Contemporary Poetry

CONTEMPORARY
POETRY
Edinburgh Critical Guides
N
Contemporary Poetry
Edinburgh Critical Guides to Literature
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell, University of Leicester and
Andy Mousley, De Montfort University
Published Titles:
Gothic Literature, Andrew Smith
Canadian Literature, Faye Hammill
Womens Poetry, Jo Gill
Contemporary American Drama, Annette J. Saddik
Shakespeare, Gabriel Egan
Asian American Literature, Bella Adams
Childrens Literature, M. O. Grenby
Contemporary British Fiction, Nick Bentley
Renaissance Literature, Siobhan Keenan
Scottish Literature, Gerard Carruthers
Contemporary American Fiction, David Brauner
Contemporary British Drama, David Lane
Medieval Literature 13001500, Pamela King
Contemporary Poetry, Nerys Williams
Victorian Literature, David Amigoni
Forthcoming Titles in the Series:

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, Hamish Mathison
Crime Fiction, Stacy Gillis
Modern American Literature, Catherine Morley
Modernist Literature, Rachel Potter
African American Literature, Jennifer Terry
Postcolonial Literature, Dave Gunning
Contemporary Poetry
Nerys Williams
Edinburgh University Press
Nerys Williams, 2011
Edinburgh University Press Ltd

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ISBN 978 0 7486 3885 7 (paperback)
The right of Nerys Williams

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Series Preface ix
Acknowledgements x
Chronology xii
Introduction 1
New, Newer and Newest Poetry 2
Poetics? 4
Before the 1970s: Poetic Precedents 6
New Lines, The New Poetry, The New American Poetry 7
Blood, Bread and Poetry: Gender and Poetics 11
Multiformalisms: Form and Contemporary Poetry 13
Structure of the Book 17
Chapter 1 Lyric Subjects 25

Towards a Theory of Lyric Expression 27
Elegy and Epistle: Andrew Motion and Lee Harwood 28
Speaking (Auto) Biographically: Cathy Song and Grace
Nichols 31
Self-reflexive Lyrics: Portraiture in John Ashbery, Sujata
Bhatt and Jorie Graham 39
Nobodys Voice: Michael Palmer 47
Conclusion: Jennifer Moxleys Deceitful Subjective 51
vi contemporary poetry
Chapter 2 Politics and Poetics 58

Founding Propositions: Politics and Post-World War II
Poetry 59
A Day in Politics: Inauguration Poets Maya Angelou and
Elizabeth Alexander 63
Pastoral and Ludic: Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon 67
The Politics of Language: Poetry and the Public Sphere
Charles Bernstein 72
Reporting War: Eliot Weinberger 76
Politics and Poetics of Exile: Choman Hardi 80
Veterans Experience: Yusef Komunyakaa 82
Reclaiming History: Rita Doves Parsley 85
Conclusion: Reading the Archive M. NourbeSe Philips
Zong! 87
Chapter 3 Performance and the Poem 98

Open Field Poetics and Projective Verse: Adaptations 99
Countercultural Performance: Lawrence Ferlinghetti 101
Performing Race: Amiri Barakas Jazz Poetic 102
Dub Poetry and its Descendants: Mutabaruka, Linton
Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah 107
The Poet Performer: Drama and Comedy in Paul Durcan
and Don Paterson 112
Performativity: Lyn Hejinian 116
Performance, the Voice and the World: Kate Fagan 121
Conclusion: Performance Writing and Experiment:
Caroline Bergvall 124
Chapter 4 Environment and Space 133

Reading Space and Environment 133
Ecocriticism: Landscape and Ecology in Gary Snyders
Poetry 134
A Poetics of Place: Geoffrey Hill, Robert Hass and Anne
Szumigalski 137
The Spatial Turn 144
Space, the City and the Poem: Edwin Morgan, Kathleen
Jamie and Paula Meehan 146
Psychogeography: The Poet in the City Iain Sinclair 151
contents vii
Travelogue from the Regional to the Global: Robert
Minhinnick and Lorna Goodison 154
Ecopoetics and the Future 157
Apocalyptic Landscapes: John Kinsella 159
Conclusion: Juliana Spahrs Ecopoetics and Ideas of
Connection 161
Chapter 5 Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries 171

Global Poetry or, English as a Global
Language 171
Dialect and Phonetic Poetry: Tony Harrison, Tom
Leonard and Liz Lochhead 173
The big one, better tongue: Jackie Kay 179
From Orality to Text: Ethnopoetics in Simon Ortiz and
Joy Harjos Poetry 181
Bilingualism and Translation in Poetry 184
My glossolalia shall be my passport: Gwyneth Lewis 185
Immigration and Linguistic Difference: Li-Young Lee 189
Interlingual Poetics: Lorna Dee Cervantes 192
Idiolects or Ideolectical Poetries 195
Linguistic Cross-fertilisation: Tusiata Avia 198
Conclusion: Daljit Nagra 199
Conclusion 207
What is Electronic Writing? 208
Content-specific Electronic Writing: John Cayley, Jenny
Weight, Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, Reiner
Strasser and M.D. Coverley 210
Electronic Experimentation and Language: Peter Finch
and Trevor Joyce 214
Poets Playground: Flarf Poetry 217
Documentation and Poetry: Mark Nowaks Coal
Mountain Elementary 219
Textured Information: Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankine 223
Disseminating Poetry 225
viii contemporary poetry
Student Resources 231

Electronic Resources 231
Questions for Discussion 237
Glossary 240
Poetry Anthologies 247
Guide to Further Reading 249
Index 255
Series Preface
The study of English literature in the early twenty-first century is host

to an exhilarating range of critical approaches, theories and historical
perspectives. English ranges from traditional modes of study such as
Shakespeare and Romanticism to popular interest in national and area
literatures such as the United States, Ireland and the Caribbean. The
subject also spans a diverse array of genres from tragedy to cyberpunk,
incorporates such hybrid fields of study as Asian American literature,
Black British literature, creative writing and literary adaptations, and
remains eclectic in its methodology.
Such diversity is cause for both celebration and consternation.
English is varied enough to promise enrichment and enjoyment for
all kinds of readers and to challenge preconceptions about what the
study of literature might involve. But how are readers to navigate
their way through such literary and cultural diversity? And how are
students to make sense of the various literary categories and
periodisations, such as modernism and the Renaissance, or the
proliferating theories of literature, from feminism and marxism to
queer theory and eco-criticism? The Edinburgh Critical Guides to
Literature series reflects the challenges and pluralities of English
today, but at the same time it offers readers clear and accessible
routes through the texts, contexts, genres, historical periods and
debates within the subject.
Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley
Acknowledgements
Firstly, my immense gratitude to both editors of the series,
Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, for their original interest
and subse-quent support for this project. Their patience, alert
editorial eye and encouragement were appreciated throughout. I
would also like to thank the work of Jackie Jones and staff at
Edinburgh University Press.
Thanks go to colleagues at the School of English, Drama and
Film at University College Dublin. In particular I would like to
acknowledge my lively conversations with Michelle OConnell,
Porscha Fermanis and Ron Callan and the support of Maria
Stuart and Mary Clayton. I am also grateful to Nick Daly for
encouraging research life in the department in such a produc-tive
way. Pauline Slatterys wonderfully efficient management of
undergraduate academic life in the school (with the help of
Marguerite Duggan and Anne Cleary) made this process less
painful. The experience of teaching the MA in American
Literature and a course on Poetry and Poetics at UCD has
informed this project greatly. To those lively and inspiring stu-
dents who offered interpretations that opened up the poems
again (particularly Jean Hogan, Ciaran Lawless, David
McCarthy and Tobias Ryan) my thanks!
Much of the initial writing took place in the lofty space of the
Irish National Library, and I would like to thank the staff at this
precious establishment. Bob and Becky Tracey very generously
enabled a space at Berkeley where the final tidying up of the
manuscript took place. I appreciate their thoughtfulness.
Close friends and family outside of Ireland Sally Perry, Una a
John, Ifor Owen, Sue Currell, Ciara Hogan and Sarah MacLachlan,
Gaynor Jones provided necessary words of wisdom, especially
when there seemed to be far too many poets in one pot.
Special thanks go to my super furry animal, Cal, for
witnessing the process and keeping her feline eye on tea breaks.
A final diolch anferth to my husband, Myles Dungan, for being
in sync with the vagaries of a writing timetable, and acting with
such grace, good humour and affection.
Chronology
Date Historical Events Literary Events

1950 President Truman announces that the Charles Olson, Projective
USA is to proceed with the building Verse
of the hydrogen bomb; the Korean
War breaks out.
1952 Dwight Eisenhower is elected
President of the USA with Richard
Nixon as his Vice President.
1953 Soviet troops suppress strikes and an
uprising in East Germany; the Korean
War comes to an end.
1954 The defeat of French forces by the
Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu
effectively ends French colonial
involvement in Indo-China.
1955 In Montgomery, Alabama 42-year- Philip Larkin, The Less
old African-American Rosa Parks Deceived
refuses to give up her seat on a city
bus to make room for a
white passenger.
chronology xiii

1956 The Hungarian Revolution is crushed Allen Ginsberg, Howl and
by the Soviet Union after three weeks; Other Poems; Robert
Elvis Presley has his first number one Conquest, New Lines
hit with Heartbreak Hotel.
1957 The Treaty of Rome establishes the The Howl obscenity trial
European Economic Community. results in the acquittal of
publisher Lawrence
Ferlinghetti; Ted Hughes,
The Hawk in the Rain
1959 Fidel Castro assumes power in Cuba Robert Lowell, Life
after his guerrilla forces defeat the Studies; Frank OHara,
army of President Battista. Personism; Gary Snyder,
Riprap and Cold Mountain
Poems
1960 Cuba aligns itself with the Soviet Donald Allen, The New
Union; Penguin Books is found not American Poetry; Sylvia
guilty in the Lady Chatterleys Lover Plath, The Colossus
obscenity trial.
1961 John F. Kennedy becomes the Allen Ginsberg, Prose
youngest and the first Roman Contribution to Cuban
Catholic US President; the attempted Revolution
CIA-led incursion into Cuba comes to
grief at the Bay of Pigs.
1962 A Russian missile site is identified in Al Alvarez, The New

Cuba by a US military overflight, Poetry
precipitating the Cuban Missile crisis;
The Beatles first single Love Me
Do reaches no. 17 in the British
charts.
1963 President John F. Kennedy is Amiri Baraka, Expressive
assassinated in Dallas, Texas; Vice Language
President Lyndon Baines Johnson is
sworn in.
Xiv contemporary poetry

1964 The Civil Rights Act becomes law in Ted Berrigan, Sonnets;
the USA, outlawing the unequal Philip Larkin, The Whitsun
application of voter registration Weddings; John Berryman,
requirements and racial segregation in 77 Dream Songs
schools.
1965 American Civil Rights campaigners Amiri Baraka, State/
march from Selma to Montgomery on Meant; Sylvia Plath, Ariel
7 March and 9 March, they finally
complete the journey at the third
attempt on 21 March; militant
African-American rights activist
Malcolm X is assassinated in New
York.
1966 England, the host nation, wins the Amiri Baraka, Black Art
World Cup by defeating Germany
42 at Wembley stadium after extra
time.
1967 Israeli military forces win the Six-Day Roland Barthes Death of
war fought against its Arab the Author
neighbours in Egypt, Syria and
Jordan; race riots in Newark, New
Jersey, USA; The Beatles release Sgt.
Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band;
hippies and other counter-cultural
elements descend on San Francisco
for the Summer of Love; in Britain
the Abortion Act legalises abortions
by registered practitioners.
1968 The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Michel Foucault, What is
army strike against American forces in an Author?
the Tet offensive with limited
military but huge propaganda success;
Richard Nixon is elected President of
the USA defeating the Democratic
chronology xv

candidate Hubert Humphrey; Spiro
Agnew becomes Vice President; Soviet
forces crush the Prague Spring
peaceful uprising against communist
rule in Czechoslovakia; presidential
candidate Robert Kennedy and African
American leader Dr Martin Luther King
are assassinated; Pierre Elliott Trudeau
becomes fifteenth Prime Minister of
Canada.
1969 Neil Armstong and Edwin Buzz Adrienne Rich, Leaflets;
Aldrin become the first men to walk Tom Leonard starts Six
on the surface of the moon; the My Glasgow Poems, completed
Lai massacre in Vietnam is revealed 1979; Alberto Baltazar
due to the journalistic work of Urista, El plan
Seymour Hersh; the Woodstock Espiritual de Aztln
open-air concert takes place at Max
Yasgurs farm in upstate New York.
1970 The Brazilian soccer team beat Italy Ted Hughes, Crow
41 in the final to win the World Cup
in Mexico City; The Beatles announce
that the group is to break up.
1971 Battles between India and Pakistan Geoffrey Hill, Mercian
erupt into full-scale war when India Hymns; Adrienne Rich,
invades East Pakistan (now The Will to Change
Bangladesh) in support of the
independence movement.
1972 Richard Nixon is re-elected president Edwin Morgan, Glasgow
of the USA; five men are arrested for Sonnets; Seamus Heaney,
breaking and entering Democratic Wintering Out
party offices in the Watergate complex
in Washington DC; Labour leader
Gough Whitlam becomes Prime
Minister of Australia; Clyde
shipworkers strike.
xvi contemporary poetry

1973 The Yom Kippur War fought Mutabaruka, Outcry;
between Israel and the Arab countries Robert Hass, Field Guide
on its borders results in co-ordinated
action by Arab members of the
Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries and the first Energy Crisis;
under the Paris Peace Accord signed
by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho,
the USA agrees to withdraw its
ground troops from Vietnam; the US
Supreme Court in the case of Roe v.
Wade lifts most federal and state
restrictions on abortion.
1974 Richard Nixon becomes the first US
President to resign, his resignation
comes about as a result of the
Watergate scandal cover-up; Vice
President Gerald Ford assumes office;
a series of strikes, including a major
action by the National Union of
Mineworkers, brings down the
Conservative government of Edward
Heath in the UK.
1975 NBCs long running game show Seamus Heaney, North;

Wheel of Fortune premieres on Derek Mahon, The
American television; South Vietnam Snow Party; John Ashbery,
falls to the combined forces of the Self Portrait in a Convex
North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Mirror; Iain Sinclair, Lud
Cong; the Khmer Rouge take power Heat
in Cambodia, which they rename
Democratic Kampuchea, a reign of
government terror begins; Australian
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam is
controversially removed from office
by Governor General Sir John Kerr.
chronology xvii

1976 Democrat Jimmy Carter defeats
Republican President Gerald Ford in
the US Presidential Election; Harold
Wilson resigns as British Prime
Minister and is replaced by James
Callaghan; the Sex Pistols play
Manchesters Lesser Free Trade Hall
on 4 June, in the audience are fans
who will go on to form the Buzzcocks,
Joy Division, The Fall and The
Smiths.
1977 Elvis Presley dies.
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Tony Harrison, From the

becomes Pope John Paul II. School of Eloquence;
Andrew Motion, The
Pleasure Steamers
1979 Shah Reza Pahlavi is deposed as ruler Amiri Baraka, AM/
of Iran the Ayatollah Khomeini TRAK; Robert Hass,
becomes the spiritual leader of a new Praise; Iain Sinclair,
Islamic Republic; Iranian Suicide Bridge; Adrienne
Revolutionary Guards seize sixty-six Rich, Blood and Bread
American hostages when they take Poetry
over the US Embassy in Tehran,
the Hostage Crisis continues for 444
days; Vietnam invades Cambodia and
forces the removal from power of
the Khmer Rouge, widespread
famine affects the country;
Conservative leader Margaret
Thatcher becomes the UKs first
woman Prime Minister after the
defeat of the Labour party
government led by James Callaghan;
the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
begins.
xviii contemporary poetry

1980 Republican candidate Ronald Reagan Lyn Hejinian, My Life
defeats Jimmy Carter in the US
Presidential election, George Bush
becomes Vice President; John Lennon
is shot dead in New York; the Iran
Iraq War begins. It continues until
1988.
1981 American hostages in Iran are Lorna Dee Cervantes,
released six minutes after the Emplumada
inauguration of Ronald Reagan as
fortieth President of the United
States of America; Provisional IRA
volunteer Bobby Sands dies after
sixty-six days on hunger strike in the
Maze prison; influential Jamaican
reggae singer-songwriter Bob Marley
dies at the age of 36; Brixton riots in
Lambeth, South London, England.
1982 The UK and Argentina fight the
Falklands War.
1983 South Korean Boeing 747 jetliner Paul Muldoon, Quoof; Rita
bound for Seoul apparently strays Dove, Museum; Cathy
into Soviet airspace and is shot down Song, Picture Bride;
by a Soviet SU-15 fighter. Jorie Graham, Erosion;
Iain Sinclair, Flesh Eggs
and Scalp Metal; Anne
Szumigalski, Doctrine
of Signatures; Jerome
Rothenberg (ed.),
Symposium of the Whole: A
Range of Discourse Towards
an Ethnopoetics
chronology xix

1984 The Miners Strike begins in the UK, Grace Nichols, The Fat
it ends with the defeat of the National Black Womans Poems;
Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Kamau Brathwaite,
Scargill; Ronald Reagan is re-elected Nation Language; Linton
President of the USA. Kwesi Johnson, Making
History
1985 Reagan and Gorbachev meet at Lyn Hejinian, Rejection
summit and agree to arrange arms of Closure; Liz Lochhead,
control talks. True Confessions and New
Clichs
1986 The Space Shuttle Challenger Mutabaruka The Mystery
explodes and disintegrates shortly Unfolds; Li-Young Lee,
after lift off in Cape Canaveral in Rose
Florida, killing all seven crew
members.
1987 Gestapo wartime chief Klaus Barbie, Paul Durcan, Going Home
aged 73, sentenced to life for war to Russia; Jorie Graham,
crimes. The End of Beauty
1988 George Bush defeats the Democratic Michael Palmer, Sun
party candidate Michael Dukakis to Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien
become forty-first President of the Cai Dau
USA; testimony to the US Congress
by NASA climatologist James Hansen
highlights the threat of climate change.
1989 Communist regimes The
collapse in Poland, Ayatollah
Hungary, Khomeini
Czechoslovakia (the issues a
Velvet Revolution), fatwa against
East Germany, Salman
Bulgaria and Rushdies
Romania; the Berlin novel
Wall is dismantled The Satanic
and the year ends Verses, forcing
with the execution of Rushdie to
the Romanian dictator accept round-
Nicolae Ceausescu. the-clock
protection.
Xx contemporary poetry

1990 German Federal Republic Chancellor Derek Walcott, Omeros;
Helmut Kohl proceeds with the early Joy Harjo, In Mad Love
reunification of Germany; John Major and War
replaces Margaret Thatcher as Prime
Minister of the UK; the Iraqi forces
of Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait.
1991 The Gulf War, militarily codenamed Anne Szumigalski, Rapture

Operation Desert Storm, begins as of the Deep
American, British, Saudi and
Egyptian forces succeed in dislodging
the Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein
from Kuwait.
1992 Democratic candidate William Derek Walcott wins the
Jefferson Clinton becomes forty- Nobel Prize for
second President of the USA, Literature; Maya
defeating President George Bush and Angelou, On the Pulse of
third party candidate Ross Perot in Morning; Benjamin
the Presidential election, Clinton Zephaniah, City Psalms
won 43 per cent of the popular vote.
1993 The European Union is established Carolyn Forch, Against
by the Treaty of Maastricht. Forgetting: Twentieth
Century Poetry of Witness;
Jackie Kay, Other Lovers;
Paul Durcan, A Snail in my
Prime: New and Selected
Poems
1995 The US-led war Seamus
against the Heaney
ruling Taliban wins the
begins in Nobel Prize
Afghanistan. for
Literature;
Gwyneth
Lewis,
Parables &
Faxes;
Sujata
Bhatt, The
Stinking
Rose
chronology xxi

1996 John Howard leads the Liberal- Charles Bernstein, Poetics
National coalition to victory to of the Americas
become twenty-fifth Prime Minister
of Australia.
1997 Labour leader Tony Blair becomes
British Prime Minister.
1998 President Bill Clinton is impeached Lee Harwood, Morning

by the House of Representatives but Light
is subsequently acquitted by the US
Senate; the Good Friday agreement
signed in Northern Ireland clears the
way for a power-sharing executive; a
bomb planted by the Republican
splinter group the Real IRA kills
twenty-nine people and injures two
hundred in Omagh, Co. Tyrone.
1999 Hugo Chvez becomes President of Jennifer Moxley,
Venezuela. Imagination Verses;
Li-Young Lee, The Winged
Seed; Simon Armitage,
Killing Time; Caroline
Bergvall, Goan Atom
2000 George W. Bush narrowly defeats Michael Palmer, The
Vice President Al Gore, after a Promises of Glass
number of recounts in Florida and a
case taken to the US Supreme Court,
to become forty-third President of the
United States of America.
xxii contemporary poetry

2001 Two hijacked airliners destroy the Lorna Goodison,
Twin Towers in New York, and the Travelling Mercies; John
Pentagon in Washington DC is Cayleys windsound wins
similarly damaged in a successful Al Electronic Literature Award
Qaeda terrorist operation; the US-led for Poetry
invasion of Afghanistan begins and
the ruling Taliban government is
overthrown.
2002 The Euro, already formally in Kate Fagan, The Long
existence, becomes an active Moment; Sujata Bhatt,
currency in daily use in sixteen A Colour for Solitude
European Union countries.
2003 The USA and UK invade Iraq in Jennifer Moxley, The Sense
search of Saddam Husseins weapons Record; Don Paterson,
of mass destruction, none is found; Landing Light; Todd Swift
the Space Shuttle Columbia (ed.), 100 Poets Against the
disintegrates on re-entry into the War
Earths atmosphere, killing all
members of its crew.
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake results in Choman Hardi, Life for
Indonesian tsunami killing nearly Us; Claudia Rankine,
230,000 in 14 different countries. Please Dont Let Me Be
Lonely; Tusiata Avia, Wild
Dogs Under My Skirt
2005 The Kyoto Protocol Eliot
on global Weinberger,
warming goes into What I Heard
effect but without About Iraq;
the signature of Gary Snyder,
the USA. Axe Handles;
Juliana Spahr,
this
connection of
everyone with
lungs; Jackie
Kay, Life Mask
chronology
xxiii

2006 A few months after test firing missiles, Charles Bernstein,
North Korea announces it has tested Girly Man; Joshua
its first nuclear weapon. Clover, the totality for
kids; John Kinsella,
The Ocean Forests
2007 Opening of Northern Irish Assembly Laynie Browne, Daily
Stormont with First Minister Ian Sonnets; Lawrence
Paisley and Deputy First Minister Ferlinghetti, Insurgent
Martin McGuinness; former Art; Jennifer Moxley, The
Pakistani prime minister Benazir Line; Robert Hass, Time
Bhutto is assassinated. and Materials Poems 1997
2005
2008 President of Cuba Fidel Castro Robert Minhinnick, King
resigns; Lehman Brothers file for Driftwood; Geraldine
bankruptcy, acting as a catalyst for a Monk, Ghost & Other
global financial crisis. Sonnets; M. NourbeSe
Philip, Zong!; Daljit Nagra
Look We Have Coming to
Dover
2009 Barack Hussein Carol Ann
Obama becomes Duffy
the first African- becomes the
American first woman,
President of the first Scot and
United States of first openly
America. bisexual
person to
become
British Poet
Laureate;
Elizabeth
Alexander,
Praise Song
for the Day;
Paula
Meehan,
Painting
Rain; Mark
Nowak, Coal
Mountain
Elementary
Introduction
I love reading all those optimistic things that people say

about poetry. Those sweeping statements about poetry being
all about love, or poetry being all about countering the
oblivion of darkness, or poetry being the genre to comfort in
times of trouble. They make me feel good about poetry.
But poetry doesnt really work that way for me. For me,
poetry is a troubled and troubling genre, full of desire and
anger and support and protest, primarily useful because it
helps me think. Lyn Hejinians essays, her explorations of
inquiry, have been really helpful to me on this. My theory
is that poetry helps me think because it is a genre that is so
open right now. There are so many rules about how to write
poetry, that there might as well not be any at all. 1
Juliana Spahrs statement, taken from an anthology American Poets

in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, gestures towards two
seemingly antithetical directions for contemporary poetry. Poetry
can be seen as a salve for troubled times and a medium of comfort.
From another perspective, poetry offers a means for examining and
exploring the world. Spahr suggests that the form of analysis
offered by poetry may even provide discomfort. Her statement
valorises contemporary poetrys openness as a genre, yet
paradoxically she suggests that the proliferation of alternative rules
liberates our understanding of what poetry might be.
The aim of this book is to introduce students to a broad span of
ideas and movements, as well as essays and debates that surround
and inform contemporary poetry. By examining a range of
contemporary Anglophone poetry, the book seeks to promote
adaptive reading strategies and to create links between a variety of
poetic forms and genealogies. Interpreting poetics as the thought,
strategies and statements behind the poetry, this guide aims to
introduce key manifestos as enabling devices for interpreting
individual texts. In offering a range of different poetries, I show the
differing ambitions of authors for their poetry, and how the work of
contemporary poets interacts with politics, culture and society by
questioning boundaries and often transgressing assumptions. My
discussion considers how poetry comments upon the world and the
status of representation itself, as well as how poetry might develop
in the twenty first century and the interaction of media with poetic
forms. A central consideration for contemporary Anglophone poets
is how to consider the complexity of asserting differences in a
global culture without resorting to didactic definitions. In this aim,
the book considers poetry from the USA, United Kingdom, Ireland,
New Zealand, Australia, the Caribbean, Canada, India and
Kurdistan. My overarching intention is to illustrate how a plurality
of approaches to poetic form and linguistic textuality enables
innovative modes of thought. American poet Lyn Hejinian may
well suggest this multiplicity of poetic approaches when she states
where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas
for vocabularies.2
NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST POETRY
It often seems that Ezra Pounds rallying cry make it new is still
very much in circulation and with it the dangers of fetishising the
3
next new paradigm for writing. From a modernist perspective, one
can read Pounds calling as the need for literary endeavour to find
new forms in which to address the material of the modern. New
ways of representation may defamiliarise the everyday, or break
down what the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky referred to as
the automation of perception in which the ordinariness of every day
objects remains uninterrogated. 4 Even a brief snapshot of poetry
anthology titles since the 1950s indicates the predominance of
the really really new. Take as examples the following cross-
section: Robert Conquests New Lines (1956), Al Alvarezs The
New Poetry (1962), Donald Allens The New American Poetry
(1960), Michael Schmidts New Poetries (1994), Michael
Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morleys The New Poetry
(1993), and Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewells American Poets
in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007).5
A key question is how do we read new and can the word
contemporary be substituted for new? Gertrude Stein reminds us
that the term contemporary denotes a complexity of time frames.
As Stein proposes in her early essay Composition as Explanation
(1926), World War I necessitated that art forms needed to be so [. .
.] completely contemporary and so created the completed
recognition of the contemporary composition. 6 Stein insisted that
as a result an acknowledgement of the contemporary occurred since
Every one but one may say every one became consciously became
aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern
7
composition. We might also be warned that perceiving literary
forms as a simple dismantling of what has already preceded can be
problematic. American poet Ron Silliman, using an analogy of the
athlete, notes how an emphasis on the zeitgeist can seem to reject a
present perception of writing:
The production of novelty, of art objects that could not

have been predicted, and cannot be accounted for, by
previous critical theory, is the most problematic area in
aesthetics. Like a record in sports made only to be broken,
a poetics is articulated in order to be transcended. 8
Remarking particularly on the evolution of form in American

poetry, Silliman notes that what we are witnessing is a form of
acceleration in literary historicity where a poets aim can often be
9
seen as a vague commitment to Make it Different, if not New.
With this in mind I will be considering the contemporary as poetry
written in English produced over the past forty years. Wherever
possible I gesture towards a historical context, especially regarding
the evolution of poetic forms, conceptualisation of the poets ideas
through essays and manifestos, and a critical consensus regarding
tendencies in recent contemporary poetry. But in order to
understand what the implications of what being contemporary
might mean for poetry written since the 1960s, it is important that
we broach initially what we can understand by a poetics, as well
as some important historical precedents, tendencies and movements
that impacted upon the writing of contemporary poetry in English.
POETICS?
Jerome McGann in a recent collection of his essays on poetry The

