Contents -- With Gratitude -- Acknowledgments -- Preface -- From the Givenness of Nature to the Encumbered Modern Body -- The Signifying Body -- The Two Bodies in the Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Body Observed Externally and the Body Experienced from Within -- The Modern Body's Unbearable Burden of Being -- The Harmony of Spirit and Body -- The Primacy of the Subject Body and the Recessiveness of the Subject Body -- Chapter 1. Four for America: Williams, Pound, Stein, Brakhage -- Styles of English Metre -- Meaning and Personal Being: Pound and Brakhage -- The Seachange: Or, How Pound Came "To Break the Pentameter" -- Bergson, Hulme, Pound, and Brakhage on the Body and Energy -- Experience as Energy: A Pattern for Thinking -- First-Person Singular: Bergson, Hulme, and Brakhage on the Primacy of Individuality -- Between Self and World: The Image in Hulme, Williams, Brakhage -- Writing = Composing Sound's Energies, Filmmaking = Composing Light's Energies: Gertrude Stein and Stan Brakhage's Conceptions of Their Media -- Digressive Interpolation: The Persistence of Emerson's Vision in Stein's Writing and Brakhage's Filmmaking -- Out of Stein: A Theory of Meaning for Stan Brakhage's Films -- The Paradox of a Perlocutionary Semantics: Brakhage and Stein on Artistic Meaning -- The Romanticism of Brakhage's Conception of Meaning -- Chapter 2. The Conception of the Body in Open Form Poetics and Its Influence on Stan Brakhage's Filmmaking -- D.H. Lawrence and the Poetics of Energy -- Two Crucial Influences on Embodied Poetics: A.N. Whitehead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- A.N. Whitehead's Project: Reconciling Permanence and Flux -- Olson's Energetics of Embodied Existence -- Michael McClure's Poetics: The Body Is an Organism. The Universe Is an Organism. A Poem Embodies an Aspect of the Universe's Evolving Form.

Allen Ginsberg: The Breath, the Voice, and the Poem -- Action Painting as Performance -- Glossary -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Stan Brakhage Filmography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.