), Orphic Noise (2017), and SONG X (2014). His poems have appeared in Hambone, Lana Turner, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and Talisman among others. Poems have been anthologized in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, and For One Boston. An Anthology for the Victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing.


His critical study, Make It Broken: Toward a Poetics of Late Modernism, was published in 2024 by Black Square Editions. He has reviewed poetry for Restless Messengers, Jacket 2, Rain Taxi, American Book Review, and On The Seawall and serves on the advisory editorial board for Journal of Modern Literature. Formerly an executive assistant and story analyst for Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, and HBO Pictures, he received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado-Boulder and has taught at Harvard University, Amherst College, Naropa, and Hunan Normal University in China. Currently he lectures in Comp Lit at Rutgers.