Point is to Change It (2007) identifies his central concern: this
book is about the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.
When their dispute involves a claim to critical thinking, the
10
question is usually decided in favour of philosophy. It is useful
to consider poetics as a philosophy of poetry, the thinking of the
art of poetic composition. Key early philosophers and thinkers
whose work is associated with the creation and discussion of a
poetics would be of course Aristotle, Horace and Dante. The New
Princeton Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics states that poetics is at
its most specific a systematic theory of poetry. Poetics in effect
attempts to define the nature of poetry, its kinds and forms, its
resources of device and structure, the principles that govern it from
other arts, the conditions under which it can exist, and its effects on
11
readers or auditors. M. H. Abrams, writing in 1953, identified
four directions that poetic theories address:
Toward the work itself (objective or formalist theories),

toward the audience (pragmatic or affective theories),
toward the world (mimetic or realistic theories) and toward
the poet creator (expressive or romantic theories). 12
Remarking on the momentum of twentieth-century philosophy with
its post World War II emphasis on language philosophy and the
impact of French deconstruction, McGann suggests that poetic
writing found itself suddenly in favour: this kind of writing was
energized, since philosophys linguistic turn made the scene of
writing itself the source and end and test of the art of critical
thinking (p. xi). McGann notes that the most significant poetry
after 1848 has been consciously language oriented as opposed
to content driven (p. xi). Central to McGanns consideration of
more recent and radical contemporary poetries is that they imply
a marked change in the way we think about our poetic tradition
on one hand and the way we might engage a critical practice, on
the other (p. xii).
One can consider twentieth-century poetics as a thinking
through of ideas and declarations of intention. Essays and
manifestos by poets from the 1950s onwards provide a context for
understanding current poetic thinking. This book introduces ideas
from American poet Charles Olsons consideration of poetry as
kinetics or energy in his famous essay Projective Verse (1950) that is
central to understanding ideas of poetic performance, to Kamau
Brathwaites consideration of the development of Nation Language
which provides alternative approaches for considering the plurality of
Englishes in Caribbean poetry. In addition Charles Bernsteins
examination of what he poses as ideolects in his provocative Poetics
of the Americas (1996) creates a mode of poetry reliant less on a
multiplicity of identities than a plurality of different languages. We
might add to these essays, ideas taken from Lyn Hejinians proposal of
an open text in her essay The Rejection of Closure (1985) where
the readers participation is key in the construction of poetic meaning,
or in an alternative and more immediate key Mark Nowaks reflection
upon poetic writing as performing a form of activism through a
documentary impulse. We could also gesture towards Caroline
Bergvalls attempts to articulate what poetic performance writing
entails and John Cayleys propositions of electronic writing. Many of
the ideas that can be said to form a poetics are not made as explicit as
a manifesto essay; these can be remarks made by the poets during an
interview or reflections in prose that are not quite as didactic as a
programmatic description of poetic intent. Here one might include M.
NourbeSe Philips reflections upon her use of legal archives in her
volume Zong! (2009) for examining the slave trade, as well as the
volumes glossary to the African languages she incorporates into her
text. We might also consider Gwyneth Lewiss reflections upon the
impact of bilingualism upon her work, or John Kinsellas
considerations on the intersection of poetry and the environment
and the creation of what he terms a poisoned pastoral. A central
concern motivating the majority of these poets is their analysis of
poetic language as a method of examination or, as Hejinian notes,
poetry as a language of inquiry. Hejinian notes that the
distinctions between theory and poetry in her own work are indeed
negligible:
Theory asks what practice does and in asking, it sees the
connections that practice makes. Poetic language, then, insofar as
it is a language of linkage, is a practice. It is practical. But poetry
insofar as it comments on itself . . . is also theoretical.13
My discussion of essays, manifestos and reflections on poetry in

this volume considers the relationship between poetic theory and
practice to discern how a poetics can be mediated through
composition.
BEFORE THE 1970S: POETIC PRECEDENTS
In their collaborative essay Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto,

Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover playfully propose that poets need To
stop wringing [their] hands over poetrys lost popularity, that
autocritique more stirring than any Maoists. The manifesto is
obligated to say There are other countries where poetry still
matters!14 For all the whimsy of Spahr and Clovers positions, they
both believe that contemporary poetry matters, as both a disseminator
of ideas and an enquiry about the world. My division of the field of
contemporary poetry in this book into five chapters (1) subjectivity,
(2) politics, (3) performance, (4) place and environment, and (5)
global Englishes illustrates the expansiveness of poetrys
responsiveness to the world around us. While my project begins with
the poetry of the late 1960s, it will be useful to map out some
important precedents to the manifesto essays and groupings which
emerge in the twenty-first century. Romana Huk in discussing the
relationship between Anglo-American poetries notes that there is an
American tendency to read radical British and Irish poetics not as
different but as lagging behind American versions. 15 Equally I am
aware there is a danger of reading global Anglophone poetries through
the lens of Anglo-American poetries. There is a similar pressure, as
Rey Chow observes, in world literatures which are held together by
investigating multiple literary traditions on the assumption that there
ought to be a degree of commonality and equivalence and thus
comparability among them . . . [yet] the assumption of parity/sameness
is premised on a requirement of linguistic sameness/difference. 16 The
following outline of movements and tendencies emerging after World
War II is intended as a backdrop and introduction to the poetries
discussed in the subsequent five chapters, and not necessarily as an
abiding framework for their interpretation.
NEW LINES, THE NEW POETRY, THE NEW AMERICAN

POETRY
Different approaches to developing a new poetry are evident in

three key anthologies that appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s,
two in UK and the other in the USA. The first is New Lines: An
Anthology (1956) edited by Robert Conquest, which grouped
together elements of a tendency which would later been known as
The Movement and included John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings,
Thom Gunn, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, Donald Davie and John
Wain. These poets tended to see their work as continuing in an
English tradition. Peter Finch proposes that this impetus reflects
something of the English suspicion of modernism and insistence
on form, often at the expense of content, that has sidelined it on the
17
world stage. In his introduction, Conquest proposes that New
Lines is an attempt to restore sound and fruitful attitude to poetry,
of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man,
intellect, emotions, senses and all (p. xiv). His ambition moreover
is to regain a form of empiricism in poetry, the poetry present in the
anthology submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor
agglomerations of unconscious commands. It is free from both
mystical and logical compulsions and like modern philosophy is
empirical in its attitude (p. xv). Conquest adds that in terms of
form the poets refuse to abandon a rational structure and
comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly
charged with sensuous or emotional intent (p. xv).
Compare this gesture towards formal control with the
introduction by Al Alvarez to The New Poetry in 1962. Alvarezs
opening essay The New Poetry, subtitled Or Beyond the
Gentility Principle, considers that behavioural niceties and
politeness has strangled the evolution of British poetry. Alvarez
comments that Gentility is a belief that life is always more or less
orderly, people always more or less polite . . . controllable; that God
is more or less good.18 Passionately, he argues that our lives are
influenced profoundly by forces which have nothing to do with
gentility, decency, or politeness. Instead the poet may be faced
with the socalled advancement of the twentieth-century forces of
disintegration . . . their public faces are those of the two world wars,
of the concentration camps, of genocide, and the threat of nuclear
war (p. 26). Poets appearing in the first edition included Ted
Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Robert Lowell and John Berryman; the
revised edition published in 1966 included Sylvia Plath and Anne
Sexton. Lowell, Berryman, Sexton and Plath would later be
grouped together under the somewhat disparaging moniker of
confessionalism or confessional poetry. Alvarezs introduction
also makes a link between the evolution of psychoanalysis and
history, or what he acknowledges as the forceable recognition of
mass evil outside us has developed precisely in parallel with
psychoanalysis (p. 27).
As a general tendency, confessional poetry presented
psychoanalytical concerns in addition to dramatising extreme states
of being and violence. The word dramatising here is key; an early
critical trend had been to examine the work of these poets through
their biography, rather than view the extreme voices as a series of
personae. One might consider, for example, the intrusion of popular
culture into the construction of selfhood exhibited in Plaths poems
such as Lady Lazarus and The Applicant. Or, there is the teasing
playfulness of Berrymans The Dream Songs with its evolving
multi-persona Henry. Dream Song 14 comes to mind with its
statement: Life, friends, is boring and the engaging retort to his
mothers admonition Ever to confess youre bored / means you
have no / Inner Resources. Henry replies I conclude now I have
no / inner resources.19 To an extent the psychoanalytic turn can be
viewed as a belated identification in poetry, corresponding to
Alvarezs more recent essays on poetry, in which he notes that:
When during the celebration of his seventieth birthday, one of

his disciples hailed Freud as the discoverer of the
unconscious, he answered the poets and philosophers before
me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the
scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied. 20
Similarly, psychoanalysis in the confessional school acts as a

framing device rather than a stylistic determinant. Alvarezs
anthology presented a post-World War II poetic that was
urgently attempting to address new subject matter for poetry, as
well as responding to the more constraining elements of The
Movement, in a desire to find articulation, or what commonly
became referred to as finding ones voice.
In the USA the emergence of Donald Allens collection of
American poets The New American Poetry (1960) collected three
general tendencies in American poetry. The first was an
experimental grouping, collectively known as the Black Mountain
School, primarily identified with the tutelage of Charles Olson
(Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov). The
anthology also included poets from the San Francisco Bay Area
whose work probed the social aftermath of World War II, as well as
a general examination of new social collectives. Poets such as
Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Levertov were
collectively linked to the San Francisco Renaissance. Finally, the
New York School provided a collective naming to artists whose
work was loosely affiliated to the representational enquiry enacted
by abstract expressionism (Frank OHara, John Ashbery, Kenneth
Koch, Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), Helen Adam and
Levertov). In a retrospective note to the new edition of the volume,
operating under the title The Postmoderns: The New American
Poetry Revised (1982), Allen is keen to stress that the identification
of his anthology with the purely experimental runs a risk of
marginalising the work of the poets included:
Increasingly literary and cultural historians have come to

recognize that these are among the most truly authentic,
indigenous American writers following in the mainstream
of Emerson and Whitman Pound and Williams. 21
Allen is keen to characterise the poems he selected under the

rubric of immediacy and spontaneity. Here we are far from the
logical restraints of retrospective reflection and control through
craft that dominate the methodology of Conquests New Lines.
Allen suggests that the poets in The New American Poetry:
Respond to the limits of industrialisms, and high technology

often by a marked spiritual advance or deference, an
embracing of the primal energies of the tribal or communal
spirit, side by side with the most stubborn sort of American
individualism. Their influence on English speaking poetry at
large has reversed the longstanding obeisance to academically
sanctioned formalism. Their most common bond is a
spontaneous utilization of subject and technique, a prevailing
instantism that nevertheless does not preclude discursive
ponderings and large canvassed reflections. (p. 9)
Turning to the essays of this anthology, compiled as The Poetics of

The New American Poetry, there is an immediate sense of poetry as
a plurality of responses to differing communities. 22 Central to many
of the discussions is the perception of poetry itself as performance.
Frank OHaras mock manifesto Personism (1959), which is often
read as an antidote to confessional poetry, challenges that
Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which
nobody knows about . . . has nothing to do with philosophy, its all
art, adding It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the
person (p. 354). In a spirit of playfulness, OHara poses I dont
even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just have to go on
your nerve (p. 353). Gary Snyders interests in Buddhism, the
environment and anthropology would later inform ecocritical
movements and studies in ethnopoetics. Amiri Barakas explosive
State/meant (1965) written as a radical gesture during the
emergence of Black Power and Black pride in the mid sixties,
forces us to consider poetry as militant action. Moreover,
Barakas Expressive Language (1963) introduces ideas of
colonialism and slavery to a discussion of the wresting of power
in poetic language. He articulates the need for poetry to assert
racial difference through forms that challenge tradition. Baraka
chillingly asserts that being told to speak proper means that
you become fluent with the jargon of power (p. 377). We could
add to these Allen Ginsbergs visionary poetics, his meditations
on sexuality and a queering of poetic expectation in Prose
Contribution to Cuban Revolution (1961):
Meanwhile for a sense of the rightness of life I trusted people

most, that is Friendship & the recognition of the light in
peoples eyes; and from then on I pursued & idealized
friendship especially in Poesy which was the manifestation of
this light of friendship secret in all man, open in some few. (p.
336)
Allens anthology presents a compendium of influential

approaches to configuring the poetics of a new American poetry.
Reading the anthology half a century later, one is aware how the
poetic essay and manifesto raise crucial ideas regarding the
responsiveness of poetry to configurations of race, performance,
sexuality and gender.
BLOOD, BREAD AND POETRY: GENDER AND POETICS
In her cornerstone essay on gender and poetry Blood, Bread and

Poetry (1979) Adrienne Rich reflects upon the momentum of
the 1960s as releasing a revolutionary ambition:
The idea of freedom so much invoked during World War II

had become pretty abstract politically in the fifties. Freedom
then as now was supposed to be what Western democracies
believe in, and the Iron Curtain Soviet bloc was deprived of.
The Existentialist philosophers who were beginning to be read
and discussed among young intellectuals spoke of freedom as
something connected with revolt.23
The search for the direct representation of womens experiences
through literary production was a key motivation to Richs poetic
evolution. In this context a new poetic was the immediate address of
the drive towards political, financial and social equality for women.
Rich comments that To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a
womans body and experience, to take womens existence seriously as
a theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do .
. . all my writing life (p. 535). But this acknowledgement of a poetic
programme was not an easy encounter since she admits: It placed me
nakedly face-to-face with both terror and anger; it did indeed imply the
breakdown of the world as I had always known it, the end of safety (p.
535). We witness this evolutionary movement in Richs own poetry
which abandons the earlier, more constraining formality of tone, to a
direct address of womens daily experience. The brutal admonitions of
Richs poem from Leaflets (1969) entitled 5:30 A.M. are evident. In
this poem the speaker describes Birds and periodic blood and a
pharmaceutical industry which manipulates a collective us with pills
for bleeding, pills for panic, to which she urges wash them down the
sink.24 Richs slightly later volume The Will to Change (1971)
includes similar poems of protest against war, and the abuse of human
and womens rights. Her poetry also brings to light womens histories,
which can be seen as a part of a recuperative project of affirming and
celebrating womens narratives within history. Planetarium is
dedicated to Caroline Herschel (the sister of the astronomer William
Herschel), who was credited with the discovery of eight comets. In this
poem Rich makes a direct comparison between the representation of
constellations as mythic monsters a monster in the shape of a
woman / the skies are full of them (p. 114) and the figure of the
female astrologer as a medium for receiving heartbeat of the pulsar as
well as encountering the NOVA (p. 115). In effect Catherine is
presented as the receptor of transmissions, she is an instrument in the
shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations (p. 116). Richs
recuperative project would be followed by diverse poets such as
American Susan Howes excavations of literary texts and documents,
Irish poet Eavan Bolands exploration of politics and violence, and
Jamaican Jean Binta Breezes combina
tion of orality and performance to represent womens everyday
experiences in dub poetics. As Rich reflects in Blood, Bread and
Poetry, Women have understood that we needed an art of our
own: to remind us of our history (p. 536).
MULTIFORMALISMS: FORM AND CONTEMPORARY

POETRY
Charles Olson in his celebrated essay Projective Verse (1950)

claimed that FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION
OF CONTENT. Olson argued for an open poetics, what he
famously termed as composition by field, as a challenge to
predetermined form and composition. Reading recent poetry,
Olsons essay has a surprising resonance, particularly his insistence
upon musicality and what he termed kinetics (or a form of poetic
energy) as a guiding principle to poetic form. While contemporary
poets might engage with open propositions of form guided by the
liberties of free verse, it would be a mistake to con-sider
contemporary poetry as formless. The frequent analogies between
poetry and musicality made over the past decades by poets such as
Bernstein, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Baraka and Kate Fagan suggest
that the alliterative, onomatopoeic and material possibilities of
language remain central to contemporary composition. Although far
from the call to order through craft, measure and rhyme exhibited
in Conquests New Lines, numerous contemporary poets find
formal constraints as a way of exploration and paradoxically
enabling variation in their writing. An evident example in this study
is Hejinians use of numerical rules for her evolving poetic prose
autobiography My Life (1980). Written at age thirty-seven, the
autobiography included thirty-seven sections each with thirty-seven
sentences. On its republishing at age forty-five, eight new sections
were added and eight sentences added in each of the existing
sections, as Hejinian considered it a generative and ongoing work.
Many of the poets I examine in this book are engaged in an
exploration of the longer poetic work (or sequence), which depends
upon anaphoric structures for development and structure poets as
diverse as Michael Palmer, Gwyneth Lewis, John Kinsella,
Geoffrey Hill and Juliana Spahr.
It is important to note, however, that contemporary poets use

established forms as a guide, such as the villanelle, epic poem with
its terza rima and sonnet structures. Annie Finch and Susan M.
Schultzs edited collection of essays Multiformalisms: Postmodern
Poetics of Form revises any alignment of formalism with a return to
25
didactic structures. According to Finch, poetic formalism is now
much more widely recognized as an infinitely complex set of poetic
possibilities than it was ten years ago, and younger critics and
scholars are increasingly realizing the numerous theoretical
possibilities for addressing poetry in form (p. 11). Finchs aim is to
redeem the idea of that formalism no longer perceived as
anachronistic, or hopelessly out of touch with contemporary life.
She hopes that Another truism this book may shake up is the idea
that formal poetry has an inherent connection with rational or dis-
cursive kinds of discourse (p. 12). Finch questions whether the
subversion of syntax is the only way to foreground and complicate
poetic language? Recent work . . . shows that metrical poetry can
easily coexist along with the subversion of grammatical and syntac-
tical conventions (pp. 1213). In contrast, Schultzs focus is on the
relationship between form and politics and race. Pertinently she
poses: How must considerations of form in contemporary poetry
be adjusted to look at the work by minority writers, whose relation-
ship with the tradition [aka the Western tradition], is more fraught
with peril than that of majority writers? (p. 15).
The most stunning example of a contemporary poets
engagement with formal structure must be Caribbean poet Derek
Walcotts epic Omeros (1990). Michael Schmidt has declared
that for Walcott:
Herrick and Herbert belong to him as much as they belong
to Larkin . . . To hear Walcott (on the page) can make it
possible for a poet in St Lucia, Auckland, Delhi or
Vancouver to hear his or her language more precisely. 26
Divided into seven books, the epic adventure of Homers Iliad and
Odyssey was refigured by Walcott by also drawing on Renaissance
poetry and setting the volume in modern St Lucia. The title itself is
the Greek for Homer. However, Walcott retains the epic formal of
terza rima, a three-lined interlinked stanza sequence where the
second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third of the
next. This refiguration of form is central to what Schmidt consid-
ers to be the dispersal of an English tradition and its adaption on a
global level: Unboundaried experiences of this kind are part of the
vigour of a literature which in despite of geography, remains
English. To insist on continuity is not to suggest identity: on the
contrary, it is to discover the value in difference.27
An early section of Omeros illustrates how Walcott refigures the
epic structure into a Caribbean context. In Book 1, Chapter IV the
third section grants us the perspective of the poet/narrator on St
Lucia as he encounters the young woman Helen whose attentions
become the focus of a rivalry between two men, Achille and Hector.
The poet sits waiting for a cheque / Our waiter, in a black bow-tie,
plunged through the sand / between the full deck-chairs, bouncing
28
to discotheque. Deftly Walcott places the contemporary scene of
a nightclub into the seemingly incongruous restraint of three-lined
verse. Playfully he draws attention to the waiter as Lawrence of St
Lucia who is Like any born loser (p. 23). Crucially, Walcott
superimposes the contemporary scene upon a landscape which
evokes the Greek narrative of Helen of Troy, describing the
emergence of a beauty / that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its
wake (p. 24). When questioned the waitress responds She? She
too proud! adding with a sneer Helen and all the rest fol-
lowed (p. 24). Even this brief excursion into Omeros illustrates
how Walcott strategically uses terza rima to frame his epic
narrative. In turn this formal device enables a degree of tension
between the modern and the classical, creating a work of
considerable hybridity. Unsurprisingly, in an early interview
Walcott described conflicts and contradictions as central to his
biography: I was a knot of paradoxes: hating the Church and
loving her rituals, learning to hate England as I worshipped her
language . . . a Methodist-lecher, a near Catholic-ascetic, loving the
29
island, and wishing I could get the hell out of it.
A further example of the engagement in contemporary poetry with
established forms is made evident in The Reality Book of Sonnets.30
The anthology showcases a range of eighty-three con-temporary
poets experimental engagement with the sonnet from the USA,
UK, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada and Australia. When one
considers that stanza can also mean room, Beverly Dahlens
admission that the sonnet is a kind of padded cell in which I go
mad (p. 12) seems particularly apt. This anthology is not promot-
ing neo-formalism but rather the rupturing and interrogation of the
sonnets form. Various engagements with an opening of the sonnet
include found work, excerpts from extended sequences, the
breaking down of lyric enunciation, concrete poetry, visual
punning, collage, homophonic translation, process writing and the
arrangement of what could be called baggy quotidian sonnets.
One of the major poets renowned for the rewriting of the sonnet
was Ted Berrigan. Part collage, part process writing and lyrical
evocation, Berrigans Sonnets (1964) show how lines of apparent
non sequiturs can be constantly rearranged to alter a context of
interpretation. Berrigans emphasis on the line as a unit of com-
position creates some surprisingly charged adaptations. Take for
example an excerpt from Sonnet XV: The black heart beside the
fifteen pieces / Monroe died. So I went to a matinee B-Movie (p.
43), which becomes in Sonnet LIX Today / I am truly horribly
upset because Marilyn / Monroe died, so I went to a matinee B
movie and Ate King Kong popcorn (p. 43). Berrigan is playfully
emphatic on the rights of the sonnet. In Sonnet XV he adds Doctor
but they say I LOVE YOU / and the sonnet is not dead (p. 43).
Similarly, Juliana Spahrs Power Sonnets (2000) arrange found
web material, such as After Bill Clinton: Press Briefing and Press
Release, White House Website April 2000, which examines the
relationship between education, web access and race. Maurice
Scullys delightful Sonnet from Sonata (2006) performs writing
in the space of my little pop-up book of knowledge (p. 205).
Geraldine Monks Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008) are lyrically
dense, sonorous and often captivating; there is a sense of condensa-
tion in her final rhyming couplets, which are sustained throughout
the volume.31 Take, for example, the following: All at sea once
more / Maroon will never be the new black (p. 47), Barnacle
Geese reclassified as fish or fruit / Eaten under the subterfuge of
natural language (p. 57) and Aside from this we kiss the /
Doldrums upping entropy to bliss (p. 31). American poet Laynie
Browne revisits the potential of the sonnet to inscribe the mundan
ity of daily life in her collection Daily Sonnets (2007).32 In
Brownes words, her 150 poems approach all mental states, traps,
games and assemblages . . . My sonnets are an approachable unruly
gathering. What the poems have in common is that they practice
permeabil-ity (p. 158). As a busy mother of two, the warping of
the fourteen-lined cell provides liberation in the mapping out of
duration and the everyday. Her titles alone suggest this fracturing of
the sonnet form: Half Sonnet +1, Two fourteenths Sonnet, and
After-Shower Sonnet. The world of the kindergarten humorously
informs the making of the poetry, as with the mode of questioning
in Sonnet 25: Why do I require these sudden / Tablets of con-
centration / She made poetry sound like a playdate / Squeezing her
wrought hands (p. 25). Brown offers a comic translation of
Shakespeares Sonnet 116, in which Let me not to the marriage of
true minds becomes a refracted and sonorous equivocation: Let
me not to the marrow of truant minds / Admit the impenetrable.
Lozenge is no lounge / Which alternates when it altercation finds
(p. 119). Browne adds in her afterward to the book that I think of
the modern sonnet as an increment of time within a frame.
Something that often physically fits into a little rectangle (but not in
thought) . . . this book is an invitation (p. 159). Far from extol-ling
the sonnet form as a display of technical virtuosity, Browne
emphasises the responsiveness of form to the pressures of daily life.
Her volume illustrates how contemporary versions of the sonnet
enable surprising freedoms of expression and performance.
STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Jahan Ramazani highlights The spread of English worldwide to its

