ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts the focus to Colum McCann and his experimentations with artistic form in the novella Thirteen Ways of Looking and his experimental Apeirogon. McCann's status as an Irish writer living in America interacts with his plots which span geographical and historical boundaries to indicate the hybridity of contemporary transnational poetics in ways that echo Stevens’ collagist impetuses. By deliberately incorporating quotations and formalistic innovations from the early Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” into plots of disjointed perspectives, a dialectic between poem and novelistic language is activated and sustained, which becomes crucial to McCann's larger interests in contemporary spaces and identities.