use by nearly a third of the worlds population and he crucially
reminds his readers that this dissemination is rooted in the might of
the British Empire and has been perpetuated by the military and
economic power of the United States.33 Considering the future of
English literary studies, Ramazani proposes:
Literary criticism on English and other imperial-language
literatures must co-exist with studies of writing in local and
regional languages of the global South. Even so, one way to
complicate an imperial Anglophony from within criticism of
English-language poetry is to explore the multiplicity of
Englishes in which poetry is written, some of which, such as the
Jamaican Creole of Claude McKay, Louise Bennett and Linton
Kwesi Johnson, was once seen as unworthy of poetry. Another is
to widen the geographic scope of Anglophone poetry studies so
that poems from the United States, Britain and Ireland are read
alongside poetries from English-speaking dominions, territories
and ex-colonies. (p. 19)
Ramazanis study moves the contemporary critic away from

tightly defined and contained definitions of national literatures
and pro-motes instead the adaptation of English across countries
and cultures. This book in turn attempts to illustrate how the dis-
semination of English has produced an expansive practice of
Anglophone poetries. A decision was made early in the project to
divide the range of poetries thematically, as opposed to discrete
national identifications. To this aim, the Edinburgh Critical
Guide to Contemporary Poetry seeks to enact conversations
between poetries which would not customarily be read in
tandem, and to dismantle too often rigid dichotomies between
so-called mainstream and experimental poetries.
While I do not hold completely with Ramazanis opening
posi-tion in his Transnational Poetries that Poetry is more often
seen as local, regional or stubbornly national (p. 3), I do find
myself receptive to his description of cross-fertilisation between
different poetries as creating an energising force field:
Because poetic compression demands that discrepant

idioms and soundscapes, tropes and subgenres be forces
together with intensity, poetry pressured and fractured by
this convergence allows us to examine at close hand how
global modernitys cross-cultural vectors sometimes fuse,
some-times vertiginously counterpoint one another. (p. 4)
Yet I am far from suggesting that contemporary poets have taken

one global aesthetic path into pluralism. Bruce Robbins pertinently
reminds us that identifying oneself as part of a global feeling is
not necessarily at the expense of national identifications. 34 He
proposes that forms of global feeling are continuous with forms
of national feeling, adding that although:
Potential for a conflict of loyalties is always present, cos-

mopolitanism or internationalism does not take its primary
meaning or desirability from an absolute and intrinsic opposi-
tion to nationalism. Rather it is an extension outward of the
same sorts of potent and dangerous solidarity. (p. 15)
Opening with Subjectivities, the first chapter considers the

representation of the personal in the work of recent poets and how
the everyday can become part of a poetic composition. I con-sider
initially a theory of lyric expression in the elegies of Andrew
Motion and Lee Harwood. The representation of womens biogra-
phy is fundamental to the work of Grace Nichols and Cathy Song,
which develops to an analysis of self-reflexive lyricism in the por-
traiture poetry of John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt and Jorie Graham.
Concentrating on the poetry of Michael Palmer and Jennifer
Moxley, the discussion considers what happens to the individual
speaking voice or lyric I when the self is displaced from a centre
stage and an experience of language takes its place.
Tackling the tricky proposition of poetry and politics, Chapter 2
investigates poetrys relationship to commentary on war and ter-
rorism through the poetry of Northern Ireland (Seamus Heaney,
Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon). The chapter also consider the
reports of the Iraq war by Eliot Weinberger and Charles Bernstein,
as well as Choman Hardis account of the Iraqi genocide or Anfal in
Kurdistan, and Yusef Komunyakaas experience as a Vietnam
veteran. Central to this chapter is a worry about creating poetry
which may read as rhetoric. A section is given to the presidential
inauguration poetry of Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander. The
chapter also considers how politics can be examined through a
certain textuality, a process which could be thought of as no longer
writing about politics but with them. This proposi-tion is of
particular relevance to my comparative reading of M. NourbeSe
Philips account of slave trading, which is compared to historical
excavation by Rita Dove of accounts of mass murder in the
Dominican Republic.
Much critical attention of late has been given to the
relationship between poetry and theories of performance.
Chapter 3 initially considers the proposition of a projective
poetry as a perform-ance both on and off the page in the
work of Amiri Barakas jazz poetic, Lawrence Ferlinghettis
declamatory style and Mutabaruka, Linton Kwesi Johnson and
Benjamin Zephaniahs versions of a dub poetic. Paul Durcan
and Don Patersons poetry offers the proposition of the poet as
performer. Theoretically the chapter engages with a proposition
of performativity in Hejinians poetry as well as a
phenomenological performance in Kate Fagans work. Closing
with Caroline Bergvall, the chapter examines the definition of
multimedia work often referred to as performance writing.
Ideas of space and environment form the basis for the fourth
chapter, which examines how poetry represents the environment.
Propositions of environmental thinking such as ecocriticism,
ecological writing and ecopoetics guide in different ways Gary
Snyder, Juliana Spahr and John Kinsellas poetry. Through an
interrogation of ideas of place, the chapter analyses the poetry of
Robert Hass, Anne Szumigalski and Geoffrey Hill. While place and
environment might initially trigger reflections upon regional
landscapes, the discussion also provides readings of the cityscape in
the poetry of Edwin Morgan, Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan.
The relationship of the regional to the global is central in Robert
Minhinnick and Lorna Goodisons poetry, while the disorient-ing
psychogeographical spaces of Iain Sinclairs work provide an
alternative way of mapping the modern metropolis.
My final chapter Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries
explores how contemporary poetry addresses the development of
English as a global language. Beginning with the more immediate
use of dialect in Tony Harrisons poetry, the discussion examines
linguistic hierarchies and regional and national identification, and
how these are confronted in Tom Leonard and Jackie Kays poems.
Introducing ideas of an ethnopoetics, Simon Ortiz and Joy Harjos
native poetries provide a further perspective on the imperial dis-
semination of English. Bilingualism, translation and interlingual-
ism form key considerations in Gwyneth Lewis, Li-Young Lee and
Lorna Dee Cervantess poetry. In closing, Tusiata Avia and Daljit
Nagras poetry shows how the poetic text can become a space for
linguistic cross-fertilization and the exploration of idiomatic
texture. Poet-practitioners greeted the emergence of the Internet
with considerable optimism, and my conclusion offers a reading of
the impact of multimedia and web technologies upon poetic
language and form. For poets such as John Cayley, the possibilities
of technology are celebrated as a site for visual and textual experi-
mentation, otherwise known as electronic writing. Other poets
consider the Internet as tool of poetic composition and chance
operations such as Flarf poetry. Evidently the Internet offers a role
in the dissemination of poetic material as well as the awareness of
breaking news material instantly, which proves crucial to the work
of labour activist and poet Mark Nowak. I close on a consid-eration
of what this may mean for the potency of a poetry that aims
towards political activism and communal engagement.
Invariably there are omissions in this project; the field of
Anglophone poetics is a vast one, yet I would hope that the book
grants a cross-section of recent developments, practices and
future concerns. To this end this volume provides a snapshot of
what Schmidt gestures to as: the enabling continuities, the ele-
ments both of specific difference and of commonality, the
vulgar tongue which individuals refine according to their light,
but also according to its own blazing lights. 35
NOTES
1. Juliana Spahr, American Poets in the 21st Century, ed.

Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2007), p. 131.
2. Lyn Hejinian, If Written is Writing, The
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and
Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press,
1984), p. 29.
3. Ezra Pound, Make it New: Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1935).
22 contemporary poetry
4. Viktor Schklovsky, Art as Technique, Russian Formalist

Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.
Reis (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press,
1965), pp. 324.
5. Robert Conquest, New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), Al
Alvarez, The New Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962),
Donald Allen, The New American Poetry (New York: Grove
Press, 1960), Michael Schmidt, New Poetries (Manchester:
Carcanet, 1992), Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David
Morleys The New Poetry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993) and
Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewells American Poets in the
21st Century: The New Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
6. Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation, A Stein
Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1993), p. 501.
7. Stein, Composition as Explanation, p. 501.
8. Ron Silliman, Of Theory to Practice, in The New Sentence
(New York: Roof Books, 2003), pp. 5862 (p. 60).
9. Silliman, Of Theory to Practice, p. 60.
10. Jerome McGann, The Point is to Change It (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2007), p. xi.
11. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (eds), The New
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 930.
12. Ibid.
13. Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), p. 356.
14. Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, Leave the Manifesto
Alone: A Manifesto, Poetry, 193.5 (2009), 452.
15. Romana Huk, A New Global Poetics, Literature Compass, 6.3
(2009), 75884 (p. 760).
16. Rey Chow, The Old/New Question of Comparison in
Literary Studies: A Post European Perspective, English
Literary History, 71.2 (2004), 289311 (p. 290).
17. Peter Finch, British Poetry Since 1945: A View from 2001 in
The Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Literature.
Available online at www.peterfinch.co.uk/enc.htm.
introduction 23
18. Alvarez, The New Poetry, p. 25.

19. John Berryman, Dream Song 14, in Selected Poems
19381968 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 73.
20. Al Alvarez, The Writers Voice (London: Bloomsbury,
2005), p. 17.
21. Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry Revised (New
York: Grove Press, 1982), p. 9.
22. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (eds), The Poetics of the
New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1973).
23. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of
the Poet, Massachusetts Review, 24.3 (1983), 52140 (p.
535). Originally given as a lecture in 1979.
24. Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and
New 19501984 (New York: Norton & Norton, 1984), p. 91.
All subsequent references to this edition are given in the text.
25. Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz (eds), Multiformalisms:
Postmodern Poetics of Form (Cincinnati: WordTech
Communications, 2008).
26. Schmidt, New Poetries, p. 9.
27. Schmidt, New Poetries, pp. 910.
28. Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 23.
29. Derek Walcott, Leaving School, in Hinterland: Caribbean
Poetry from the West Indies and Britain, ed. E. A. Markham
(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989), p. 93.
30. Jeff Hilson (ed.), The Reality Book of Sonnets (Hastings:
Reality Street Editions, 2008).
31. Geraldine Monk, Ghost & Other Sonnets (Cambridge: Salt,
2008).
32. Laynie Browne, Daily Sonnets (Denver, CO: Counterpath,
2008).
33. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2009), p. 19.
34. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), p.
15. 35. Schmidt, New Poetries, p. 11.
chapter 1
Lyric Subjects
I n the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent T. S. Eliot famously

declares that Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality.1 Eliot also adds playfully: But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want
to escape from these things (p. 21). It might seem curious to open this
chapter with Eliots essay of 1919, but his high-lighting of poetry as
work that is created and formed, as opposed to spontaneously
expressed, draws important attention to how we think about poetry.
Discussions of poetry often draw attention to the articulation of the
poets voice, poetry as an expression of per-sonal sentiment or the
poem as the recollection of events. While Eliots claims for poetry are
arguably based on an attempt to secure the legacy of his work, the
distinctions between control, craft and the spontaneous expression of
personality lead to some useful questions when approaching the work
of contemporary poets. One might ask, how do recent poets approach
the personal in their work? How can everyday experience make for
poetic material? To what extent do contemporary forms offer a
challenge to our per-ceived notions of voice in poetry? How does
recent poetry negoti-ate ideas of memory and recollection? Moreover,
what happens to the individual speaking voice, or lyric I, when the
self is dis-placed from centre stage and an experience of language
takes its
place?
Al Alvarez in his retrospective account of post-war poetries The
Writers Voice (2006) identifies a key moment in the history of
American poetry. He recalls a reading by Allen Ginsberg at SUNY
Buffalo in 1966. Ginsbergs notorious opening to his early poem
Howl I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through
the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix generates
expectations of countercultural critique, musicality and perform-
2
ance. However, Alvarezs comments on Ginsbergs reading indi-
cate a discomfort regarding the poet as prophetic voice:
I now understand what I was witnessing that evening in

Buffalo was something new and strange: the transformation
of poetry into showbiz . . . Poets were private people and
reading their work was still a private pleasure . . . Ginsberg
changed all that by sheer force of personality. Or rather by
using verse as a vehicle of showmanship, he helped turn a
minority art into a form of popular entertainment based on
the cult of personality.3
Echoing Eliots critique of personality, Alvarez points us towards a

central and basic conundrum of recent poetry: in order to address its
audience compellingly, does the contemporary poem always
necessitate extremity of emotion and personality? Writing over two
hundred years ago William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge
claimed in their introduction to Lyrical Ballads (1798) that:
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it

takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the
emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tran-
quillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that
which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually
4
produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
Following this Romantic precedent in considering the poets from

the United Kingdom, USA, Jamaica and India, we will con-
template how the personal lyric in contemporary poetry conveys
subjective states of mind and how the personal poem adapts its
address. It is important to consider what happens to the poem
when subjectivity is no longer represented as a stable voice. This
destabilising of voice and persona in the poem is what the
American poet Lyn Hejinian proposes as subjectivity that is less
a fixed entity than a mobile (and mobilized) reference point. 5
TOWARDS A THEORY OF LYRIC EXPRESSION
The lyric or personal poem is often considered as expressive,

and the expressive lyric posits the self as the primary
organising principle of the work. Central to this model is the
articulation of the subjects feelings and desires, and a strongly
marked division between subjectivity and its articulation as
expression. M. H. Abrams identifies an expressive theory of the
lyric poem as the internal made external:
A work of art is essentially the internal made external,

resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse
of feeling, and embodying a combined product of the poets
perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and
subject matter of a poem therefore, are the actions and
attributes of the poets own mind . . . The first test any poem
must pass is no longer, Is it true to nature? or Is it
appropriate to the requirements either of the best judges or the
generality of mankind? but a criterion looking in a different
6
direction; namely Is it sincere? Is it genuine?
Although Abrams has in mind primarily the poetry of the nine-

teenth century, this model resonates as a general impulse in poetry
from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in its
evocation of sincerity and authenticity. The symbolic use of the
external world as a psychic landscape for the subjects state of mind
is one we are familiar with, even in Eliots proposal of the objective
correlative: in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such
that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
7
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Critic Charles Altieri identifies the dominant model of the
1970s as the scenic mode, and suggests that this model of the
lyric poem is firmly rooted in the extension of a romantic
ideology.8 The impetus of the work is towards an expression of
an inchoate interiority and the poem in his words:
Places a reticent, plain-speaking and self-reflective speaker
within a narratively presented scene evoking a sense of
loss. Then the poet tries to resolve the loss in a moment of
emo-tional poignance, or wry acceptance, that renders the
entire lyric event an evocative metaphor for some general
sense of mystery about the human condition. (p. 10)
This impetus towards description and expression is characterised by

the poet Robert Pinsky as discursive writing. 9 Pinsky states that
the discursive lyric presents the poet talking, predicating, moving
directly and as systematically and unaffectedly as he would walk
from one place to another (p. 133). Broadly speaking, both these
models of an expressive lyric posit the self as the primary
organising principle of the work. Central to this tendency is the
articulation of the subjects feelings and desires, and a strongly
marked division between subjectivity and its articulation as expres-
sion. This focus on expression is frequently evoked with reference
to the speakers voice and a suggestion of a certain sincerity and
authenticity. What is most apparent in the expressive model of the
lyric poem is the immanence of the self, its centrality within the
composition as the subject of the writing, and the role of language
as a transparent medium for communicating intense emotion.
ELEGY AND EPISTLE: ANDREW MOTION AND LEE

HARWOOD
An early poem, Anniversaries by Andrew Motion, written before

he became Poet Laureate in 1999, illustrates how an expressive
model of the lyric addresses and represents intense emotions of
10
bereavement. Motions lyric sequence of tightly constructed four-
lined stanzas in five sections acts as an elegy, a reminder and
marker of loss, and also an attempt to recompose the past. The
five sections that comprise the sequence mark time in a circuit:
we start with the fourth anniversary, move to the first then the
second and third to conclude with a fourth anniversary once
more. Looking closely at Anniversaries, it becomes clear that
the poem through these acts of reflection seeks to work through
ideas of trauma and grief. Motions poem points us significantly
to his biography. Anniversaries chronicles his mothers riding
accident and sub-sequent years of being in a coma. But the
opening stanzas do not point to this directly; instead what one is
presented with is a sense of continuation and repetition set in a
snowscape: I have it by heart now / on this day in each year (p.
6). Words such as lost, waiting, setting reinforce the sense
of a ritual which accompanies the bedside vigil.
The five sections enact a conversation with the absent mother. In
this way the poem functions similarly to Pinskys suggestion of a
discursive lyric, the speakers voice in its personal reflection
indicates private meditations overheard. Motions emphatic repeti-
tion of the lyric I in the second section What I remember, I
watched, I am still there (p. 7) indicates not only the attempts
of recollection, but also an implication of solitude, as though the
subjective is literally rooted to the spot. Motion also makes use of
nature as a psychic landscape where sentiment is superimposed
upon his surroundings. We are told that while waiting for his
mothers return the tap thaws (p. 7) then hardens to ice. These
small observations also bear witness to the marking of time. The
impression of a solitary individual alone in a hostile environment is
enforced when the horse returns to the farm. The reins trailing
behind mark a pattern, a trail across the plough / a blurred riddle of
scars (p. 7). This image of premonition superimposes the trails in
the snow and a cosmic sky as Motion plays on the plough as
constellation and the sonic suggestion of scars as possible stars.
As the sequence unfolds the speaker attempts to deconstruct the
loss of a parent. The second, third and fourth anniversaries commit
themselves to understanding the blurred riddle (p. 7) of amnesia
and stillness. He witnesses his fathers attempt to engage with his
mother: If you can hear me now squeeze my hand (p. 8).
Empathetically Motion sets the bedside rituals in correspondence
with the natural world since in the third anniversary his mother
is described as having a shadow of clouds (p. 8) upon her face.
More terrifying for the speaker is the moment when the mother
momentarily awakens and speaks, only to retreat to an imposed
stillness with a look that refuses to recognise my own (p. 9).
Motions poem can be read as a form of arrested elegy, it marks
the attempts of a plain-speaking voice to understand the death-
like trance and suspension of his mothers life. Moreover, the
form of the poem, its division into neat four-lined stanzas and
sections denoting each year, attempts to grant form and order to
experience through narrative. Throughout Motions poem
personal events are communicated and expressed through the
intimacy of a single speaking voice.
English poet Lee Harwood offers a further response to express-ing
bereavement through the poetic elegy. Unlike Motion, Harwoods
poem is less assured of the viability of its task. Harwoods work
questions whether poetry can mediate his experi-ence and
recollections. The poem enacts a form of doubting elegy as he
searches for a discursive form which can enact a conversation with the
person lost. Harwood is moreover suspicious of com-mitting
immediate experience into poetic form, and alert to the dangers of
inscribing too much of his own persona at the expense of the person he
is grieving. The title of Harwoods elegy is disarming and self-
explanatory: African violets for Pansy Harwood my grandmother
18961989.11 But the opening lines disrupt any sense of static
backdrop to the elegy; we are plunged into a world of motion and
attempts to create shape and form. The poem describes the movement
of flags on silver pyramids, purple flowers that present themselves
to the air and the straining of a composition as Chopin fights his way
into music (p. 432). This spatial disori-entation is echoed by
Harwoods attempt to organise his recollec-tions around hospital visits,
childhood memories and processes of making art. Threads of phrases
and conversation intervene, such as snippets like A real heartbreaker
and That was a bit unneces-sary son (p. 432). These intrusions
succeed in demolishing any illusion of control that one may associate
with the unitary voice. Rather than the distinct chronicle of time
exhibited in Motions Anniversaries, the speaker in Harwoods elegy
admits that for him (the tense continually shifts, past and present
blur) (p. 433). Moreover, Harwoods elegy is filled with
anxious rhetorical ques-tions based on ideas of reciprocity,
exchange and legacy: What did I give you, And you gave
me?(p. 432).
At every point in the poem the knowledge of his grandmothers
everyday life informs the tumbling array of recollections. The
speakers frustrations at his inability to commit these everyday
experiences to the written page are also evident. With rage the speaker
taunts his ambition to reduce this to yet another poem, savagely
dismisses his elegy as pages of words creating old routines that are
easy with the truth, turning facts to meet the story (p. 432). In a
tirade against the gentrification of experience and memory he acts by
systematically smashing all those pretty pictures since they wont
do anymore (p. 432). Indeed the speaker refers to the legacy left by
the grandmother as the other stuff that continues (p. 433).
Whereas for Motion his poem is guided by the ritual of bedside vigils
and calendar months, Harwoods poem dramatises the knowledge of
ritualised tasks and gestures observed such as pickling onions, bottling
fruit, mending shoes; in effect the daily working patterns of cooking,
making, fixing (p. 433). In African Violets continuity is created
across generations. The speaker notes that: I find myself moving as
you would / not the same but similar (p. 432). Harwoods poem
jettisons any formal shape which will guide his elegy for fear that it
will immobilise his reflections. Instead he attempts through free verse
to inscribe the momentum and often unpredicted pattern of a
conversation. In African Violets the single speaking voice attempts to
talk to you again and again / I see you again and again sat there (p.
433).
SPEAKING (AUTO) BIOGRAPHICALLY: CATHY SONG

AND GRACE NICHOLS
Since the late 1960s there has been considerable discussion of what
indeed constitutes an author. Critical and continental theory has
questioned the omnipotence of the author as one who orchestrates
and controls the meaning of any writing produced. Most famously
Roland Barthess essay Death of the Author (1967) and Michel
Foucaults What is an Author? (1968) challenged any determi-
nate meaning to any text. Barthess later identification of what he
termed a writerly text can be understood as ourselves writing,
whose goal he characterises as a desire to make the reader no
12
longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. This momentum
towards reconfiguring the concept of the author as the bastion of all
meaning can be traced to a shift in literary criticism from the 1930s
that increasingly focused on the literary work as an entity in its own
right. Critics such as Jack Stillinger trace the emergence of these
concerns from established philosophical debates:
Literary theorists especially those writing under the influ-

ence of Barthes and Foucault (and of those earlier writers
like Nietzsche and Freud who influenced Barthes and
Foucault), have increasingly treated literary texts and
frequently all writing together, as autonomous, separate
from any idea of determinate meaning. 13
The proposition of literary texts as having no final interpretation
challenges New Criticisms valorisation of the literary work as
the well-wrought urn, where meaning and structure coalesce.
What does this mean for the personal lyric? The single-speaking poetic
voice is often linked to an impression of intimacy, the speaker in some
essence articulating words that seem at once over-heard by the reader.
The prominence of the personal lyric in the 1970s established an
important relationship between intimacy and the examination of
biography. For many poets the relationship between biography and
cultural legacy and inheritance cannot be differentiated; in effect then
the mapping of a life story can become an enquiry into unvoiced
personal, family and national histories. Paradoxically perhaps, from
the 1960s onward we witness a growth in the production and reception
of autobiographical works. The critic Philippe Lejeune describes
autobiography as a retrospective prose narrative written by a real
person conveying his own exist-ence where the focus is his individual
life, in particular the story of his personality. 14 For other critics
autobiography is an affirmation of individual worth (p. 140). The
1970s and 1980s mark an affirmation of the personal poem coupled
with an examination of autobiography through considerations of
race, cultural inheritance, ethnicity and gender. In the USA in
particular, the rise to promi-nence of the personal lyric (often
referred to as the workshop lyric) during the 1970s and 1980s
is connected to the proliferation of creative writing programmes
in the academy. The increasing professionalisation of poetry had
its roots in the post-war years, and in the flourishing of New
Criticism we can trace the basic premise of the workshop poem
as a well-crafted, self-sufficient composition. Moreover, during
this time in the USA, identity politics the categorisation of
different groups often according to race, ethnicity, gender and
sexual orientation found a fertile and often recuperative role in
contemporary poetry. Essentially identity politics focuses upon
the experience of often marginalised communities as enabling
possibility for political discussion and action.
Cathy Song is sometimes identified as a Hawaiian, Chinese-
American or Korean-American poet. The immediate
compendium of distinctive, yet coexisting identities is addressed
in her work, as well as the history of the immigrant experience in
the USA. Songs narratives are intensely personal, but her poetry
also voices a col-lective immigrant cultural history. The entitling
of her first volume Picture Bride (1983) emphasises this
concern immediately.15 Critic Gayle K. Fujita-Sato states that:
Picture brides was a method of arranging marriages used by
Japanese and Korean immigrants before the war. Usually a
man would ask his parents or relatives to find a prospective
bride, and the couple then exchanged photographs of them-
selves. When marriage was agreed upon, an official ceremony
was held in the home country before the woman departed to
join her husband. In many cases the picture brides arrival was
the couples first face-to-face meeting. 16
Picture Bride maps out spaces for often unobserved womens

activities, such as acts of applying make-up, cooking and sewing.
In The Seamstress this sense of invisible tasks or silent histories is
made evident through the descriptions of the single-voiced nar-
rator. The seamstress informs us that she works in difficult light
with her blind fingertips next to an entire wall without windows
(p. 79). Throughout the poem Song pays particular attention to the
artisanship and unacknowledged beauty of the seamstresss tools:
Hands moist and white like lilies / The white-gloved hands of the
magician which move with miraculous flight (p. 79). She also
evokes elements from the Western fairy tale since her movement is
described as the spiders slow-descending movement attached to
an invisible thread / I let myself down off the chair (p. 79). Her
body establishes a horrifying verisimilitude with her work; the
spine bent over her sewing machine creates the silhouette of a coat
hanger (p. 79).
Picture Bride also places a considered focus on mother-and-
daughter relationships. In many of the poems this relationship is
often framed in antagonistic terms as an older generation dic-tates
the rules of filial practice. The Youngest Daughter frames this
relationship through the practised ritual of bathing and food
preparation, the ritual of tea and rice and gingered fish (p. 6). The
fleshy mother of the poem appears far more visceral than the sickly
daughter with her skin as damp and pale as rice paper (p. 5) and
the colour of aspirin. Song makes us acutely aware of the distance
between the domestic carer duties and the world of outdoor work.
Comparing their skin, she notices not only the difference in colour
her mothers is parched in the drying sun (p. 5) of the fields
but also the cartography of blue bruises from the medication of
insulin. The speaker describes her mother as fecund with animal-like
terminology. Her breasts are like two walruses / flaccid and whiskered
around the nipples (p . 5). This intimate portrait also suggests a
suffocating distaste as she thinks six children and an old man / have
sucked from these brown nipples (p. 5). A sense of confinement
generates the youngest daughters desire to break free from domestic
and filial responsibilities. The speaker admits that her mother knows
she is not to be trusted and is even now plan-ning my escape (p. 6).
The final stanzas focus upon ideas of release, travel and even
migration is echoed when the motif of a thousand cranes patterning the
curtain fly up in a sudden breeze (p. 6).
The five sections of Picture Bride are named after the American
painter Georgia OKeeffes flower paintings: Black Iris,
Sunflowers, Orchids, Red Poppy and The White Trumpet
Flower. Songs deliberate evocation of American art as a
framing device for the book serves to make a sustained link with
the USA. Importantly the volume interrogates the nation of the
hyphen-ated identity Asian-American. In this poem the
identification of China as a cultural code which enables the
female immigrant to establish a sense of selfhood and
community, is juxtaposed with a legacy of Chinese history that
rendered women without agency or power. In Lost Sister the
problem of identification becomes key: how does one retain a
sense of cultural cohesiveness and sustain integration into a new
country? Throughout the poem, cultural routines grant the
female immigrant the necessary tools to create and affirm her
identification. A litany of products and cultural references from
Mah-Jong tiles and firecrackers to jade and crick-ets litter the
poem. Lost Sister parallels the historical lives of Chinese
women who remain in China and those who migrate to the USA.
As with Youngest Daughter, Lost Sister invariably presents the
ideal of migration as a possibility of escape and rebellion. Divided
into two sections, it presents us with women who are both
subservient and resourceful. For them to move was a luxury /
stolen from them at birth (p. 52). Space and time are restricted into
an image of painful and minute physical study as the women learn
to walk in shoes / the size of teacups / without breaking / the arc of
their movements (p. 52). By contrast the lost sister rises with a
tide of locusts (p. 52) in the Chinese diaspora to the Pacific shore.
Song deftly utilises the association of the grasshopper in the poem
as a Chinese symbol of good luck and abundance, associated only
with forward movement. Yet the poem keenly draws attention to the
complexities and failures of cultural translation that are part of the
experience of migration. Echoing images of miscegenation, the
sister not only changes her name, but dilutes jade green with the
blue of the Pacific (p. 52). A sense of extreme cultural disloca-tion
is emphasised in the second section which stresses the move-ment
to a cityscape of dough-faced (p. 52) landlords, cramped
accommodation, laundry lines and restaurants. In this urban envi-
ronment the necessity of cultural identification is represented also
as a restrictive chain, China becomes the symbolic jade link hand-
cuffed to your wrist (p. 52). Like the other women of the opening
section the poem indicates that the lost sister, as her mother, will
leave no footprint (p. 53), no major historical testimony of her
life. But Song suggests that the extensive passage travelled over
the Pacific is proof enough of the unremitting space of your
rebellion (p. 53). As a whole Picture Bride enables a space
where biographies erased by the major narratives of history can
be granted articulation and expression.
Grace Nicholss The Fat Black Womans Poems (1984) also details
an experience of migration.17 Nichols states that the volume came
initially out of a sheer sense of fun, of having the fat black woman
doing exactly as she pleases . . . taking a satirical, tongue-in-cheek
look at the world.18 Born originally in Guyana, Nichols immi-grated
to England in 1977, but her poetry is resolutely informed by her
identity as a Guyanese-Caribbean. Yet Nichols warns that even this
identification as a Caribbean poet must be read in terms of hybridity,
influences upon her work come from the different immigrant groups
who came out to the Caribbean: East Indians, Chinese and Portuguese.
My voice as a writer has its source in that region (p. 283). Nichols
also states that Difference, diversity and unpredictability make me
tick.19 The Fat Black Womans Poems present a speaker who
negotiates the problems of everyday living in London. Its discrete lyric
mediations on family, sexual encounters and landscapes of Guyana
frequently interrogate the legacies of slavery and colonialism. More
recently Nichols has asserted that she does not specifically want to be
read as a postcolonial poet but as a writer in a community of other
immigrants:
riding the waves (p. 7). Nicholss fat black woman is adaptive,
aphoristic and irreverent. She assumes a centralising focus in each
of the small lyric poems of this section, sitting on the golden
stool, refusing to move while white-robed chiefs / are resigned /
in their postures of resignation (p. 8). In making her central to the
action of each poem, Nichols successfully creates a world where
the black woman is neither marginal nor unheard. The sheer
physicality of her presence in these poems adds spontaneity to the
work. Some critics suggest that this tactic of corporeality can
provide prob-lems of recreating stereotypes. Mara Scanlon finds a
difficulty in situating a reclamation of identity too resolutely in the
body, that material presence which is invoked in literature
philosophy and theory by feminists and non-feminists alike to
21
counter the slippery identity constructions of poststructuralists.
The danger, accord-ing to Scanlon, is that this focus on the physical
body may just rep-licate the language of racist and sexist
discourses. Nichols herself suggests that writing this way grants her
some control over the world, however erroneous that might be. I
do not have to accept a world that tries to deny not only black
women but women on the whole.22
The Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping draws attention to
idealisations of beauty and the refusal of fashion products to cater to
her own body. Shopping in London becomes a real drag and de
weather is so cold, with the shops displaying their frozen thin
mannequins. In response, the fat black woman curses in Swahili /
Yoruba and nation language (p. 11). Apparent in these poems is
nostalgia for warmth and community but Nichols is also at pains to
point out the idealisation of Caribbean living. In Two Old Black Men
on a Leicester Square Park Bench, in response to the mens memory
of a sunfull woman you might have known, a voice chides Its easy /
to rainbow the past (p. 35). She acknowledges migra-tion in fiscal and
economic terms: the sun was traded long ago (p. 35). Most
compelling in this volume is Nicholss use of nation language, a
challenge to the imperial correctness of English that acknowledges
the infusion of different languages, idioms and dialects into spoken
Caribbean-English. Importantly, Kamau Brathwaite in his
. . . living now in London, who had a past from which they
have been uprooted and they were addressing an audience
as uprooted as themselves, and not any one particular kind
of audience. I suppose that in a way is a bit more appealing
than postcolonial, because not just black writers have been
uprooted.20
Nichols prefers instead to be identified as a trans-cultural

writer, a term which embraces a range of immigrant experience.
The first section of the volume presents a larger-than-life char-
acter described in the first poem Beauty as a fat black woman
cornerstone examination of the development of nation language in
Anglophone Caribbean poetry states that:
We in the Caribbean have a kind of plurality: we have
English, which is the imposed language on much of the
archipelago. It is an imperial language, as are French, Dutch
and Spanish. We also have what we call Creole English,
which is a mixture of English and an adaptation that English
took in the new environment of the Caribbean when it became
mixed with the other imported languages. We have also what
is called nation language, which is the kind of English spoken
by the people who were brought to the Caribbean, not the
official English now, but the language of slaves and labourers,
23
the servants who were brought in.
Nichols suggests that the use of Creole is a way of reclaiming our

language heritage and exploring it. It is an act of spiritual survival
24
on our part. Her commitment to Creole in poetry aims not only to
preserve culture, but to energise her writing: I do not think the only
reason I use Creole in my poetry is to preserve it, however. I find
using it genuinely exciting. Some Creole expressions are very vivid
and concise and have no equivalent in English (p. 284). In
Skanking Englishman Between Trains, she playfully focuses on
the appropriation of Jamaican Creole and culture by a small yellow
hair Englishman (p. 33) with a ghetto blaster perched on his shoul-
der skanking, or pacing in time, to reggae at Birmingham Station.
The pose of the Englishman is comic, especially when he asserts
his abhorrence of English food I like mih drops / me johnny
cakes / me peas and rice (p. 33). Punctuating each of his
statements with a Man, the Englishman is truly a convert, but one
also senses the underlying critique that there is more to knowledge
of anothers culture than an appetite for cornbread. Nicholss ironic
turn of phrase is apparent, she comments at the close he was full-o-
jive / said he had a lovely Jamaican wife (p. 33). Here the
ventriloquised language of hipster-talk is placed into a sharp critical
focus.
The final sections of the volume reinforce the complexities of
Caribbean history and culture and challenge its accessibility as
mere lifestyle choice. Nichols returns us to the language of eco-
nomics, stating that Poverty is the price / we pay / for the sun girl
(p. 42). Memories of childhood and the sayings of elders haunt the
images of returning home. Nichols inserts the rhetorical language
of the preacher in Be a Butterfly. His cadence of the saying
Dont be a kyatta-pilla / Be a Butterfly (p. 49) informs the
momentum of the poem as the refrain becomes equally a statement
of ambi-tion, self-belief and assertion. This shaping of nation
language as a presence of dynamism asserts Nicholss desire that
Creole is not read as a secondary language, as mere dialect, or at
worst incorrect English. Through her negotiation of biography and
life story Nichols revisits the complexities of Caribbean culture and
historical violence, while ensuring that the linguistic inventiveness
of Creole remains central to her narrative.
SELF-REFLEXIVE LYRICS: PORTRAITURE IN JOHN

ASHBERY, SUJATA BHATT AND JORIE GRAHAM
I have already examined the concept of an expressive lyric in

reference to poetic forms such as the elegy, epistle and life story
as well as the representation of race and cultural inheritance. It is
also essential that we acknowledge how contemporary poets depict
the representation of selfhood through self-reflexive techniques.
Self-referential writing is not, of course, new terrain for poetry.
Poetry has, across the centuries, displayed awareness of the act of
its own making. Yet it can be proposed that for contemporary poets
meditation on other media, particularly self-portraiture, enables a
detailed examination of the construction of selfhood as a textual
entity. Certainly contemporary poets John Ashbery, Sujata Bhatt
and Jorie Graham share a general fascination for how self-portraits
are created and what they tell us about the artist. Ashbery, Bhatt and
Graham use their meditations upon portrait painting as a way of
exposing and examining poetic techniques, what I will call a self-
reflexive lyric. Commenting on the works of others in this way
draws useful attention to how poetry addresses not only the idea of
selfhood, subjectivity and the role of the artist, but also poetrys
engagement with everyday experience.
Susan M. Schultz writes of Ashbery that No poet since Whitman
has tapped into so many distinctly American voices and, at the
same time, so preserved his utterance against the jangle of
25
influences. Ashbery in an interview comments upon the need to
distil a voice from a cacophony of different voices available to a
poet. He states his aim is to reproduce from the polyphony that
goes on inside me, which I dont think is radically different from
that of other people.26 Readers may initially find Ashberys poetry
bewildering, not least because of the expansive linkages between
different subjects his work constructs. The clauses and sub-clauses
of Ashberys poetic line are often periphrastic that is, refuting
direct statement through digressive techniques. His poetry dis-plays
a self-awareness of its own creation; the reader is encouraged to
consider the poem as action in process. Ashbery comments as far
as my own poetry goes, while theres a lot of my unconscious mind
in it, theres a lot of the conscious mind too, which is only normal,
since we do sometimes think consciously not very often, but
sometimes.27 Occasionally this extreme self-awareness asserts
itself as a criticism of the poem being written. In The One Thing
That Can Save America the speaker comments self-critically I
know that I braid too much of my own / Snapped-off perceptions of
things as they come to me.28 In later poems such as Novelty Love
Trot the poet is unusually disarming but tongue-in-cheek when he
states I enjoy biographies and bibliographies / and cul-tural
29
studies.
A brief reference to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Pontys
Phenomenology of Perception (1945) helps us to understand the self-
reflexive impulse in Ashberys lyric.30 Merleau-Ponty states that
phenomenology is a philosophy for which the world is already there
and it is an attempt to achieve a direct and primi-tive contact with the
world (p. vii). Usefully he maintains that phenomenology is a
rigorous science (p. vii), but an investigation which has at its core a
matter of describing and not analysing (p. viii). Understood in this
light a phenomenological impulse has as its aim not the objectification
of the world into reducible knowl-edge, but an account of spacetime
and the world as we live them (p. vii). Ashbery comments that Most
of my poems are about the experience of experience . . . and the
particular experience is of lesser interest to me than the way it filters
through me.31
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror takes as its starting point and
subject matter sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist painter
32
Francesco Parmigianinos self-portrait, the first mirror portrait.
The opening of the poem is almost ekphrastic, in that it describes in
detail Parmigianinos painting, rendering visual art into poetry. The
unusual scale of objects is emphasised in the poem: the right
hand / Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer / and swerving
easily away (p. 188). Ashberys details of art history remind us
that the portrait is a thing made; emphasised by his reference to
Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary of Parmigianinos and author of the
first Italian art history book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects (1550). Already Ashberys poem points
to the self-reflexive intricacies of self-portraiture, art history,
biogra-phy and their poetic interpretation. The momentum of his
writing repossesses this sense of process and creation. We are told
Vasari says that the artist arranged a convex mirror, such as is
used by barbers (p. 188). The globed ball is used with great art
to copy all that he saw in the glass (p. 188). Ashbery clearly
delights in the fact that the verisimilitude that we see in
Parmigianinos portrait results from his reflection, of which the
portrait / Is the reflection once removed (p. 188). The poem not
only conveys the detail of the painting, but the effect of seeing the
portrait and the impression that is formed by the viewer through a
technique of near repetition. In this way it can be stated that
Ashberys poem performs phenomenologically, it grants us the
perception of perception. What the portrait says, according to
Ashbery, is a naked gaze that is a combination / Of tenderness,
amusement and regret, so powerful / In its restraint that one cannot
look for long (p. 189).
Meditating upon his own craft, the speaker admits that his
attempt to give form to the impression that the painting creates is
conjecture: The words are only speculation / (From the Latin
speculum, mirror) (p. 189). Delighting in etymology, the poet
paradoxically makes a link between portraiture and writing.
Ashbery has commented that he sees the work of the poet as
somehow elucidating a lot of almost invisible currents and
knock-ing them into some sort of shape. 33 The poem as a
consequence results in the configuring of a life englobed (p.
189). Processes of creating and the act of painting are seen as a
moment of incipience:
A peculiar slant
Of memory that intrudes on the dreaming model
In the silence of the studio as he considers
Lifting the pencil to the self-portrait (p. 191)
Successfully, Ashbery in this poem removes over four centuries
of distance between the portrait and the present. Moreover, these
lines suggest that a key role of writing and painting is to activate
memory; the memory referenced can be the impact of the tran-
scribing of the world (as in the self-portrait), or in Ashberys
more duplicitous world the procedure of recreating a memory of
the painter in the act of painting. In effect Ashbery attempts to
reinstall into his poem the dailiness of Parmigianinos world,
what he terms the strewn evidence . . . The small accidents and
pleas-ures / Of the day as it moved gracelessly on (p. 192).
Pronouns in Ashberys work generate considerable instability,
and the poet comments upon the person in his work as an
emerging force, not a pre-existent entity before writing:
A person is someone given an embodiment out of these pro-

liferating reflections that are occurring in a generalized mind
which eventually run together into the image of a specific person
he or me who was not there when the poem began.34
Far from establishing stable relations between perceiver and per-

ceived, or speaker and subject, Ashberys poem constantly nego-
tiates the relationship between the I and you. This highly self-
aware approach can result in a blurring of the identities of artist
and poet. The speakers commentary on Parmigianinos
technique results in describing actions that become embedded in
the speakers own world. Take for example the section of the
poem where we are told that The picture is almost finished:
The surprise almost over, as when one looks out,

Startled by a snowfall which even now is
Ending in specks and sparkles of snow.
It happened while you were inside, asleep,
And there is no reason why you should have
Been awake for it, except that the day
Is ending and it will be hard for you
To get to sleep tonight, at least until late. (p. 195)
Periphrasis in this section creates an extensive reflection which

challenges any definitive sense of space and time. The depiction of
the snow focuses on the impossibility of underscoring an event as
finished or complete. Moreover, the instability of you and one
suggests that both speaker and artist perform interchangeable roles.
At each stage the poet attempts to inscribe into the painting a nar-
rative of movement, process and creation. Daringly, in this poem he
suggests that the creating of art is not dissimilar to the errors,
misunderstandings and misinterpretations which are central to the
game Chinese whispers. Ashbery points to the intrusion, which
twists the end result / Into a caricature of itself (p. 201).
Commenting on artistic intention and agency he suggests that a
similar principle makes works of art so unlike / What the artist
intended (p. 201). Ashberys highly self-reflexive writing, with its
digressive techniques, aims to energise the texture of the poem,
enacting processes of creation and perception. Daring to circum-
navigate the subject of his poems, Ashberys periphrastic progress
challenges our idea of poetic expression. The poet remarks that the
challenges in the artistic avant-garde could equally apply to his own
work: Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and
recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as
religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are
founded on nothing.35
Indian poet Sujata Bhatt approaches painting and in particular
self-portraiture as an important framing device for her volumes
The Stinking Rose (1995) and A Colour for Solitude (2002).36
The Stinking Rose places a focus on the self-portraiture of early
twentieth-century Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Her paintings are
renowned for their painful autobiographical subject matter and her
groundbreaking use of the indigenous cultures of Mexico. Kahlos
self-portraits do not flinch from depicting her own shattered spinal
column, miscarriages, intense physical pain or representations of
explicit sexuality. Bhatt considers The Stinking Rose as movement
away from early work, stating I consciously avoided writing about
my childhood.37 A native speaker of Gujarati, she usefully makes a
comparison between her multilingual background and painting:
I have never been monolingual, so I dont know what that

feels like. I think sometimes I experience my languages like a
concrete medium: like different colours of paint, for example.
Im intrigued by the way various languages coexist in one
mind, the way they might clash and interfere with each other
but also the way they can enhance one another. It may
well be that knowing all these languages and having had to
live in different languages makes me more conscious of
the right word and of feeling that any given language is
almost like a separate being.
Bhatts gesture here to a certain viscosity of language, or language

as a painters palette, is made evident in her poem Nothing is
Black, Really Nothing. The title comes as a translation from
Kahlos diary nada es negro, realmente nada and the speaker per-
forms a homage to the lifework of Kahlo while framing a narrative
with her own daughter. Bhatts poem attempts to give an analytic
accuracy to her knowledge of black through a series of intersect-
ing narratives through art history, anecdotal information, peda-gogy
and self-knowledge. Using Kahlos quotation as the basis for her
investigation and as a continual reprise throughout the poem, she
questions: But Frida, how black you could paint (p. 30). Placing
her focus in one of Kahlos famous self-portraits Fulang Chang
and I (1937), Bhatt comments how black the little dark hairs
above your lips and how black the hairs of your monkey (p. 30).
In an attempt to quantify what constitutes true blackness, the
speaker adds that true black breathes (p. 30) also blue and red.
This meditation leads to a consideration of the early black paint
named elephantinum, noted in early Rome by the writer and
chronicler Pliny. Not unlike Ashbery, Bhatt takes a detour to
examine how the darkest black was made from elephants tusks by
Apelles, Alexander the Greats court painter.
Bhatts speaker states that she must resist the temptation to create a
compendium of alternative readings of black, descriptors such as
black heart, black mood (p. 31), since her quest is far less
existential. In a comic interlude the poet comments on her
daugh-ters love of black her insistence that her hair is black,
black / not brown (p. 31). At the close of the poem, Bhatt
returns to the opening image of Kahlo and places black in a
context of female creativity and self-knowledge. She emphasises
how Kahlo found so many different black strokes in order to
pull out every shade / of blackness / from your hair, your self
(p. 32). Using the figure of the female painter, Bhatt is able to
draw an extensive cartogra-phy of cultural references and global
artistic practices. In this way she creates a sense of connectivity
between generations of women. Bhatt admits:
Part of the reason I have poems about womens experiences

. . . is because I tend to write out of my own life it is my
life that I am trying to understand. In many poems Ive
changed things or put in a lot of fiction: often I have a
female character who is not me, but an imagined woman in
a different time and a different place. Of course, in some
way these imaginary women are connected to me. 38
Bhatts focus upon womens experience, particularly in this case

a female painters reputation and life, enables a process of
aesthetic self-interrogation.
Similarly, Jorie Grahams early poetry depicts a fascination with
representing paintings, including icons and frescoes. A sampling of
poetry titles from her first volume Erosion (1983) illustrates this
preoccupation: Still life with Window and Fish, The Lady and
the Unicorn and other Tapestries, Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt
and Massacios Expulsion.39 The publication of The End of the
Beauty (1987) marked a notable rupture of the single-voiced lyric
40
in her work. Critical accounts of Grahams poetry register the
shift in her poetry during this period, as a movement from ekphrasis
to iconoclasm. Moreover, the scrupulous painterly representations
of her early work are forcefully broken down to focus on the
scrutiny of perception, and its mediation through a certain linguistic
textuality. The rupturing in the text is often seen through gaps,
spaces and questions. In Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay
(Penelope at her Loom) from The End of Beauty, Graham
references the classical narrative of Penelopes wait for her husband
Odysseus. Traditionally associated with faithfulness and patience,
Penelope in order to deflect her suitors devises a delaying tactic.
Penelope uses as an excuse the need to complete a burial shroud for
her elderly father-in-law, Laertes, before she can contemplate her
suitors advances. She weaves by day and unpicks her work at
night. Split into twenty-three separate sections, many of which
comprise only a single line of verse or a couple of words, Grahams
self-portrait uses the motif of weaving and unthreading as a textual
game of survival which emerges as the poem progresses. Graham
describes in her opening: the flitting shadows the postponement /
working her fingers into the secret place, the place of what is
coming undone (p. 48). The self-portrait enables three intersect-ing
and synchronous narratives to coexist. On one level we are given
Penelopes story but at points Odysseuss actions enter the frame,
the here and the there, in which he wanders searching (p. 49), as
well as the self-portraiture of the artist and poet at work. Using the
analogy of Penelopes loom Graham sees comparatives of detail in
the weaving and unthreading which takes place in her own writing,
what she refers to as the story and its undoing (p. 48).
A fascination with lacunae, gaps and unthreading is also mir-
rored by other poems in The End of Beauty. In Pollock and
Canvas Graham places her focus on Jackson Pollocks abstract
expression-ism and action paintings; a process which she
describes as choos-ing to no longer let the brushtip touch / at
any point / the still ground (p. 81). This movement is described
moreover as retaining action, creating a hovering keeping the
hands off the gap alive (p. 83). In an interview Graham has
suggested how acts of failure, even the failure of language to
match the world, are a necessary part of creativity:
I need to feel the places where the language fails as much as

one can. Silence which is awe or astonishment the speech
ripped out of you . . . Id like to think you can feel by its
accurate failures, the forces pressing against the sentence, the
time order . . . From the labyrinthine ritual cave paintings of
the Stone Age, through every period of human time, when we
have sought to enter, to break the surface, one of the ways
it has been crooked the blindness that one may see. And
in the poets that go that way, twisted syntax, breaks against
smooth sequence or sense, line breaks of queer kinds, white
spaces, interruptions, dashes, overpunctuation, delays,
clotted rich diction, obscurity, disorder, ellipses, sentence
fragments, digressive strategies every modulation in
certainty are all tools for storming the walls. 41
One can read into Grahams self-portraiture an evocation of the

phrase Penelopes web. The phrase is associated with a task that is
perpetually in process but never done or completed. This act of
weaving in the poem is also associated with the pattern-ing and
evocation of memory. Grahams Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay
points to the loom as trapping Odysseus, her hands tacking his
quickness down as if soothing it to sleep (p. 50). Not unlike the
evocation of keeping the gap alive in Pollocks action painting,
Penelopes action of unthreading, snipping and weaving enables
what the speaker refers to as his wanting in the threads she has to
keep alive for him / scissoring and spinning and pulling the long
minutes free (p. 51). Eventually creation and its destruction are
seen as a continual undistinguishable cycle, what Graham points to
as beginning always beginning the ending (p. 52). The titles
reference to self-portraiture enables Graham to meditate upon the
motivations of poetic writing, its relationship to memory and
actions that have not yet occurred. Like Ashbery and Bhatt, Graham
places poignant reflections on artistic intention and how self-
portraiture generates questions regarding the writing of poetry. She
asks us to consider poetrys relation to absence, omis-sion, creation
and destruction.
NOBODYS VOICE: MICHAEL PALMER
A key final question needs to be addressed: what happens to the

individual speaking voice, or lyric I, when the self is displaced
from centre stage and an experience of language takes its place?
American poet Michael Palmer suggests that the two apparently
conflicting possibilities of poetry as an act of recovery and an
act of unthreading are, in effect, mutually dependent strategies:
To recover the telling, the human, we must unwind the tale,

unbind the tale, the present seems to say. And to recover
meaning, we must resist its simulacra, cajolings and
screens. We must allow the voice the work its plurality,
its silences, its infinite, pleated body. 42
Palmer proposes that compositional techniques must always be

given an alert, if not sceptical eye. His perspective on the writing
and reception of poetry considers the poem as a site of enquiry,
an enfolding of infinite variations and a constellation of voices.
The poets role in Palmers matrix is to scrutinise the mechanics
of language, to reaffirm the importance of the personal utterance.
At its most basic this unthreading of the tale told forces us to
reflect upon how meaning may be constituted and recovered.
Since meaning is almost always a battleground for establishing
authority, we could add that this attention to the structures of
language has an implicit political and cultural angle. Voice and
linguistic indeter-minacy intersect in contemporary poetry to
generate what Palmer refers to as nobodys voice.
Palmer has often stated that his ambition is to create a composi-
tion that has nothing at its center. 43 Indeed, Palmers essays and
poetry gesture to the lyric as the articulation of nobodys voice.
But nobodys voice is not just the voice of no one. In explain-ing
what this phrase suggests, Palmer places us directly within a
context of European lyricism and a tradition that he identifies as
the analytic lyric. The poet Paul Celan becomes for Palmer a key
figure in this examination of the lyric self in language:
His response to the discourse of totalitarianism is to create

out of the German Expressionist tradition a body of
intensely concentrated lyric poetry which addresses the
reconstruction of human speech. I was . . . very much
moved by the sense of the dispersal of the subject, but also
the reaffirmation, the fact that it was nobodys voice and yet
it was, also, something again and again and again. 44
The analytic lyric in Palmers words addresses the problematics
of purely private utterance by taking over the condensation of
lyric emotion, and focusing it then on the mechanics of language
(p. 238). This approach produces in turn a critique of the discourse
of power, to renew the function of poetry (p. 238). In an early
essay Memory, Autobiography and Mechanisms of Concealment
(1981), Palmer reverses our preconception of the act of recovery in
poetry (be it biographical or historical). He proposes that what is
taken as a sign of openness conventional narrative order may
stand for concealment, and what is understood generally as signs of
withholding or evasion ellipsis, periphrasis etc. may from
45
another point of view stand for disclosure. In this light we can
begin to read the resistances in contemporary poetry, even the gaps
and lacunae we have experienced in Grahams poetry, as attempts
to practise more authentic methods of representation.
There is no better place to start than with Palmers more explicit
examination of memory and the lyric voice in his rewriting of Rainer
Maria Rilkes Orpheus and Eurydice (1904).46 The poem from The
Baudelaire Series works both as a cogent unravelling of a story and
the recovery of memory, since Palmer situates the reworking of the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth within the context of reminiscence. We
are given indications in both Rilke and Palmers poems that the
narrative centres on a state of amnesia. Rilke por-trays Eurydice as
deep within herself. Being dead / filled her beyond fulfilment. 47
Palmers poem gives us these statements: Im not here when I walk /
followed by a messenger confused / (Hes forgotten his name) (p. 24).
His treatment of Rilkes poem enacts the three intersecting
perspectives of Orpheus, Eurydice and the messenger god Hermes.
These three points finally fuse at the poems close. Eurydice in the
opening stutters through an ellipti-cal narrative and the poem enacts a
sustained examination of how song broke apart (p. 24) by focusing
on the separate modalities that comprise the lyric. The fragmentary
statements in the work create junctures in the poem that seem to
indicate a recalling of events. But this process of recall disrupts the
narrative even more. Palmers poem, although it relies heavily on
anaphoric constructions, shows hostility to naming and representative
accuracy: Dont say things / You cant say things, Dont say his
name for him / Dont listen to things (p. 25). This poem can be
read as an intersection of dis-courses, a kind of unthreading of
the lyric I. The complexity of subjectivity for Palmer is
prevalent in the final lines: Dont look through an eye / thinking
to be seen / Take nothing as yours (p. 25). These lines read as a
commentary on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth; Orpheus of
course does look back desiring recognition. But perhaps most
alluring is reading the poem as an active process of negotiating
memories as opposed to directly expressing them. The poems
linguistic instability foregrounds the complex balanc-ing act
between recovery and enquiry which the poem depends upon.
Palmers volume The Promises of Glass (2000) features a series
of eighteen autobiographical portraits. 48 The earlier quest for a
narrative is orchestrated strategically in this opening sequence as a
theatricalisation of carnivalesque and philosophical figures. On one
level we can read this volume in tandem with the prose journal The
Danish Notebook (1999), which was written from a request to
connect the dots in his work.49 Initially the poem reads as a stand-
up routine commenting on a body of work, even twisting the
rhetoric of the journal interview. The speaker prepares for the per-
formance: as I was putting on my face: / base, blusher, mascara,
ultra high-gloss lip enamel (p. 17). In a mock confessional we are
also told Dear Phil, What a hellish season its been. For a time I
thought I was another (p. 18). Read as a ludic chronology of
Palmers work, the opening presents the poet as celebrity, the
modulation of the extract is camp but not darkly ironic.
In If Not, Not, one of the more intensely lyrical poems in The
Promises of Glass, an anxious dialogue is enacted and rewritten
within other possible stories, intentions and sensations. The poem
circles its subject, a departure or romantic loss, in order to recre-ate
the idealised narrative which perhaps never existed: They tell each
other stories, / lies composed of dreams (p. 61). In attempt-ing to
recover a past that was never present intervening sensations
an inflection of colour or lighting rust, chrome, yellow, coral /
chemical green (p. 61) become compositional methods that
momentarily frame and even divert the reminiscence. If Not, Not
is wonderfully self-cancelling, erasing an emergent conversation
through a further unravelling of the story at each temporal plateau
in the text. Hesitant, disorienting and painful statements are
made and then discarded, such as: The music of moths, the
small lamps, What we called the hour in those days and I was
there / cut in half, only to survive (p. 61). As in Palmers earlier
rewriting of Orpheus and Eurydice, this poem balances a process
of recov-ery with a threat of amnesia or immobilising silence:
He means to say (p. 61). The French theorist Maurice Blanchot
under-stands this tension between memory and forgetting as an
implicit drive in the writing of poetry. He notes that the poet
speaks as though he were remembering, but if he remembers it is
through forgetting.50
CONCLUSION: JENNIFER MOXLEYS DECEITFUL

SUBJECTIVE
Jennifer Moxley somewhat playfully recognises that she has

been identified as a lyric poster child for her generation. And
yet her initial impressions of contemporary American lyricism in
the mid-1980s were far from auspicious:
This was the mid-eighties, a time when if you opened a

main-stream literary magazine all of the so-called lyric
poems were little stories from an individuals perspective
broken into lines and ending in an epiphany usually with a
sense of either moral or political superiority, directed
toward an absent interlocu-tor. 51
As a younger poet, her work contemplates the experimental legacy

of American poetry and the reception of lyric forms in the twenty-
first century. Notoriously, Moxleys preface to her first major
volume Imagination Verses champions the rights of the universal
lyric I .52 In The Open Letter series Moxley reiterates her
belief in a community of readership; that the solitary reader of
poetry is, in fact, interrelated to a network of other readers, a pre-
supposition which is not so far from William Wordsworths ideal of
a common language and Shelleys ideation of the imagination as
the great instrument of moral good. Moxleys own conditions for
the lyric draw striking parallels for the consideration of the slip-
periness of subjectivity and the configuration of memory:
The lyric can provide a literary approximation of those

fleet-ing moments of experience through which the present
comes into being. In the lyric, where syntactically
digressive devices work against narrative, the word both is
and is not temporally fixed, and thus through lyricism, the
past and the future along with the affective frames proper to
each, namely longing and regret become presentized. 53
The emphasis on the simultaneity of past and present indicates

that lyric memory becomes the traditional complex of a present-
tense evocation of the past. Moxleys reference to what she calls
digressive strategies points us to interruptions in the text, reso-
nances that hamper poetrys assimilation into an immediate nar-
rative. She questions emphatically the nostalgia and amnesia of
experiential recounting, or what she lineates eloquently in The
Cover Up from her volume The Line (2004) as an experience
gone except in the deceitful subjective. 54 Her poetry is densely
musical, incorporating citation, digression, meditation and a
provisional self-reflexive testing of the personal poem.
The poems from Imagination Verses are highly charged and emotive
in a way that challenges the more immediate revelations of
confessional verse. A key characteristic of this volume is Moxleys
ability to suture intense personal perception and political observa-tion.
Situating these poems in time can also be a difficult prospect. Ode on
the Son appears to place us in a quest for epic and romance with the
questioning: Where is my field of wheat, / my flock, my ocean / my
arsenal, my knight errant (p. 17); while one of the longer poems from
this volume, Ten Prolegomena to Heartbreak, makes reference to acts
of duelling in conjunction with the Avant-Garde lover / of hope (p.
85) and a protagonist who dreams of filmic meetings with big scores
(p. 88). Moxleys language is more-over one of constant detour and
transgression; she states I am such an inept navigator / of woe betide,
a miserable egomaniac (p. 85).
In Imagination Verses lyricism can appear to be a doubtful
strategy for political change, and feelings of hesitation and self
interrogation dominate the poems. At points there is also a search
for patterns of interconnection and responsibility. She urges in Ode
on the Particle, so forget the time you dwelt in insolence
pretending to be unique (p. 71), and seeks instead the unseen
connection of any specific body (p. 72). In a later poem from The
Sense Record (2003), Grain of the Cutaway Insight, there is the
berating of lyric form as a compulsion for order pitted against the
desire to commit thought as momentum and investigation: My
thoughts are too awkward, too erratic to rest / at ease in the beauti-
ful iamb.55 The engagement of Moxleys poetry in the world seeks
to counter what Charles Olson called the lyrical interference of the
individual as ego.56 She states the lyric I is not a political
universal, nor the guardian of the rights of men, but neither is it the
flaccid marker of an outdated bourgeois egotism (p. 57). As deceit-
ful as Moxleys speaking subject may be, her work raises broader
aesthetic questions to show us how linguistic instabilities can lead
one to question the nature of selfhood and its relation to the larger
social sphere.
SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS
Expressive lyric poetry raises questions about poetic voice

and articulation.
In contemporary poetry differences exist between poets
approaches to the personal, illustrated, for example, in the elegy.
The examination of autobiography in the 1980s is used by
some poets to engage with questions of race and identity and
ethnicity.
Self-portraiture presents poets with opportunities to dissect
processes of writing and composition, particularly in the
poetry of John Ashbery and Sujata Bhatt.
Many poets challenge the idea of the subject as a pre-existent
entity. Some poets attempt to show an evolving subjectivity in
their work, such as Jorie Graham.
For others the expression of a self through language is
displaced by an attention to the construction of language, for
example Michael Palmer and Jennifer Moxley.
NOTES
1. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in Selected

Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1920), pp. 1322 (p. 21).
2. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City
Lights, 2001), p. 9.
3. Al Alvarez, The Poets Voice (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), pp.
1045.
4. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, in The Poetic Works
of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest De Slincourt (London:
Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 740.
5. Lyn Hejinian, The Person and Description, Poetics Journal,
9 (1991), p. 167.
6. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory
and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 223.
7. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1972),
p. 145.
8. Charles Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American
Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 10.
9. Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 133.
10. Andrew Motion, Selected Poems 19761997 (London:
Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 610. All subsequent references
to this edition are given in the text.
11. Lee Harwood, Collected Poems (Exeter: Shearsman, 2004),
pp. 4323. All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
12. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2000), pp. 45.
13. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary
Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3.
14. Philippe Lejeune, cited in Juliana Spahr, Resignifying
Autobiography: Lyn Hejinians My Life, American Literature,
68.1 (1996), 13959 (p. 139).
15. Cathy Song, Picture Bride (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1983). All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
16. Gayle K. Fujita-Sato, Third World as Place and Paradigm in
Cathy Songs Picture Bride, Melus, 15.1 (1988), 4972
(p. 50).
17. Grace Nichols, The Fat Black Womans Poems (London:
Virago, 1984). All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
18. Grace Nichols, The Battle with Language, Caribbean
Women Writers: Essays from the First International
Conference, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (Wellesley, MA:
Calaloux, 1990), pp. 2839 (p. 287).
19. Grace Nichols, cited in Dennis Walder, Post Colonial
Literatures in English (London: Blackwell, 1998), p. 147.
20. Grace Nichols, cited in Talk Yuh Talk Interviews with Anglophone
Caribbean Poets, ed. Kwame Dawes (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2000), pp. 1401.
21. Mara Scanlon, The Divine Body in Grace Nicholss The Fat
Black Womans Poems, World Literature Today, 72.1 (1998),
5966 (p. 62).
22. Nichols, The Battle with Language, p. 289.
23. Kamau Brathwaite, Nation Language, in History of the
Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone
Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984), pp. 5-6.
24. Nichols, The Battle with Language, p. 284.
25. Susan M. Schultz (ed.), The Tribe of John Ashbery and
Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 1995), p. 1.
26. John Ashbery, in Thomas Gardner Regions of Unlikeness:
Explaining Contemporary Poetry (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 74.
27. John Ashbery, In conversation with John Tranter New York
City, 20 April 1985, Jacket, 2 (1985). Available online at
http://jacketmagazine.com/02/jaiv1985.html.
28. John Ashbery, in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton
Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton & Norton,
1994), p. 179. Originally published in Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror (New York: Viking, 1975).
29. John Ashbery, Novelty Love Trot, in The American Poetry
Review, 33.6 (2004), p. 6.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception,

trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1999).
31. John Ashbery, cited in Richard Gray, American Poetry of the
20th Century (Harlow: Longman, 1990), p. 324.
32. John Ashbery, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1986). All
subsequent references to this edition are given in the text.
33. Ashbery, cited in Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness, p. 74.
34. John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashberys
Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),
p. 135.
35. John Ashbery, The Invisible Avant-Garde, in T. B. Hess and
John Ashbery (eds), The Avant-Garde (New York: Macmillan,
1968), p. 149.
36. Sujata Bhatt, The Stinking Rose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995);
A Colour for Solitude (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002). All
subse-quent references to this edition are given in the text.
37. Sujata Bhatt, Interview with Vicki Bertram. Available
online at www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?
showdoc=4;doctype=i nterview.
38. Bhatt, Interview with Vicki Bertram.
39. Jorie Graham, Erosion (New York: Ecco Press, 1983).
40. Jorie Graham, The End of Beauty (New York: Ecco, 1987).
All subsequent references to this edition are given in the
text.
41. Jorie Graham, Some Notes on Silence, in Philip Dow (ed.), 19
New American Poets of the Golden Gate (New York: Harcourt,
1984), pp. 40910.
42. Michael Palmer, cover note for Norma Cole, Moira
(Berkeley: O Books, 1995).
43. Michael Palmer, From the Notebooks, 19 New American
Poets of the Golden Gate, p. 343.
44. Michael Palmer, Interview, in Gardner, Regions of
Unlikeness, p. 239.
45. Michael Palmer, Autobiography and Mechanisms of
Concealment, in Bob Perelman (ed.), Writing Talks
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), pp.
20729 (p. 227).
46. Michael Palmer, Sun (San Francisco: North Point, 1988),
pp. 235. All subsequent references to this edition are given
in the text.
47. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,
trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Press, 1989), pp.
4953.
48. Michael Palmer, The Promises of Glass (New York: New
Directions, 2000).
49. Michael Palmer, The Danish Notebook (Penngrove, CA:
Avec Books, 1999), p. 9.
50. Maurice Blanchot, Forgetful Memory, in The Infinite
Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 31417 (p. 317).
51. Jennifer Moxley, Lyric Poetry and the Inassimilable Life, in
The Poker, 6 (2005), 4958 (p. 53).
52. Jennifer Moxley, Imagination Verses (New York: Tender
Buttons, 1996), p. x. All subsequent references to this
edition are given in the text.
53. Jennifer Moxley Lyric Poetry and the Inassimilable Life, p.
53.
54. Jennifer Moxley, The Line (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press,
2004), p. 36.
55. Jennifer Moxley, The Sense Record (Cambridge: Salt,
2003), p. 6.
56. Charles Olson, Projective Verse, in Donald Allen and
Warren Tallman (eds), Poetics of the New American Poetry
(New York: Grove Press, 1973), pp. 14758 (p. 156).
Chapter 2
Politics and Poetics
In May 2009 Carol Ann Duffy became the first woman poet
laureate in UK history. In recent decades the role of laureate
became subject to increasing pressures of marking royal events.
Such were the demands placed upon Andrew Motion, Duffys
predecessor, that after some resistance, he began to write
occasional public verse. Provocatively, Duffy has eschewed the
more ceremonial function of laureate and is intent upon raising
awareness of poetry in the public sphere. The new laureates first
work was a pointed and topical criticism of the abuse of allowances
by a number of British MPs. Responding to the published poem,
Mark Brown comments:
She could have chosen to write on Prince Philips 88th

birthday, or the sombre commemorations of the D-day
landings in Normandy. Instead Carol Ann Duffy has chosen
a far more meaty subject for her first poem as poet laureate:
politics. And shes angry more Duffy Furiosa in the
words of one expert . . . It is a powerful, passionate
commentary on the corrosiveness of politics on politicians
and the ruinous effect of idealism. 1
Through an insistent echoing of former Prime Minister Tony Blairs

rallying cry Education, Education, Education, Duffys poem
articulates an absolute disaffection with the failure of politicians
2
promises. Her poem entitled Politics asserts the failure of ideals,
since politics turn the face to stone, the right hand to a gauntlet,
3
the left a glove puppet. Duffy allies political rhetoric to gambling
and the fiscal, a politicians speech becomes your lips dice and a
kiss is a dropped pound coin. While knowledge of the abuse of
expenses forms the bedrock to understanding Politics, Duffys
disgust is levied at the manipulation of language and its perversion
to Latin, gibberish, feedback static. Politics investigates the pact
made between members of parliament and their role of representing
the public good. In a bid to reinsert an ethics of representation and
higher linguistic code, the speaker states that politics must roar to
your conscience, moral compass truth. Paradoxically, Duffys
closing cry of POLITICS, POLITICS, POLITICS is not as an
absolute dismissal, nor a rallying cry, but as an attempt to reclaim
the word to a fundamental element of good upon which all action
must be based.
FOUNDING PROPOSITIONS: POLITICS AND POST-WORLD

WAR II POETRY
From these opening observations it may seem that the relationship

between poetry and politics must always be one of competing
claims for the rights to truth and representing the public good. The
often cited and misunderstood quotation from W. H. Auden, poetry
makes nothing happen, can be read as a central nexus of our
4
discussion. Following World War II there was a necessary and, at
times, passionate questioning of the role of poetry in the public
sphere. Indeed it might appear that the writing of poetry during
times of political crisis equates to Nero fiddling as Rome burns.
One may well question whether Shelleys nineteenth-century
treatise on poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world in
5
his A Defence of Poetry (1821) retains any resonance. Poetry,
Shelley argued, is central to human life because it is the creator of
culture; the poet creates a broad vision that transcends his time and
place, to create a dialogue with past and future generations. While
Auden might initially appear to be dismissive of poetrys power, his
poem is an admission that poetry survives a way of happening, a
mouth (p. 242). Auden proposes that poetry is an enduring art
form, a dynamic method of articulation.
Theodor Adornos infamous statement that to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric appears at the end of his 1949 essay
Cultural Criticism and Society. 6 Critics originally took it as a
judgement upon the impossibility of writing lyric poetry
following the Holocaust. Mechanised mass murder at Auschwitz
obliterated the concept of individual suffering; as a result the
idea of the viability of the single expressive voice in poetry is
called into the question. However, Adorno later reflected upon
the original statement and insisted upon the necessity of
continuing to write poetry:
I once said that after Auschwitz one could no longer write

poetry, and that gave rise to a discussion I did not anticipate
. . . I would readily concede that, just as I said that after
Auschwitz one could not write poems by which I meant
to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that
time it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that
one must write poems.7
Adornos original statement takes us through a dialectical

pronouncement: to write a poetry that infers the Holocaust, risks
diminishing the catastrophe to a complicit artistic representation;
equally a poetry that refuses to acknowledge the Holocaust
serves only to silence history. His later reflection indicates that
poetry needed to change and expresses the desire for poetry to
serve as ethical witness.
When interviewed in the 1980s during the height of The
Troubles in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney reflects upon the
question whether poetry can respond to barbarism:
Can you write a poem in the post nuclear age? Can you write
a poem that gazes at death, or the western front, or
Auschwitz a poem that gives peace and tells horror? It gives
true peace only if horror is satisfactorily rendered. If the eyes
are not averted from it. If its overmastering power is
acknowledged and unconcerned, so the human spirit holds its
own against its affront and immensity. To me thats what the
end of art is peace means.8
Heaney also calls upon the poet to bear witness to atrocity the
poets responsibility is to render the horror of barbarism in the
poetic work without complicity. His pronouncement can be allied to
Jerome Rothenbergs insistence that poetry after the Holocaust must
be human. Rothenberg suggests that a new form of lyricism creates
a poetry not necessarily about the Holocaust, but a poetry that
characterizes what it means to be human, to be a maker of poems
(even lyric poems) after Auschwitz.9 We might add to this
meditation Charles Bernsteins comment that In contrast to or is
it an extension of Adornos famous remarks about the
impossibility of (lyric) poetry after Auschwitz, I would say poetry
is a necessary way to register the unrepresentable loss of the
10
Second War.
An appeal to politics in poetry is made evident in the mid-1980s
and early 1990s with the growth of interest in a poetry of witness.
Carolyn Forchs groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting:
Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness itemises the wars and turmoil
11
of the twentieth century. Her catalogue includes poets of the First
and Second World Wars as well as poetry from the Holocaust;
repression in Eastern and Central Europe, war and dictatorship in
the Mediterranean; Indo-Pakistani wars; wars in the Middle East;
repression and revolution in Latin America; the struggle for civil
rights and liberties in the USA; wars in Korea and Vietnam;
repression in Africa; and the struggles against apartheid in South
Africa and for democracy in China. Working often with twentieth-
century poetry in translation, Forchs introduction gives a
compelling insight to the term witness:
We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish

between personal and political poems the former calling
into mind lyrics of love and emotional loss, the latter
indicating a public partisanship that is considered divisive
even when necessary. The distinction between the personal
and the political gives the political realm too much and too
little scope; at the same time it renders the personal too
important and not important enough. If we give up the
dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the
most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the
personal however can indicate a myopia, an inability to see
how larger structures of the economy and the state
circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of
individuality. (p. 31)
Forch calls for a third term to be distinguished between the

state and the personal which she names the social. She adds that
the social is a place of resistance and struggle where books are
published, poems read and protest disseminated (p. 31). Poetry, far
from not making anything happen politically, can be read as what
poet Michael Palmer refers to as something happening among
12
other things happening. Cast in this light, poetry has political
agency played out in the social realm. Palmer urges the poem to
bear witness to the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. He comments upon the network of associations and
configurations that make the poem. His reading of poetrys
response to a moment of Barbarism establishes the relevance of
the contemporary poets ongoing engagement with society:
The poem is altered by events that it cannot possibly foresee

. . . The point is not simply how work responds to current
events, but how previous work is altered by and alters, them
. . . Poetry as something happening among other things hap-
pening. As something happening in language, and to language
under siege. Poetry as memory, sometimes memory of the
13
future. Poetry as both fixed and in process, ever a paradox.
As Palmer points out, poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
has had to learn how to ethically address and represent brutality and
war, from interethnic conflict to global warfare. Theories of
deconstruction and poststructuralist thought can persuade readers and
students that the politics of a poem lies in an interrogation of linguistic
structures. Given these differences, we will need to address the
distinctions between a poetry which writes about politics, and a poetry
which performs politically. World War II veteran and pacifist
Lawrence Ferlinghettis manifesto poem Insurgent Art (2007) offers a
belief that poetry has political agency.
Ferlinghetti responds: What are poets for, in such an age? /
What is the use of poetry? / The state of the world calls out for
poetry to save it. He adds, with considerable optimism, that
15
Words can save you where guns cant. As such, this chapter
considers the extent to which contemporary poets are prepared to
rest their belief for political change and critique, in the power of
language.
A DAY IN POLITICS: INAUGURATION POETS MAYA ANGELOU

AND ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Arguably, no more direct intervention between poetry and politics

exists than the presence of a poets recitation during presidential
inauguration day in the USA. Four American presidential
inaugurations (John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton (twice) and Barack
Obama) have included a poet reading as part of the ceremony. The
poets were Robert Frost (1961), Maya Angelou (1993), Miller
Williams (1997) and Elizabeth Alexander (2009). Zofia Burr
proposes that the occasion of the inaugural poem resurrects an
ideology about the role of poetry in the public sphere that is as
influential now as it was in the early 1960s.16 Burr proposes that
in this ceremonial function the poet serves as an explicit outsider.
Both poet and poems role is to question, from a position of
integrity, the state of the political sphere:
The function of the poet as a check on power is both

analogous to that of the press of the Fourth Estate
(understood as having a responsibility to scrutinize the
actions of the government from the perspectives of the
people) and also absolutely unlike that of the press . . . the
very things that poetry is designed to check and counter in
the name of integrity defined in the terms of the private, the
personal the individual. Thus if poetry has a public role to
perform, it is only by virtue of its ability to remain apart
from all public discourses of society. (pp. 4301)
Poetry and politics make odd bedfellows given poetrys association

with privacy and politicians perpetual search for an audience. An
estimated 38 million viewers watched Obamas inauguration
ceremony around the world, but the tensions are evident in John F.
Kennedys proposal that politicians are the men who create power
17
and artists are the men who question power. Maya Angelou and
Elizabeth Alexanders poems illustrate how poets attempt to avoid
the rhetorical flourishes associated with public address while
retaining a direct appeal to their audiences expectations. Their
poems create a dialogue with previous inaugural poems;
Alexanders poem especially enters into a direct conversation with
Angelous earlier On the Pulse of Morning (1993).
Angelous poem problematises the ideal of an accomplished
programme of nationhood. On the Pulse of Morning is not a
citizens address to America, but includes three unexpected voices:
a rock, a river and a tree. Borrowing from Native American
animism, Angelou alerts us to a landscape that existed prior to the
voyages to the New World of Columbus and other European
adventurers. The America of Maya Angelous poem is not a
preexistent space but an ambition to be made through exertion, care
and community. The rock urges the people to face your distant
destiny and challenges a human predilection to remain face down
in ignorance / your mouths spilling words. / Armed for slaughter. 18
Building upon an ecological imperative, the voice of the river
retells how the denominations of people create a bordered country
whose armed struggles for profit / Have left collars of waste upon /
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast (pp. 2701).
Borrowing from Walt Whitmans evocation of American citizenship
as a body containing multitudes in Song of Myself (1855) Angelou
uses a listing of identities evoking the complexity of America:
The Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,

The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. (p. 271)
The intervention of the tree as a final speaking voice builds upon

the diversity outlined by the river with a parallel gesture towards
inclusion. Angelou dramatises how America exists as an intersection of
individual narratives creating a tissue of connective narrative threads.
These narratives convene to create an experience of migration,
wanderlust, and in many instances exploitation and a bloody history, to
include Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, Cherokee, Turk, Arab, Swede,
German, Eskimo, Scot, Ashanti, Yoruba and Kru. Angelou opens the
history of America with the violent annihilation of Native American
cultures and includes the violence of slavery against African peoples:
Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare. Praying for a dream (p. 272).
On the Pulse of Morning urges a reconsideration of the ways in
which a nation performs its politics. Echoing the refrain of the Civil
Rights Movement, Angelous poem states that the peoples of America
will not be moved (p. 272) and urges its audience to give birth again
to the dream (p. 272). Encouraging dynamics of community and
shared agency, the poem proposes that this is a new day and wishes for
the grace to look up and out And

into your sisters eyes, into Your
brothers face, your country And
say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning. (p. 273)
This appeal to a communal ritual based in the everyday offers an

explicit challenge to the rhetoric of ceremony.
Interviewed by the New York Times prior to the occasion of
Obamas inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander stated that as
preparation to her writing, she read the previous inaugural poems,
as well as many others adding that the ones that appeal to me
have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to
larger issues without getting corny. 19 Crucially Alexander admitted
that her aim was to create a poem that did not talk down to some
imagined audience. Alexanders Praise Song for the Day
20
establishes a conversation with Angelous poem. Building on
ideas of working life, her poem marks the inaugural day with the
action of Americas citizens. The poem echoes the momentum of
work songs; its focus is upon acts of mending broken
communities. Alexanders opening poses a caustic critique upon
the failure of the Bush administration, the breakdown of an
American polity and its dependence upon a language of mistrust,
a failure to act in the spirit of a central good: Each day we go
about our business / walking past each other, catching each
others / eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
In her essay on June Jordan, Alexander states that Jordans
emphasis on linguistic innovation poses an instructive example to
21
her own work. Alexander suggests that For time immemorial
across geographies and peoples, poetry has taken as its subject
politics, that is, the affairs of the polis, the community and its
people (p. 116). Commenting on the interrelationship between
poetic form and politics she proposes that:
Poets do have responsibility to make images that compel, to

distil language, to write with model precision and specificity,
that is what poetry has to offer to other genres. It makes
something happen with language that takes the breath away or
shifts the mind. For the poem, which is after all not the
newspaper, must move beyond the information it contains
22
while simultaneously imparting the information it contains.
In Alexanders estimation the political poem refuses becoming
reportage. Images of mending, regrouping, artistic creation and
daily schedules become the loci of the poem. We are presented
with a someone who is darning as well as people making
music, teaching, waiting for a bus and watching the weather. Far
from being a praise song of America, the poem focuses on the
elements within American society which fail to function what
Alexander refers to as the things in need of repair. Importantly,
the poem frames the relationship between citizens as a linguistic
bond giving reference to the constitution as an encounter in
words. Whereas Angelous poem stresses the importance of
inclusion and multiplicity, Alexanders poem stresses the
importance of encountering others through travel, and the
curiosity to know what is beyond ones own community.
Alexander maps America through its highways, dirt tracks and rail
lines as well as its buildings. Inscribed in their making is a
history of incredible sacrifice, many that have died for this day,
and the poet asks to sing the names of the dead who brought us
here. For Alexander and Angelou, America remains in a state of
possibility and the role of the inaugural poem is not to glorify
political achievements. Instead their poems display a need to
find connections between citizens and act as a reminder of the
failures, as well as the possibilities, inherent in political rhetoric.
In this way, both are following Jordans premise of the
relationship between poetry and politics: I am saying that the
ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate
connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not
only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each
other that will determine the connection. 23
PASTORAL AND LUDIC: SEAMUS HEANEY AND PAUL

MULDOON
On 8 May 2007 the opening of the Northern Irish Assembly at

Stormont presented an unlikely coupling of First Minister Ian
Paisley, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, and deputy First
Minister Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander. The
Guardian commented that it was an extraordinary display of cross-
24
community unity marking a symbolic end to the Troubles.
Eventually nicknamed the chuckle brothers, at the close of their
shared ministerial office McGuinness gave a parting gift to Paisley.
The Times noted that the gift was a pair of framed poems composed
by McGuinness himself.25 The paper added that Just in case Mr
Paisley was not too keen on his poetic efforts, Mr McGuinness had
also asked Seamus Heaney, the Nobel laureate, to write out in long-
hand some lines from Heaneys The Cure at Troy.
McGuinnesss action illustrates how poetry is associated with ideas
of intimacy and ceremony. The uneasy alliance between poetry and
politics often conjures the fear of performing work that is mere
rhetoric or polemic in verse. A snapshot of the poetry of Northern
Ireland written between 1975 and 1983, from Heaneys North
(1975), Derek Mahons The Snow Party (1975) and Paul
Muldoons Quoof (1983), articulates an inherent scepticism
towards the poet as polemicist, but a respect for the ethical
questions poetry raises.26 Heaney asserts that during The
Troubles poetry served a marginal but important countercultural
role whose language was an antidote to sectarian rhetoric:
The fact that a literary action was afoot was itself a new
political condition, and the poets did not feel the need to
address themselves to the specifics of politics because they
assumed that the tolerances and subtleties of their art were
precisely what they had to set against the repetitive
intolerance of public life. When Derek Mahon, Michael
Longley, James Simmons and myself were having our first
book published, Paisley was already in full sectarian cry
and Northern Irelands cabinet ministers regularly
massaged the atavisms of Orangemen on the twelfth of
July.27
The archaeologist P. V. Globs The Bog People (1965) provided

Heaney with accounts of bodies dug up accidentally by Scandinavian
turf cutters, as well as evidence of ritualistic murder and burial in the
Iron Age. In Wintering Out (1972) this exposure to Globs book
became the basis for a poem regarding sacrificial murder, Tollund
Man. However, in North the exhumation of the bodies serves as an
acute political allegory for the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland.
Heaney is explicit about the political analogy:
Taken in relation to the tradition of Irish political

martyrdom, for that cause whose icon is Kathleen Ni
Houlihan, this is more than an archaic barbarous rite; it is
an archetypal pattern. And the unforgettable photographs of
these victims blended in my mind with photographs of
atrocities, past and present in the long rites of Irish political
and religious struggles.28
This element of simultaneity is evident in The Grauballe Man.

Found in Jutland, Denmark the man had had his throat slashed. As
Heaney depicts: The head lifts / the chin is a visor raised above the
vent (p. 28). Grauballe Man looks as if he had been poured in tar
(p. 28) and gently removed as a forceps baby (p. 29). Moving us
to the twentieth century, Heaney closes with a reference to his
shield which chronicles the weight of each hooded victim / slashed
and dumped (p. 29). In Punishment the allegorical model is taken
further in the poetic dissection of the body of a woman found in the
bog with a noose around her neck, as punishment for sexual
betrayal. Heaney attempts to sexually reanimate the body with her
nipples as amber beads and the wind on her naked front (p. 30).
Acutely attuned to this act of voyeurism, the confessional tone of
the poem creates an unsettling intimacy with the preserved body.
The speaker confesses that I almost love you (p. 31). The poem
moves introspectively to reflect upon modern Northern Ireland, as
the speaker interrogates his own lack of agency, regarding the
women tarred as punishment for their relationships with British
soldiers. He questions his own position watching the bog womans
sisters weeping by railings. Invariably he recognises his own
situation within the atavism of sectarian conflict by admitting to
understanding, the exact / and tribal intimate revenge (p. 31).
North divided critics; for some it glorified violence and ritualised
murder. Poet Ciaran Carson wrote that Heaney was in danger of
becoming a laureate of violence a mythmaker, an anthropologist
of ritual killing, an apologist for the situation in the last resort, a
mystifier.29 Heaneys North could be interpreted as celebrating
what politician Conor Cruise OBrien has pointed to in his attack
on the IRA and Sinn Fein as autocratic and fascist organisations,
30
mired in the language of sacred soil and the cult of the dead.
Heaney suggests that poetry and politics are in different ways, an
articulation, an ordering, a giving to form to inchoate pieties,
prejudices world views.31 In Whatever You Say Say Nothing the
poet interrogates the language which represents Northern Ireland in
the public domain. He draws our attention to overused terms that
are in danger of becoming empty signifiers: Backlash and crack
down, Polarization, long standing hate and the voice of sanity
(p. 52). Heaney also comments upon his own possible compliance
towards encoding politics in all this art and sedentary trade (p.
54). The poems title is a warning, and the work gives a close
analysis of differences between the religious communities. Names
and schools signify affiliations, encrypted politics which infiltrate
everyday life drawing attention to land of password, handgrip,
wink and nod / of open minds as open as a trap (p. 55). To this
effect Heaney has seen his role less as claiming political
leadership than as remaining witness to:
Poetrys solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the

victimized, and the underprivileged. The witness is any
figure in whom the truthtelling urge and the compulsion to
identify with the oppressed becomes necessarily integral
with the act of writing itself.32
The final poem in North, Exposure, displays the poets position

as a marginal spectator. He comments ruefully upon My
responsible tristia (p. 67), notoriously describing the poet as
neither internee nor informer but as an inner migr who has
escaped from the massacre (p. 68).
Published in the same year, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford is one
of the key poems from Derek Mahons volume The Snow Party.
Mahons approach towards the political landscape in Ireland is
deliberately circumspect. The poem interrogates suffering, violence
and the premise of ethical representation through poetry. Starting
from a global map of human suffering, the poem addresses the
haunting of Peruvian mines and Indian compounds to settle upon a
shed in County Wexford. Here a thousand mushrooms crowd to a
33
keyhole having learned patience and silence. The mushrooms
in this foetid environment serve as an imagining of the imprisoned
and censored. Their patient waiting is seen as out of sync with the
march of history and political discussion since they wait for us
since civil war days (p. 89). Edna Longley poses that Mahons
poem does more than translate a defeated community into the
narrative of history or even a lost people into symbolic
salvation . . . He receives a defenceless spirit into the protectorate
34
of poetry. The mushrooms may function as reminders of
prisoners of conscience, and certainly Mahons poem places a
dubious focus on the the flashbulb firingsquad we wake them with
(p. 90). Mahon extends this community of suffering to a
transhistorical one, identifying it with the holocaust victims of
Treblinka and the lost people of Pompeii (p. 90). Questions
regarding an ethics of representation are posed in the poem since
voices beg for us To do something, to speak on their behalf / or at
least not to close the door again (p. 90). A Disused Shed in Co
Wexford frames the necessity of writing as a response to and
articulation of the suffering of others, but warns that the
representation of that suffering is of key concern in considering
political responsiveness.
Interviewed in 1985, Paul Muldoon responded to a question on the
relationship between politics and his poetry with the retort It doesnt
matter where I stand politically, with a small p in terms of Irish
politics. My opinion about what should happen in Northern Ireland is
no more valuable than yours.35 Quixotic and ludic, Muldoons
Gathering Mushrooms in Quoof refuses to remain still. He creates a
space where memories of cultivation compete with drug taking, news
headlines and the dirty protest in the H Block. While these intersecting
narratives refute a political positioning, the poem can be read
intertextually. We can see a useful continuity between Muldoons work
and Mahons A Disused Shed in Co Wexford. Set in a loose five-
sonnet sequence, Muldoon revisions an agrarian idyll by situating the
pastoral in a hallucinatory psilocybin haze. There is also reference to
paramilitary violence with the recollection of the IRA firebombing of
Malone House, Belfast in 1976. Gathering Mushrooms from Quoof
features recollections of his father cultivating mushrooms, playfully
depicting him as one of the mythic ancient warriors / before the rising
tide (p. 8). However, the play of the poem shifts in the closing sonnet
where reverberating political images surface. Ventriloquised through a
hallucinating friend the speaker recalls a voice which begs Come back
to us (p. 9). Framed in a prison where beyond this concrete wall is a
wall of concrete and barbed wire
(p. 9) the poem graphically evokes images of the H Block republican

prisoners dirty protests of the late 1970s and the hunger strikers of the
early 1980s. The voice urges the poet that his song must be of
treading your own dung (p. 9). A gradual fading of the scene in a
soiled grey blanket of Irish rain / that will one day, bleach itself white
(p. 9) paces the gradual emaciation of the prisoner to death.
Muldoon challenges any deliberate intention to respond to
Mahons poem. When asked about the allusions common to both
poems he responds:
The similarity is really an accident. I think its worth
remembering that in England theres much more mobility, a
much wider range of experience. Im not saying that there
arent any class barriers or distinctions in Ireland, but
basically its a fairly homogenous country in which
everybodys experience is pretty much the same, and the
same images just tend to turn up. And the same images turn
up in American poetry. What more can I say?36
Certainly, both share a preoccupation with ventriloquising the

voices of the dispossessed and an equivocation concerning direct
political positioning. Longley reflecting upon the recent changes
created by processes of peace and reconciliation in Northern
Ireland proposes: Just as the Good Friday agreement may allow
poetry to be read more aesthetically, so its strands focus the
finer print of Northern Ireland not as a bordered space but as
itself internally and externally intertextual. 37 The three poets
through their different processes of early engagement mythic
ritual in Heaney, questions of ethical responsibility in Mahon
and empathy in Muldoon display a shared commitment to
refuting atavism and easy political positioning.
THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE: POETRY AND THE

PUBLIC SPHERE CHARLES BERNSTEIN
An early poem by Charles Bernstein states quixotically that I read

somewhere that love of the / public good is the only passion that
38
really / necessitates speaking to the public. Bernsteins name is
affiliated to a loose collective known under the rubric of language
poetry or writing, which began to appear in the early 1970s.
Language writing can be characterised as a poetry which frequently
works in terms of diminished reference, questioning the
transparency of language, or languages unequivocal claim as a
finite medium of representation. The disruption of syntax, narrative
and the foregrounding of languages generative properties through
its slippages, puns and word play serve to create a poetry of intense
linguistic opacity. For language writing the rupturing of the text
and divergence of poetic language from public discourse had a
political agency. Bernstein suggests that language must be seen
as not accompanying but constituting the world. 39 The
premises of the tendency create an overall focus upon the reader
as a coproducer of the text, which would appear to align the
tenor of their poetics neatly with Roland Barthess identification
of the writerly text.40 Barthes suggests that the writerly text can
be understood as ourselves writing (p. 5), and characterises its
goal as a desire to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a
producer of the text (p. 4).
Bernsteins essays refute language as a vehicle of direct
media-\tion. His early poetics stress a suspicion of the language of
public discourse, and suggest that there is a troubling relationship
between the hierarchies of languages rule-governed conventions
and authority. The relationship between convention and a rhetori-
cal address, he suggests, can be located as an attempt to master
language. This link between rhetoric, rule-governed conventions
and public discourse has for Bernstein an explicitly political
dimension. He stresses that once we consider the conventions of
writing, we are entering into the politics of language . . .
Convention is a central means by which authority is made
credible.41 Before equating Bernsteins poetry with the refutation
of all rule-governed principles in language, it is clear that the poet
considers not all conventions and authorities as corrupt (p. 222).
Instead he proposes that It is essential to trace how some uses of
convention and authority can hide the fact that both are historical
constructions rather than sovereign principles. For convention and
authority can, and ought, serve at the will of the polis (pp. 2223).
Bernsteins comments indicate that a critique of convention is a
legitimate method for revealing an authority which perhaps does
not serve the polis. But can we begin to link this ambition to the
writing of poetry? In an early essay, he suggests that the
disruption of established rules of grammar and syntax is linked
with a political agency, in effect opening the text to an
affirmation of language as a shared commonality:
Prescribed rules of grammar & spelling make language seem

outside of our control. & a language, even only seemingly,
wrested from our control is a world taken from us a world
in which language becomes a tool for the description of the
world, words mere instrumentalities for representing this
world.42
Bernstein links the artifice of poetry, or what he calls writing
centered on its wordness (p. 32) with an ambitious political and
social claim:
Language is commonness in being, through which we see
& make sense of & value. Its exploration is the exploration
of the human common ground. The move from a purely
descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing
centered on its wordness, its physicality, its haecceity
(thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-
sameness, of the place of our connection: in the world, in
the word, in our-selves. (p. 32)
The section World on Fire from Bernsteins volume Girly Man

(2006) examines the role of poetic language in a culture of the
43
political soundbite. Bernstein interrogates ideas of poetic
responsiveness and the relationship between rhetoric and political
enquiry. The title, taken as Arnold Schwarzeneggers deprecation of
Democrats in 2004 as girly men, is used as an affirmative chant
dedicated to Bernsteins son, The Ballad of the Girly Man:
So be a girly man
& sing this gurly
song Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war. (p. 181)
The eleven poems in World on Fire can be read as a poetic

sequence which tackles the repercussions of 9/11. Indeed, Some of
these Daze marks the publication of Bernsteins initial responses to
9/11 posted on the Internet, with titles such as Its 8:23 in New
York, Aftershock, Report from Liberty Street and Letter From
New York. Bernstein acts as a bewildered reporter attempting to
understand skies unnaturally clear of airplanes (p. 18) and the
What I cant describe is the reality; the panic; the horror (p. 19).
Bernsteins poetry includes a texture of nonsense rhyme, black

humour, punning, and the rewriting of found citations and sayings. His
humour is often reliant upon the readers reciprocative aware-ness to
mistakes, errors and linguistic slippage. Take for example the
following from The Folks Who Live on the Hill, which begins with a
deformed evocation of a scene from Casablanca: Its still the same
old lorry (p. 39). He questions in this same poem: Whats the / Use in
clothespin when you havent got / Even the idea of a line?(p. 40).
Images of social disaffiliation and disconnection constantly emerge
through the sequence as in Lost in Drowned Bliss:
Things are
solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine.
* **
forest: we splinter the void to catch

the light, then hail the sparks as paradise. (p. 49)
These poems do not seem assured in using humour as a weapon of

resistance; the evocation of a lyric sensibility at the close of Lost
in Drowned Bliss signals a nostalgia if not for moral certitude, then
at least for an affirmation of poetrys role in the public sphere.
Paradoxically, Bernsteins riposte to military authority becomes
most cogent when he assumes a more dogmatic rhetorical refrain.
This method creates an impression of call and response in Broken
English which constantly questions What are you fighting for? (p.
47). These interjections are interspersed with a sickening evocation
of doctored media images and airbrushed photographs:
Brushing up fate pixel by pixel, burnishing

dusk: the sum of entropy and elevation.
Tony takes it in his intestine, the sharp

pain in the body like ripples
in a sand dune, his face exquisitely detached
from any sign of the sensation. (p. 47)
Bernstein candidly recognises that it is almost a joke to speak of

poetry and national affairs. 44 Evoking Rousseaus The Social
Contract he affirms that Poetry is one of the few areas where
the right of reconvening is exercised. 45 We can begin to
understand the relationship between poetry and politics in
Bernsteins language, writing not as protest poetry, but as a
poetry that wishes to transform patterns of reading and assessing
the world. The poet refers to this impetus as:
Poets dont have to be read, any more than trees have to be sat
under, to transform poisonous societal emissions into
something that can be breathed. As a poet, you affect the
public sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and
by exercising our prerogative to choose what collective forms
you will legitimate. The political power of poetry is not
measured in numbers; it instructs us to count differently. 46
Bernsteins claims for poetry as enacting change enforces that it

is a revolution in reading and understanding.
REPORTING WAR: ELIOT WEINBERGER
In a column for Poetry in 2008 David Orr considers how a poem

may perform politically. He questions whether the political in
poetry must be subdivided into categories of responsiveness to
ideas of social relations, world events, reportage, language even
the ability of the poem to incite action:
Is a political poem simply a poem with political words in it,

like Congress or Dachau or egalitarianism? Or is it a
poem that discusses the way people relate (or might relate) to
one another? If thats the case, are love poems political? What
about poems in dialect? Should we draw a firm line, and say
that a political poem has to have some actual political effect?
Should it attempt to persuade us in the way most normal
political speech does? . . . One of the problems with political
poetry, then, is that like all speech, it exists at the mercy of
time, history, and other people. But that doesnt mean
poetry itself is passive.47
Eliot Weinbergers What I Heard About Iraq is constructed from

a montage of facts, sound bites, interviews and testimony. 48
Weinbergers prose poem sequence combines statistical statements
with the words of politicians, soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Russian
theorist Mikhail Bakhtins account of heteroglossia in the novel,
and his evocation of the text as contaminated by a plurality of
discourses, helps to explain how Weinbergers volume performs as
a political critique. Bakhtin notoriously privileged the language of
the novel as a site of verbal interaction heteroglossia, in relation to
what he indicates is the largely monologic language of poetry: The
world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble
conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one
49
unitary and indisputable discourse.
What I Heard About Iraq gives challenge to Bakhtins
anchoring of poetry as a monologic language. Found material
acts as a form of reportage; the text becomes impregnated with a
plurality of voices. Chronicling the reaction to 9/11 and the
USAs entry into the Iraq War, the poem displays how political
information is disseminated and within time contradicted by the
same sources. Building with the refrain I heard, the poem also
uses graphic facts at intermittent points. The constant increase of
Iraqi civilian deaths becomes a shocking mantra in the poem:
starting off with an initial figure of 10,000, towards the close we
are told I heard that 100,000 Iraqi civilians were dead (p. 74).
Through the juxtaposition of quotations Weinberger is able to
display the tragic absurdity of political language and decision-
making. One key incident is the Bush and Blair administrations
alerts regarding Saddam Husseins weapons of mass
destruction. In the opening sections we read the words of
Secretary of State Colin Powell, President George Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney:
I heard Colin Powell say: Im absolutely sure that there are

weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will
be forthcoming. Were just getting it now.
I heard the president say: Well find them. Itll be a matter
of time to do so.
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: We know where they are.
Theyre in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and
east, west, south and north, somewhat. (p. 27)
Later these claims are contradicted:
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: We never believed that wed

just tumble over weapons of mass destruction. (p. 51)
I heard Condoleezza Rice say: We never expected we
were going to open garages and find them. (p. 51)
I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: They may have had time to

destroy them, and I dont know the answer. (pp. 512)
I heard Richard Perle say: We dont know where to look for

them and we never did know where to look for them. I hope
this will take less than two hundred years. (pp. 512)
I heard Tony Blair say We know that Saddam Hussein

had weapons of mass destruction, and we know that we
havent found them, that we may not find them. But
what I wouldnt accept is that he was not a threat, and a
threat in WMD terms. (p. 68)
Weinbergers sequence uses rhetoric against its assumed premise

of legitimation and authority to create a political critique. The
poets careful juxtaposition of information indicates how quickly
political narrative contradicts itself. German migr Hannah
Arendt focused our attention on how, in totalitarian regimes,
mass propaganda wilfully plays with falsehood as a strategy for
alienation, inertia and subsequent reaffiliation:
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the

correct assumption that, under such conditions, one could
make people believe the most fantastic statements one day,
and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable
proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in
cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to
them, they would protest that they had known all along that
the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for
their superior tactical cleverness.50
Along these lines, What I Heard About Iraq is Weinbergers attempt to
hold politicians accountable for both warmongering and
misinformation. Central to Weinbergers text are acronyms which are
presented with a chilling sense of rationality. Weinberger reports that I
heard a marine at Camp Whitehouse say: The 50/10 technique was
used to break down EPWs and make it easier for the HET member to
get information from them (p. 42). It is later explained that the
50/10 technique was to make prisoners stand for 50 minutes of the
hour for ten hours with a hood over their heads in the heat (p. 42).
Moreover, EPWs are explained as enemy prisoners of war and HETs
are human exploitation teams (p. 42). What I Heard About Iraq also
reports that photographs of coffins are banned and that the Pentagon
renamed body bags transfer tubes (p. 38). Weinberger reminds us
how political language shields its audience from uncomfortable truths
and miscarriages of justice. Overused words such as freedom and
liberation are also highlighted to indicate how they perform brutishly.
On the fall of Fallujah it is reported: I heard an American soldier
say: Its kind of bad we destroyed everything, but at least we gave
them a chance for a new start (p. 65). Also, it is reported: I heard
Muhammed Kubaissy, a shopkeeper, say: I am still searching for what
they have been calling democracy (p. 65). Tim Woods suggests that
the questioning of the nature of language to inform one about reality
results in a political conclusion about the manipulation of discourse to
inform one about specific ideological truths. 51 Weinbergers use of
found materials as a basis for his poem powerfully illustrates the
mendacities of political discourse surrounding the Iraq war. His
critique moreover is enacted without a need for the poet to perform a
political rhetoric of his own.
POLITICS AND POETICS OF EXILE: CHOMAN HARDI
Attention to a traumatic political history is explored by Kurdish poet

Choman Hardis volume Life for Us.52 Hardi was born in Iraqi
Kurdistan. His family fled to Iran, to return when the poet was a young
child. When the Kurds were attacked by Saddam Husseins chemical
weapons in 1988, Hardis family returned to exile, this time settling in
the UK. She has researched the testimony of widows of genocide in
Iraqi Kurdistan, in association with the Uppsala Program for Holocaust
and Genocide Studies. A search for a safe domestic space where family
life can be nurtured and protected dominates Hardis poetry. In There
was . . . we are told that: There is a house with four bedrooms / where
a couple live with their three children (p. 9). Yet even in this contained
space where a young man used to play his flute until the women cried
the poem presents a father torn between politics and poetry (p. 9).
The poets role is often one of fact-finder, gatherer of narratives and
the speaker on behalf of those who have suffered. The Spoils, 1988
presents a passage of documentation and evidence, and is dedicated to
the 182,000 victims of Anfal, Kurdistan, Iraq. Hardis own research
focuses upon interviews recording the experiences of widows in
Kurdish cities and Kurdish womens experience of diaspora.
Explaining the term Anfal, Hardi states it means spoils of war and
is the name of the eighth chapter of the Quraan which came to the
prophet in the wake of his first jihad against the non-believers. 53
Anfal was used by the Iraqi government as a naming of their military
operations against Kurdish Muslims in Northern Iraq between
February to September 1988. Hardi outlines the political and religious
impact of naming the military strategy:
By using this word the government intended to mobilise support

from within the country and to legitimise the operations in the
Muslim world, portraying the Kurds as non-Muslims. Anfal took
place in eight stages, targeting six geographically identified
areas. In this process over 2600 Kurdish villages were destroyed
and an estimated number of 100,000 civilians ended up in mass
graves. Many more died as a result of bombardment, gas attacks,
exodus to Iran and Turkey and life in the camps (Topzawa,
Dibis, Nugra Salman, Nizarka, Salamya). At the beginning of
each Anfal stage chemical attacks were used to kill, terrify and
destroy the morale of the people. After the air raids and
alongside conventional bombing the ground attacks started.
The attacks were designed to steer civilians towards certain
collection points near main roads where they were awaited by
the army and the jash forces (Kurdish mercenaries who
worked for the Iraqi government).54
This role of the poet as a chronicler of testimonies is key to the

poem Dropping Gas: 16th March 1988. Amidst the confusion of
war in Halabja, the poet listens to a neighbour who has lost his
entire family he wants to show me (p. 19), whereas others are
journalists taking photos / some men robbing dead bodies (p. 19).
The poet serves as an ethical witness, questioning I stand detached
from everything, / observing, believing and not believing (p. 19).
Hardis poetry presents the poet as exile, examining and dissecting the
ravages of Kurdish diaspora. The Spoils 1988 negotiates how: Anfal
came and some survived it (p. 20). By contrast there are those who
could not have left for unknown destinations / and started their lives
in a new land (p. 20). The imagined space of a home is equated with a
return to a site of trauma. Even in What I want, the poet, in depicting
humane soldiers, recreates a barbaric scene of counter-definition:
soldiers who would never say: / We will take you to a place / where
you will eat your own flesh (p. 11). Memory and reminiscence are
evoked through the mythmaking possibilities of Penelopes loom in
The Penelopes of my homeland, dedicated to the 50,000 widows of
Anfal. In this poem the widows weave their own and their childrens
shrouds / without a sign of Odysseus returning (p. 21). Hardis
evocation is strictly one of the anti-heroic. Life for Us presents the
stark reality of women grieving after the disappeared, which in The
1983 riots in Suleimanya is depicted as the mourning woman with
unshaved legs / unshaped eyebrows and ashy lips (p. 46). The liminal
position of the exile is evident in Hardis work. At the Border 1979
recounts the return to Kurdistan where the young sister plays with
being present in two places simultaneously. She calls at the checkpoint,
Look over here she said to us, / my right leg is in this country /
and my left leg in the other (p. 30). One of the final poems, To
Kurdistan, suggests a need for a cartography of place and home.
Hardi recalls that once questioned on her destination, I will take
the repeated advice / and will not say to Kurdistan (p. 48). This
need to map, locate and reorient the exile into a safe space is also
echoed in the appeal towards creating safe domestic spaces.
Forch states that a poetry of witness reclaims the social from
the political and in doing so defends the individual against
55
illegitimated forms of coercion. She adds that this poetic
registers through indirection and intervention the ways in which
the linguistic and moral universe have been disrupted by events (p.
45). The genocide in Kurdistan is presented by Hardi as a history
which is echoed in other political histories; a husbands retelling of
world news stories becomes a site for revisiting trauma and the
reinscription of a series of losses: Somewhere, people are fleeing
again. / We hug and I cry. Somewhere / there is another war to be
remembered by children (p. 61). Hardis poetry struggles to narrate
this sequence of losses; from her research she stresses the
therapeutic role of stories for women in exile:
Narrative therapy is a way of empowering these women by

enabling them to deconstruct the structures which oppress
them as women and as ethnic minorities in the UK.
Recounting histories in a group context enables them to
give positive meanings to their experiences as well as
establishing a support network. Coming together in groups
also enables women to fight oppression and take on broader
political aims for their community.56
Hardis engagements with exiled Kurdish women in the UK
reiterates the importance of discursive practices as a way of
engaging with traumatic life histories, while also reconvening
political communities.
VETERANS EXPERIENCE: YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA
Vietnam War veteran Yusef Komunyakaa began to write about

his war experiences in 1984, almost fifteen years after his return
from South-East Asia. These densely framed lyrics of testimony form
the basis of the volume Dien Cai Dau (1984).57 Komunyakaa
describes the experience of writing the volume as cathartic, the poems
surfaced with images that dredged up so much unpleasant psychic
debris. All the guilt and anger coalesced into a confused stockpile of
unresolved conflict . . . I hadnt forgotten a single thread of evidence
against myself.58 In his essay on the relationship between poetry and
music, Komunyakaa stresses that the poem is an action that attempts
to defy structure as container or mould. However it does embrace
control (an artist has to know and respect the instrument) in
language.59 This element of control can be read in Komunyakaas
work as a detailed attempt to approach experience and history as a
revisioning; poetry, the poet stresses, is not a gush but a felt and lived
syncopation.60 He adds that revision means to resee, and at times it
seems more accurate to say relive
. . . How many ways can this tune be replayed? 61
In Camouflaging the Chimera the inclusive pronoun we is used
to map out shared action and strategy. Komunyakaa describes the
practicalities of jungle warfare as an attempt to weave ourselves into
the terrain (p. 3). Given that the mythic chimera is often pictured as a
lions head, goats body and serpents tail, Komunyakaas title stresses
the creation of one body out of a collection of disparate parts. The
poem stresses that the manoeuvres of warfare are ultimately a political
enforcing and claiming of land. Camouflaging the Chimera illustrates
the duration of waiting in war and the movement to an intense
interiority. The soldiers wait for the enemy until something almost
broke inside us (p. 3). Komunyakaas poem does not present an easily
palpable antiwar message; instead the poem meditates upon the
defamiliarisation of the landscape. Before the ambush the Viet Cong
are depicted as black silk (p. 3) and an intense subjectivity is framed
in the arresting impression of the soldiers waiting as a world revolved
/ under each mans eyelid (p. 4).
Komunyakaas war poetry presents a politically complex
testimony of the war. The poet questions the ideological and racial
conflicts that arise from an African-American fighting in an Asian
country for the USA at the close of the 1960s. As Kevin Stein
observes, Dien Cai Dau questions the interrelationship between
domestic and foreign policy which for many Americans remained
well beyond the horizon of their attention, and equally beyond the
periphery of their knowledge. Many of Komunyakaas poems, to
the contrary, address these larger ideological issues and their effects
on black Americans.62 Nowhere is this problematic relationship
between race and patriotism more evident than in Hanoi Hannah.
The poem evokes the voice of the female broadcaster who made
English-language propaganda radio broadcasts for North Vietnam,
directed towards American soldiers. Hannah queries not only the
USAs involvement in Vietnam, but African-American participation
in an army that tolerates latent racism Soul brothers, what you
dying for? (p. 13). Psychological warfare raises confusion about
action in war and the African-American participation in its credo.
Komunyakaa displays an alert awareness of how his poems perform
politically. In You and I are Disappearing, Komunyakaa recalls
the horror inflicted upon small girl during a napalm attack, and in
an attempt to represent the memory, Komunyakaa includes a string
of similes. The girl burns like a piece of paper, like foxfire, like
oil on water and like a cattail torch (p. 17). Komunyakaa is
hesitant and reluctant to commit the child to one image or
aestheticise her pain. The I or eye of the poem is threatened by
disappearance into the litany of descriptors: She rises like
dragonsmoke to my nostrils / She burns like a burning bush / driven
by a godawful wind (p. 17).
Much critical attention has been given to the political space

inhabited by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC,
completed in 1982. Its architect Maya Lin has stated that her
ambition was to see the memorial not as an object, but as a cut in
63
the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. The final
poem in Dien Cai Dau, Facing It, confronts the polished surface
of veterans names on the memorial wall. Komunyakaa depicts the
intense experience of his reflection entering the political monument
of 58,022 names and we are reminded that his black face fades, /
hiding inside the black granite (p. 63). Finding a position from
which to read, both the inscriptions on the wall and the world
around him become increasingly difficult. The mirroring of the
mourners and visitors creates a simultaneous layering of reflections
upon the wall, since Lins memorial effectively breaks down the
boundaries of monument and lived life. While Komunyakaas
speaker may touch the name of a Vietnam veteran, Andrew
Johnson, and see the booby traps white flash, the wall also
reflects the scene of a brushstrokes flash then a red birds wings
and also a plane in the sky (p. 63). Memorialising Vietnam in
Komunyakaas poetry means finding a space for a political present
in the quotidian; a woman in this black mirror may at first look
like she is trying to erase names but as the speaker stresses, No,
shes brushing a boys hair (p. 63). In this way, Komunyakaas
intense lyricism chimes with Adornos belief that voicing the
subjective enables an important political resistance. In On Lyric
Poetry and Society (1957) the philosopher proposes:
The unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to

language as something objective, and the immediacy and
spontaneity of that subjects expression as one and the
same: thus language mediates lyric poetry and society in
their innermost core. This is why the lyric reveals itself to
be the most deeply grounded in society when it does not
chime in with society, when it communicates nothing,
when, instead, the subject whose expression is successful
reaches an accord with language itself, with the inherent
tendency of language.64
Far from seeing the lyric as a purely solipsistic enterprise or a

voicing of estrangement, Adorno approaches the lyric voicing as
simult-neous with social articulation. Cast in this light,
Komunyakaas withdrawal into subjectivity cannot be separated
from the social realm, since it is an action, which implies
political critique or opposition in itself.
RECLAIMING HISTORY: RITA DOVES PARSLEY
Having considered how contemporary poetry addresses the political

through public event and address, use of political reportage and
first-hand experience of war, it is essential to consider how poetry
can perform as witness to past events in history. In African-
American Rita Doves Parsley (1983), attempts are made to
interrogate history and reconstruct different narratives to those
archived or in historical textbooks. 65 Doves poem Parsley shows
the horrific and absurd logic of a tyrant while using a formal poetic
pattern as a way of subverting hierarchy and authority. Parsley
approaches the horrific history of the Dominican Republic dictator
Rafael Trujillos command to massacre 20,000 Haitians for failing
to roll the letter r in 1937. This act of genocide later became
known as the Parsley Massacre. To distinguish the Haitians,
Trujillos troops asked the inhabitants to pronounce perejil (the
Spanish word for parsley). Dove examines the political brutality of
Trujillos dictatorship and the politics of language. Her exploration
of poetic form raises important questions about the acquisition of
tradi-tions, and even their use as possible political subversion.
Using the strict form of the villanelle, the opening of the poem
presents the massacre from the Haitians point of view. This
traditional form with its governed metre and repetition of lines may
seem counterintuitive, but the constant echoing of key words such
as cane, imitating, parrot and spring (p. 133) reinforces a
sense of claustrophobia and containment. Moreover, situating the
Haitians words within a lineage of poetic tradition highlights the
barbarity of the incident, challenging Trujillos perspective of
Haitians as subaltern.
Controversially, Parsley presents the absurd and perverted
logic of the dictators actions. Dove mentions: It was important
to me to try to understand that arbitrary quality of his cruelty. 66
The dictators equating of linguistic control with the assertion of
authority is clear, yet his voice in the poem is worked through in
free verse. One perceives the desperate attempts of the Haitians
to speak Spanish and save their lives they sing without Rs:
mi madle, mi amol en muelte (p. 135). Dove has written that
Parsley was a response to her first encounter of the historical
account of the Haitian massacre; she explains that there was no
explanation of why Trujillo chose the word:
No mention of the French Creole spoken by the Haitians that
rendered their Rs softly guttural, incapable of fluttering at
the tip of the tongue. No description of the kind of execution,
what instruments were used and how quickly the terror
proceeded, no clue to the Generals state of mind at the
time. Just the bald facts: 20,000 dead over a word.67
The Generals morbid fascination with the death of his mother
becomes a way of entering his deluded psyche. While Doves poem
certainly does not aim to fill all the holes in the historical narrative, the
perspectives enforce the portrait megalomaniac who surrounds himself
with those who echo his words. In his palace is a parrot practicing
spring since even the parrot we are told can roll an R (p. 135).
Doves narrative frames the horrifying ventriloquism that the General
demands from his subjects and interrogates the barbarism of Trujillos
actions by performing the madness of his questioning Who can I kill
today for a single, beautiful word (p. 135).
CONCLUSION: READING THE ARCHIVE M. NOURBESE

PHILIPS ZONG!
For Caribbean-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip, an ethical

dilemma is created in how to form material, to perform what the
poet describes as This story that must be told; that can only be told
68
by not telling. This pressure upon authorial responsibility is
echoed in the citation from German language poet Paul Celan in the
fourth book of Zong! The citation states simply No one bears
69
witness for the witness. As with Doves Parsley, NourbeSe
Philips Zong! is based on a case of horrific historical cruelty. In
1781 a slave ship, the Zong, sailed from the coast of West Africa
for Jamaica, captained by Luke Collingwood. Due to navigational
errors the journey, which normally took six to nine weeks, lasted
four months. The ships cargo was fully insured, and in this case the
cargo consisted of 470 slaves. Collingwoods navigational
blunder meant that water was scarce and the slaves began to die.
NourbeSe Philip cites the documents in her account:
Sixty negroes died for want of water . . . and forty others

. . . through thirst and frenzy . . . threw themselves into the
sea and were drowned; and the master and mariners . . .
were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.
Captain Collingwood believed that if the African slaves
died a natural death, the owners of the ship would have to
bear the cost, but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it
would be the loss of the underwriters. In other words,
murdering the African slaves would prove more financially
advantageous to the owners of the ship and its cargo.
The owners, the Messrs Gregson, being fully insured, make
an unsuccessful claim against the insurers for the destroyed
cargo. The ships owners are successful in their legal action
against their insurers to recover their loss. The insurers appeal
this judgment and a new trial ordered: Gregson v. Gilbert is
the formal name of this reported decision which is more
colloquially known as the Zong case.70
Zong! is an attempt to retrace the history but not in a

chronological narrative. NourbeSe Philip uses the court case
documentation as a loose framework for the work as a word-
hoard since the original text of the Gregson v. Gilbert case
comes to a mere 500 words. The material is dispersed, scattered,
fractured violently and assiduously mangled:
Fragmenting and mutilating the text mirror the

fragmentation and mutilation that slavery perpetrated on
Africans and African customs and life. In deliberately
changing the story of the legal text, I engage in a similar
duplicity that the actors in the Zong case engaged in to
convince themselves that it was perfectly allowable to
murder Africans in order to collect insurance monies. 71
find a form that could bear this not telling. I think this is what
Zong! is attempting: to find a form to bear this story which cant
Rather than attempt to reconstruct the narrative into a coherent
whole, NourbeSe Philip marks the range of competing voices in
the text: lacunae, erasures and silences all constitute part of the
narrative. The poet is suspicious of telling the stories in the
traditional way, or the Western way of narrative in terms of a
beginning, a middle, and end.72 Importantly, NourbeSe Philip
adds that I think part of the challenge, certainly for me, was to
73
be told, which must be told, but through not telling. A glossary at
the close of Zong! points the reader towards the intervening
languages in the text which include Arabic, Dutch, Fon, French,
Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Shona, Twi and
Yoruba. NourbeSe Philip comments that Zong! bears witness to the
resurfacing of the drowned and the oppressed and transforms the
desiccated, legal report into a cacophony of voices: wails cries,
74
moans that had earlier been banned from the text.
The fugues musical form provided an inspiration for the work,
providing a form of imitative counterpoint which helped the poet
approach her material. Zong! returns repeatedly to evocations of the
chained slaves being thrown overboard. One of the voices used in
the volume is that of a white European male, and the visual disarray
and displacement of his perspective is made evident in the
following extract from the Sal section of the book:
there is
creed there is
fate there is
oh oh oracle there are
oh oh
ashes
over
if
if
if i
f
fa
fa fall ing over
&
over the crew
touching there is fate
there is
creed
there is
oh
oh
the oba sobs
again if if if i
f over and over
the seven
seas ora
in this time ora
within ora ora time within
loss (p. 60)
Different languages collide throughout the volume; here there is a

non-hierarchical juxtaposition of English and Latin (ora) with
Yoruba (if). Working from the original legal document, NourbeSe
Philip incorporates silence into the text through gaps and omissions
on the page. Visually the page re-enacts the momen-tum of the
falling and drowning slaves, the rehearsal of prayer and a call for
divination or if. The text performs an echo chamber as one
language sonically intersects another, made clear in the visual and
aural prompts created between if and the call to divination, as with
the fractured falling that haunts the entire volume. The sound of
Yoruba rises in the text, and the poem performs as a score of
lamenting voices. A desperate attempt at asserting control and
authority is reinforced by the repeated mantra of there is fate,
there is creed, as well as the recall of the comforting clich seven
seas. Against this we have the tragic breaking down of the Yoruba
king or ruler: the oba sobs. The poet uses the Latin for bones,
ora, as a musical marker or chant that forms a half echo with
oba. The musical counterpoints in the poem with their sonic and
alliterative movements create suggestive liaisons, intersections and
a review of history that are incremental within the volume.
From an archival report of two pages, NourbeSe Philip creates a
poem spanning one hundred and eighty-two pages. In doing this she
sees the poets role as both magician and editor simultaneously
censoring the activity of the reported text while conjuring the
presence of excised Africans (p. 199). Importantly, the poet
stresses that experimentation is key in her approach to the material;
that challenging the structures of language enacts a form of political
critique. Her mentor is African-American writer Audre Lorde:
I think weve been using the masters tools (to use Audre
Lordes powerful metaphor) to dismantle the structures that
hold us fast and that what is happening . . . We are beginning
to fashion new tools to do the work, because the work cannot
be done successfully using the masters tools. The masters
tools were developed for us out of the masters relationship
with us . . . I dont trust the archive, . . . the archive is much
more unstable than we originally thought.75
NourbeSe Philip, through the disjunction and dislocation of

the text, forces the reader to create meaning; she is asking the
reader to make sense of an event that can never be understood:
What is it about? What is happening? This, I suggest, is the
closest we will ever get, some two hundred years later, to what it
must have been like for those Africans on board the Zong.76 She
adds that in attempting to understand these events, the reader or
audience shares the risk of the poet who herself risks
contamination by using the prescribed language of the law. 77
Following World War II, Theodor Adorno suggested that

poetry needed to reconsider how it responded to the personal
and the public.
A key issue for poets after World War II was how to perform
the role of witness and testimony.
For many poets there is a problematic relationship between
poetry and politics. A key suspicion would be a concern of
creating work which is merely rhetorical, or dismissed as
protest poetry.
One way poets have found to address the public sphere is to
use the personal and everyday as starting points for their
reflections; others like Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove have
used analogies with history and myth.
Language use for poets like Charles Bernstein and M.

NourbeSe Philip is a key medium for undermining prevailing
authorities.
Poetry serves an important role in its voicing against war as

well as chronicling war experiences from the perspectives of
both combat soldier and citizen.
Poetry has a political role in excavating past histories and
granting articulation to silenced voices.
NOTES
1. Mark Brown, Carol Ann Duffy Leaps into Expenses Row with
First Official Poem as Laureate, The Guardian, 13 June 2009,
p. 1. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/
jun/12/carol-ann-duffy-politics-laureate.
2. Tony Blairs infamous declaration was made on New Labours
1997 landslide victory in the United Kingdom, 1 May 1997.
3. Carol Ann Duffy, Politics, in The Guardian, 13 June 2009, p.
1. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/
jun/12/politics-carol-ann-duffy-poem.
4. W. H. Auden, In Memory of W. B Yeats, in Edward Mendelson
(ed.), The English Auden: Poems Essay and Dramatic Writings,
19271939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 242. All
5. P. B. Shelley, A Defence Of Poetry [1821], in David Lee
Clark (ed.), Shelleys Prose (Albuquerque, NM: University
of New Mexico Press, 1954), pp. 27597 (p. 297).
6. Theodor Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, in
Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1949] 1981), p. 34.
7. Theodor Adorno, Selections from Metaphysics: Concepts
and Problems Lecture Fourteen, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.),
Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CT: Stanford
8. Rand Brandes, Seamus Heaney: An Interview, Salmagundi,
80 (1988), 21.
9. Jerome Rothenberg, Khurbn and Holocaust: Poetry After
Auschwitz, Dialectical Anthropology, 24.34 (1999), 27991
(p. 287).
10. Charles Bernstein, Second War and Postmodern Memory, in A
Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 217.
11. Carolyn Forch, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century
Poetry of Witness (New York: Norton & Norton, 1993).
12. Michael Palmer, Poetry and Contingency: Within a Timeless
Moment of Barbaric Thought, Chicago Review, 49.2 (2003),
6576 (p. 75).
13. Palmer, Poetry and Contingency, pp. 756.
14. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry As Insurgent Art (New York:
New Directions, 2007), p. 3.
15. Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art, p. 9.
16. Zofia Burr, Of Poetry and Power: Maya Angelou, in Maria
Damon and Ira Livingston (eds), Poetry and Cultural Studies:
A Reader (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 430.
17. John F. Kennedy, Dedication: The Robert Frost Library 1963, in
Erwin A. Glikes and Paul Schwarber (eds), Of Poetry and Power
(New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 1357.
18. Maya Angelou, The Complete Poems Collected Poems of Maya
Angelou (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 270. All subse-
quent references to this edition are given in the text.
19. Dwight Garner, Elizabeth Alexander: Inaugural Poet with
an Outsize Audience, The New York Times, 26 December
2008. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/
arts/27iht-poet.1.18936672.html.
20. Elizabeth Alexander, Praise Song for the Day, The New York
Times, 20 January 2009. Available online at www.nytimes.
com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-poem.html.
21. Elizabeth Alexander, Black Alive and Looking Straight at
You: The Legacy of June Jordan, in Power & Possibility:
Essays Reviews and Interviews (Ann Arbor, MI: University
of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 116-20.
22. Alexander, Black Alive and Looking Straight at You, pp.
11617.
23. June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected
Essays
(New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003), p. 219.
24. Owen Bowcott, Paisley and McGuinness Mark New Era, The
Guardian, 8 May 2007. Available online at www.guardian.
co.uk/uk/2007/may/08/northernireland.northernireland.
David Sharrock, Martin McGuinness Makes Parting Gift of Poetry to
Ian Paisley, The Times, 6 June 2008. Available online at
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article4075640.ece.
26. Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber & Faber, 1975);
Derek Mahon, The Snow Party (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975); Paul Muldoon, Quoof (London: Faber &
Faber, 1983). All subsequent references to these editions
are given in the text.
27. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose,
19781987 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990),
p. xxi.
28. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 19681978
(London: Faber & Faber, 1981), pp. 578.
29. Ciaran Carson, Escaped from the Massacre? The Honest
Ulsterman, 50 (1975), 183.
30. Conor Cruise OBrien, States of Ireland (New York: Pantheon,
1972), p. 319.
31. Seamus Heaney, Unhappy and at Home: Interview with
Seamus Heaney by Seamus Deane, The Crane Bag, 1:1
(1977), 617 (p. 62).
32. Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, p. xvi
33. Derek Mahon, Collected Poems (Oldcastle: Gallery Press,
1999), p. 89.
34. Edna Longley, Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland, The
Crane Bag, 9.1 (1985), 2640 (p. 36).
35. Michael Donaghy, A Conversation with Paul Muldoon,
Chicago Review, 35.1 (1985), 7685 (p. 85).
36. Paul Muldoon, An Interview with Paul Muldoon by Claire
Wills, Nick Jenkins and John Lanchester, Oxford Poetry
Online. Available online at www.oxfordpoetry.co.uk/texts.
php?int=iii1_paulmuldoon.
37. Edna Longley, Altering the Past: Northern Irish Poetry and
Modern Canons, The Yearbook of English Studies, 35 (2005),
117 (p. 11).
38. Charles Bernstein, Controlling Interests (New York: Roof
Books, 1980), p. 6.
40. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford:

Blackwell, [1970] 2000).
41. Charles Bernstein, Comedy and the Poetics of Political
Form, in A Poetics, pp. 21828 (pp. 218, 220).
42. Charles Bernstein, Three or Four Things I Know About
Him, in Contents Dream, pp. 1333 (p. 26).
43. Charles Bernstein, Girly Man (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006). All subsequent references to this
44. Bernstein, Comedy and the Poetics of Political Form, p.
225.
45. Bernstein, Comedy and the Poetics of Political Form, p. 225.
46. Bernstein, Comedy and the Politics of Poetic Form, p. 226.
47. David Orr, The Politics of Poetry, Poetry, 192.4 (2008),
40918. Available online at www.poetryfoundation.org/
journal/article.html?id=181746.
48. Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard About Iraq (London: Verso,
2005). All subsequent references to this edition are given in
the text.
49. Mikhail Bakhtin, Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the
Novel, in Michael Hoquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 286.
50. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
Schocken Books), p. 382.
51. Tim Woods, The Politics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in
Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2002), pp. 24950.
52. Choman Hardi, Life for Us (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2004). All
53. Choman Hardi, Breaking the Circle of Silence about Anfal
Women, available online at
www.chomanhardi.com/research. html.
54. Ibid.
55. Forch, Against Forgetting, p. 45.
56. Choman Hardi, Kurdish Women Refugees: Obstacles and
Opportunities, Researching Asylum in London Database (2005).
Available online at www.researchasylum.org.uk/?lid=366.
57. Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1984). All subsequent references to this

58. Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and
Commentaries (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press,
2000), p. 14
59. Komunyakaa, Blue Notes, p. 36.
60. Ibid. p. 36.
61. Ibid. pp. 367.
62. Kevin Stein, Vietnam and the Voice Within: Public and
Private History in Yusef Komunyakaas Dien Cai Dau, The
Massachusetts Review, 36 (19956), 54161 (p. 548).
63. Maya Lin, cited in Carol Becker, Surpassing the Spectacle:
Global Transformations and the Changing Politics
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), p. 90.
64. Theodor Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society, in Rolf
Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans.
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), pp. 3754 (p. 43).
65. Rita Dove, Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1993),
given in the text.
66. Rita Dove, Stan Sanvel Rubin and Judith Kitchen: Interview with
Rita Dove, Black American Literature Forum, 20.3 (1986),
22740 (p. 232).
67. Rita Dove, Writing Parsley , in Robert Pack and Jay Parini (eds),
Introspections: American Poets On One of Their Own Poems
(Middlebury, VT: Middlebury College Press, 1997), p. 79.
68. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2008), p. 194. All subsequent references
69. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! p. 100.
70. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!. Available online at
www.fascicle. com/issue01/Poets/philip1.htm.
71. Ibid.
72. M. NourbeSe Philip, Defending the Dead, Confronting the
Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip by Patricia
Saunders, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (June
2008), 6379 (p. 72).
73. Ibid.
74. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! p. 203.
75. NourbeSe Philip, Defending the Dead, pp.701.
76. NourbeSe Philip, http://www.fascicle.com/issue01/Poets/
philip1.htm.
77. Ibid.
chapter 3
Performance and the Poem
The term performance poetry is now commonly used to describe a

presentation that may never be transcribed into volume or a book.
Performance in this context indicates the interaction of poetry
with its audience; the event may often be ephemeral and
experiential, such as a slam poem or improvised talk. The focus of
this chapter is to consider how contemporary poetry may perform
in a plurality of senses. Drawing from poetic manifestos, we can
consider the poetry performance as a form of musicality: poetry, as
Charles Olson suggested, becomes a score for the voice. Focusing
on poets associated with cultural movements and protest writing,
poetry can also perform the demands of appealing to an audience
and inciting change. Performance poetry in this light allows for
textures of call and response, humour, parody and polyphony.
While performance may emphasise a dramatic component, in
considering textual performance contemporary poetry also
performs visually on the page through experimental typography.
I consider the various ways that poetry may perform or can be
considered in Judith Butlers formulation performative.
Approaching performance as the sonic or textual iteration of
rhetorical gestures and personas enables a more nuanced
consideration of how identities are performed as processes of
mobility and change. Increasingly in both critical and poetic circles
there has been attention to performance writing that places its
focus upon an investigation of the performance of language in
different fields.
OPEN FIELD POETICS AND PROJECTIVE VERSE:
ADAPTATIONS
Published in 1950, Charles Olsons groundbreaking manifesto

essay Projective Verse presents an important envisioning of the
relationship between poetry and performance. 1 Olson describes
projective verse as a form of open poetry. The essay centres around
the energy, or what he calls the kinetics, of writing, and also
importantly links the relationship between writing and the body
with its sustained reference to an ideation of breath. Central to
Olsons essay is the proposition of an open or projective verse as
COMPOSITION BY FIELD, which creates a space for the poem
opposed to inherited line, stanza, overall form (p. 148). The
motivation for such writing is described aphoristically by the poet,
as FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
CONTENT (p. 148). Olsons emphasis upon the act of perceiving
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY
LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION (p. 149)
suggests a degree of immediacy to the writing and the creation
of an open form that resists preconceived structures. Key to our
understanding of performance is Olsons emphasis on the
relationship between the poem and musicality, the poem in effect
as a score for the human voice. Discussing the importance of the
typewriter in the process of composition Olson states:
It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and

its space precisions, it can for a poet, indicate exactly the
breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the
juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For
the first time the poet has the stave and the bar, a musician has
had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime
and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech,
and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader,
silently or otherwise to voice his work. (p. 154)
Olsons acknowledgement of the intimate relationship between

page, breath, voice and body animates an appreciation of both
poetry as spoken word performance and the textual performance on
the written page. The graphemic possibilities inscribed in
Olsons work are developed by contemporary critic and poet
Michael Davidson.2 Davidson examines the modern poets
foregrounding of the materiality of language and suggests how
the poetic text can be read as a site for phantasmagorical
writings and the layering of previous inscriptions. In describing
the multiple strata of writing, Davidson draws on the inflection
of palimpsest which becomes in his own coining palimtext.
The palimtext in his account is an attempt at describing:
Modern writings intertextual and material character, its

graphic rendering of multiple layers of signification. The
term also suggests the need for a historicist perspective in
which textual layers refer not only to previous texts but to
the discursive frame of the present in which they are seen. 3
We can interpret performance in poetry as dependent not only

upon an audience, but upon the reader as a coproducer of
meaning. This element of co-production is key for Lyn Hejinian
as a utopian possibility:
For a writer, it is language that carries thought, perception,

and meaning. And it does so through a largely metonymic
process, through the discovery and invention of
associations and connections. Though it may seem merely
technical, the notion of linkage of forging connections
has in my mind, a concomitant political and social
dimension. Communities of phrases spark the communities
of ideas in which communities of persons live and work. 4
As we will see, the challenges faced by the reader of

contemporary poetry as co-producer of meaning become central
to how a poem is performed and subsequently interpreted
COUNTER CULTURAL PERFORMANCE: LAWRENCE

FERLINGHETTI
In his essay Modern Poetry is Prose (1978), Lawrence
Ferlinghetti nostalgically looks back at a tradition of song in
modern American poetry:
Wallace Stevens with his harmonious fictive music. And

there was Langston Hughes. And Allen Ginsberg, chanting
his mantras, singing Blake. There still are others elsewhere,
jazz poets and poetic strummers and wailers in the streets
of the world, making poetry out of the urgent, insurgent. 5
Ferlinghettis poetry is associated with the countercultural

movements of 1950s America. The Beats emphasis upon the
importance of the spoken word meant poetry inhabited the public
sphere, often as protest. The emergence of Ferlinghettis poetry in
the 1950s coincides with the movement of poetry from the
confines of the academy to a more accessible and spontaneous form
or what Robert Lowell referred to as the difference between the
6
raw and the cooked. In an early poem, Constantly Risking
Absurdity (1958), Ferlinghetti pinpoints this emphasis upon
performance as a trademark of the poets work. 7 The poet is both an
acrobat performing above the heads / of his audience, balanced
precariously on the high wire of his own making (p. 45) and a
comedian entertaining the audience as a little charleychaplin man
(p. 46). The acrobat poet strives towards the high perch where
the figurative ideal of Beauty stands (p. 46), whereas the comic
poet has the task of catching her spreadeagled in the empty air (p.
46). In the poem the poet embraces two roles: one stuns with his
daring feats and risks in the face of danger, while the other acts as a
performing comic everyman. This is not unlike the description of
poetry in Ferlinghettis essay What is Poetry? as a clown who
laughs and a clown [who] weeps dropping his mask. 8
A powerful rhetorical appeal is performed by Ferlinghettis I am
Waiting (1958), which addresses American policy-making,
historical narratives, ideas of spiritual awakening and literary
history. The performance of the poem relies upon the repeated
phrase I am Waiting, which acts as a refrain. Paradoxically, this
phrases constant recontextualisation creates a dynamic movement,
while also affirming that the poet is in a static position waiting for
change. As a chorus, I am Waiting adds a curious twist inciting a
desire for action and agency. This dynamic possibility is coupled
with humour and irony, and the focus of Ferlinghettis anger is
directed at the Cold War USA. The speaker states: I am waiting for
someone to really discover America / and wail (p. 46) and I am
waiting / for them to prove / that God is really American (p. 47).
Ferlinghettis poem seeks to rewrite histories, his liberal anarchist
sentiments are clear in his wait for the Last Supper to be served
again / with a strange new appetizer and for the meek to be
blessed / and inherit the earth / without taxes (p. 47) as well as a
reconstructed Mayflower / to reach America / with its picture story
and TV rights (p. 48). The speaker is painfully aware of the
different media that compete against the performance of his poem,
as well as a pressure to reanimate literary history. One section of
the poem is dedicated towards what he terms as some strains of
unpre-meditated art / to shake my typewriter as he waits to write
the great indelible poem (p. 49). Ferlinghettis poem performs
against a largely romantic literary backdrop, waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer, for Alice in Wonderland to
retransmit to me her total dream of innocence, as well as an
evocation of William Wordsworth in the desire to get some
intimations / of immortality and a final reproach to the lovers in
John Keatss Ode to a Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last
(p. 49). The poets closing pronouncement that he is waiting
perpetually and forever (p. 49), indicates that his desire for
change has attained a status of perpetuity if not immortality.
Certainly the reprise creates the invocation of a litany within
Ferlinghettis poem, which he performs as a mock sacrament upon
his audience.
PERFORMING RACE: AMIRI BARAKAS JAZZ POETIC
If Ferlinghettis awareness of an audience is apparent in his use of

humour and a mock reverential pronouncement, Amiri Barakas
poetry also shares his intention to reach a public and incite
political change. Originally named LeRoi Jones, Baraka
assumed his Muslim name in 1967, which coincided with his
focus upon Black Nationalism. Barakas writing during this time
placed an emphasis on poetry as a political vehicle generating
action and cultural definition, and allied to radical social
revolution. In an early poem Baraka addresses his own work as
assassin poems or poetry as weaponry. 9 This sentiment is
emphasised in his militant and early manifesto that claims:
The Black Artists role in America is to aid the destruction

of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect
so precisely the nature of society, and of himself in that
society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of
his rendering and, if they are black men, grow strong
through this moving.10
While Barakas political emphasis shifted from Black Nationalism

to Third World Marxism in 1974, he remained attuned to the sonic
resonance of poetry as a performance. Baraka indicates that Olsons
sense of an open form is integral to his own writing. In How do
you Sound the poet announces that poetic form must be free and
not predetermined: All is permitted . . . There cannot be
anything I must fit the poem into. Everything must fit into the
poem. There must not be any preconceived notion or design of what
the poem ought to be.11 In our context of performance, it is
important to note that Baraka also states that Who knows what a
poem ought to sound like? Until its thar Says Charles Olson . . . &
I follow closely with that (p. 645). This early work debunks ideas
of tradition by adding The only recognizable tradition a poet
need follow is himself . . . & with that, say all those things out of
tradition he can use, adapt, work over into something for himself.
To broaden his own voice with (p. 645).
The importance of voice as performance is crucial to an
under-standing of Barakas poetry. In the essay Expressive
Language (1963) the poet emphasises the power of discourse
and the importance of adopting different personas within the
play of linguistic performance:
Know the words of the users, the semantic rituals of power

. . . Words meanings, but also rhythm and syntax that frame
and propel their concatenation, seek the culture as the final
reference for what they are describing of the world. 12
Leadbelly Gives an Autograph (1969) meditates upon the

intersection of poetry, music and racial heritage as evinced by the
framing of the poems title with its reference to the blues singer.
The backdrop of the poem indicates initially decay and cultural
atrophy with the dying wood of the church, and the speaker
laments the fact that We thought / it possible to enter / the way of
the strongest.13 Later we are told that the delay of language is A
strength to be handled by giants (p. 262). Clearly the speaker
associates linguistic control with political power. The poem also
chronicles an attempt to find an alternative tradition that can
perform with immediacy in response to the violence and racial
injustice. Baraka calls for The possibilities of music by affirming
that it does exist. and that we do, in that scripture of rhythms (p.
262). Moreover, the rhythm is presented as a component of the
earth and nature. Instead of offering us a spiritual enclave, the
speaker insists upon the scripture of rhythms where soil is
melody (p. 262). The visual presentation of the poem on the page
moves us from brief staccato with its opening pat your foot / and
turn to the counter-punctual melodies of longer and digressive lines
such as looking thru trees / the wicker statues blowing softly /
against the dusk (p. 262). In his pursuit of an open form Baraka
does not sacrifice the poems melody and incantatory rhythm.
Indeed, it could be stated that he is searching for an alternative
tradition, an antidote to a history that is described in the terrifying
image of An old deaf lady / burned to death / in South Carolina (p.
263).
In the pursuit of alternative forms of performance, Baraka engages
with alternate traditions. The poem KaBa (1969) takes its title from
the central point of Muslim faith in Mecca. Written at the height of
Barakas interest in Black Nationalism, the poem affirms the beauty of
blackness, of a people with African imaginations seeking to make
our getaway into / the ancient image (p. 263). Jerome Rothenberg in
his work on poetry performance and ethno-poetics in the 1970s
suggests that there has been a shift from a great tradition centred in a
single stream of art and literature in the West to a greater tradition
that includes, sometimes as its central fact, preliterate and oral
cultures throughout the world.14 Rothenberg adds that he views
this adaptation as creating a sense of continuity within human arts,
and maintains that a drive toward performance goes back to our
pre-human biological inheritance that performance and culture,
even language, precede the actual emergence of the species: hence
an ethnological continuity as well.15 This call to an earlier tradition
is made evident in KaBa in the appeal made to create sacred
words and a need for magic: we need the spells, to raise up /
return, destroy and create (p. 263). Nowhere possibly is the
intersection of a preliterate oral culture of performance and music
made more evident in Barakas poetry than his long poem
AM/TRAK (1979), written in memory of jazz musician John
Coltrane. Critic Meta DuEwa Jones contends that: through the
arena of performance, a dimension of Barakas poetics emerges that
counters a one-dimensional interpretation of his poetry as
16
appallingly flattened by his political motivations. Baraka
borrows from the idioms of jazz performance and as Jones
contends the poets use of anaphora and repetition indicates that
17
a jazz aesthetic structurally influences the poems form. The
ethnomusicologist Ingrid Monson suggests that in a jazz
performance an exchange will begin with the repetition of a
particular musical passage or a response with a complimentary
musical interjection.18 This sense of call and response, constant
syncopation and transition, is exhibited in Barakas poem as an
ongoing imaginary dialogue with Coltrane poetic form is adapted
to transcribe jazz sounds. The poet himself states that the recent
concern in the West for the found object and chance composition is
an attempt to get closer to the non-Western concept of natural
19
expression of an Art object.
The opening of AM/TRAK with its emphatic vocals Trane. / Trane /
History Love Scream, Oh / Trane, Oh (p. 267) plays on the titles
use of the name for the US rail network, which it then proceeds to
phonically link with Coltrane. This implied linkage creates a
hurtling movement through the poem where syncopation, or
contradictions of rhythms in the lines, are asserted throughout the
work. Set against the Newark race riots of 1967 and Barakas own
imprisonment for resisting arrest in possession of an illegal firearm,
the poem pays homage to Coltrane as black blower of the now /
The vectors from all sources slavery renaissance / bop charlie
parker (p. 270). The poem moves quickly from short accumulative
rhythms to the extended swoon of longer lines. In the following
passage, jazz poetics and political protest conjoin:
nigger absolute supersane screams against reality

course through him
AS SOUND!
Yes, it says
this is now in you
screaming recognize the
truth recognize reality
& even check me
(Trane) who blows it
Yes it says
Yes &
Yes again Convulsive multi
orgasmic Art
Protest
The iterative momentum of these lines leads to a crescendo of

sound; moreover, their visual layout on the page propels the
dynamic of the narrative. Barakas performance includes street
language; changes in the typeface can create the implication of
shouts and chorus. The poet incorporates the refrains of the
saxophonists music as part of his rhetorical appeal to create a
radical work that not only has relevance, but political purpose as
protest. Throughout AM/TRAK one is given a sense of an
improvised performance and certainly the transcription of sounds
such as blow, oh honk-scram (bahhhhhhh-wheeeeeeee) (p. 271)
reinforces this impression of immediacy. However, it should be
noted that, as Gayl Jones reminds us, in jazz-inspired writing the
concepts improvisational and extemporaneity are only a
manner of speaking: jazz is mastery of technique, and a superb jazz
text is as exciting a form as its musical counterpart. 20 Barakas
adaptation of open form and performance are not a mere freefall of
words and sound, but carefully accumulative. Importantly, the poet
has noted that his own compulsion towards a jazz poetic is the
inscription of history within the performance of the work. He
states: Jazz incorporates blues not just as a specific form, but
as a cultural insistence, a feeling matrix, a tonal memory. Blues
is the national consciousness of jazz its truthfulness, and adds
that Just as blues is, on one level, a verse form, so Black poetry
begins as music running into words. 21 Key to Barakas
collaboration of sound with form is the desire to represent
cultural memory through anaphoric and iterative constructions.
DUB POETRY AND ITS DESCENDANTS: MUTABARUKA,

LINTON KWESI JOHNSON AND BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Barakas interest in establishing a jazz poetic as the central tenet to

his writing is mirrored by other contemporary poets relationships
to music, and its impact for the performance of poetry. Already we
have considered how performance is inscribed in ideas of spoken
word, and the rhetorical possibilities of addressing an audience. For
Jamaican-born poets such as Mutabaruka and Linton Kwesi
Johnson, reggae music in the seventies offered an alternative
tradition to directly express and engage with an audience. Initially
responding to the improvised commentary and narration by sound
DJs speaking aloud over instrumental reggae records (an
improvised rapping called toasting), both Mutabaruka and
Johnsons work is classified as dub poetry or dub lyricism. The
term, coined by Johnson, appeared initially in two articles
published by the poet: Jamaican Rebel Music in Race and Class
and a review in New Musical Express 1976. Dub poetry initially
covered the performance of poetry over musical performance and a
strong reggae beat. In an interview Johnson states that dub poetry
arose from a need to find viable tradition in his Jamaican culture:
When I began to write, I had no poetic models to draw

from because I wasnt much into poetry at school . . . From
the moment I began to write in the Jamaican language
music entered the poetry. There was always a beat, or a
bass line going on in the back of my head with the words. 22
Initially, he explains dub poetry as an attempt to find a way of
addressing what DJs at the time were doing. They would get a
piece of instrumental music . . . and improvise spontaneous
lyricism describing everyday happenings and events (p. 256).
In responding to the application of the term to his own work,
Johnson argues that he and poets such as Mutabaruka and other
Black British poets perform poetry in its own right, creating
poetry to be recited to a poetry-listening audiences, something
separate from the sound system tradition (p. 257). Critic
Christian Habekost argues that dub poetry also emerges from
the musical cross hybridization of African rhythms and North
American sounds which result in the formation of Ska music. 23
Habekost adds:
One of dub poetrys crucial achievements is its artful fusion of

different artistic expressions, its bridging of the gap between oral
and text media, singing and talking, music and literature. In the
wider context of cultural dynamics, dub poetry functions as a
connecting link between the black oral tradition and the white
literary tradition. For a Caribbean culture it represents both the
African presence and European influences.24
Dub poetrys inception in the 1970s enabled an important

bridging of divergent and often antithetical traditions.
Key to dub poetry is its engagement with narratives of
oppression, histories of economic exploitation, protests against
racism and police brutality. The performance of the work
illustrates what E. A. Markham considers as a play with the role
of the poet through emergent and competing personas:
The poet as performer is coming out of this side of not

being quite the preacher/teacher/activist/comic/apologist/
bore, stripping off the sermon/lesson/protest/joke/cause of
outside authority, thereby admitting to a degree of
vulnerability, thereby working against structures (most of
them oppressive) which, in order to deny/conceal that
vulnerability, wear the face of authority. In this spirit
performance is a continuous process of becoming. 25
Although initially associated with poetic performance in front of an
audience, the poets affiliated with dub poetry turned to the
dissemination of their work through audio media and the printed page.
Leading dub poets include Michael Smith, Jean Binta Breeze, and
Levi Tafari. Mutabarukas famous work Dis Poem questions the
placing of his own work within a canon of literary endeavour; the
poem becomes a site for the intersection of history, cultural upheaval,
political unrest and insurrection.26 The ongoing process of the poem is
stressed, with an emphasis placed upon a poetics of spontaneity and
responsiveness. Mutabaruka emphasises the poems responsibility to
respond to colonial history the wretched sea / that washed ships to
these shores as well as bear a chronicle and testament to names of
black challenge and endeavour. The poem will call names which
include black radical activists, politicians and campaigners of the
twentieth century: Jomo Kenyatta, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and the
emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. The immediacy and intimacy that
the poem establishes is evident from the way it performs as speaking
and calling to its audience. Mutabaruka uses Jamaican English, often
referred to as patois, which the critic Kamau Brathwaite addresses as
an affirmation of Caribbean speech or nation language. His
description illustrates nation language as a potentially defiant force
influenced strongly by:
The African model, the African aspect of our New World/

Caribbean heritage. English it may be in terms of some of
its lexical features. But in its contours, its rhythm and
timbre, its sound explosions, it is not English, even though
the words, as you hear them, might be English to a greater
or lesser degree.27
Rather than viewing Caribbean English as a variant of correct

English, or as a dialect, Brathwaite asserts that Nation
Language has its own status and sound modulations.
Anger is apparent in Dis Poem with the speaker vexed / about
apartheid / racism / fascism / the klu klux klan / riots in brixton. As
a vehicle of revolution and a verbal weapon, we are told, dis poem
is revoltin against / first world / second world / third world /
division. Not unlike Barakas early vindication of assassin
poems, Mutabarukas poem is both a call to arms dis poem is
knives . . . bombs . . . guns as well as a call for unification of
African nations, becoming a drum uniting the languages of
ashanti / mau mau / ibo / yoruba. Mutabaruka also plays with
paradoxes and contradictions in his work. Initially he delights in the
poems status as countercultural since dis poem will not be
amongst great literary works, neither will it be recited by poetry
enthusiasts, quoted by politicians / nor men of religion. Later we
are informed that dis poem is a sampling from the bible / the
prayer book / the new york times, readers digest as well as the cia
and kgb files. The poet insists that dis poem is not inscribed
between the covers of a book; instead it is an ongoing conversation,
a speakin which will continue on the stage of world history.
Mutabarukas poem stresses an immediacy which will survive
history and be disseminated to an audience to continue in your
mind.
Linton Kwesi Johnson takes the element of spontaneity inherent
in dub poetry and combines it with a belligerent reportage in his Di
28
Great Insohreckshan. Responding to the Brixton riots of 1981,
Johnsons use of Insohreckshan uses nation language as a way of
offering a further perspective upon newspaper reports as well as a
vehement critique of British hierarchies of power. Nation language
enables Johnson to undermine the authority of English languages
association with ideals of sovereignty. Brixton becomes a site of
histarical okayjan whose unrest spreads ovah di naeshan in the
face of oppreshan (p. 271). In this poem Johnson also inverts
associations by juxtaposing the sovereign beliefs of nationhood and
a British identity with the power and necessity of insurrection and
revolt:
dem a taak bout di powah an di glory

dem a taak bout di burnin an di lootin
dem a taak bout smashin an di grabbin
dem a tell mi bout di vanquish an di victri (p. 271)
The poem offers a further and alternative perspective on the story

of the Brixtons rioting. Johnsons emphasis upon the urban space
as di ghetto grapevine (p. 271), offers an imprint of the
disenfranchised community. Moreover, the incorporation of terms
and tactics associated with warfare and crowd control makes the
poem not only a weapon of instruction and rebellion, but also an
opportunity of reinvention and play. The text performs a struggle
for power; the repeated use of di plastic bulit and di waatah
cannon creates an unexpected rhythmic phrasing in the poem
that culminates with a desire to bring a blam-blam (p. 272).
Also, the poem incorporates references to public officials such
as Lord Scarman, who led the enquiry into the Brixton riots.
Scarman becomes, in effect, a sonic resonance of both the dub
beat and the action of mash up plenty police van and mash up
di wicked wan plan (p. 272). The poem appeals to its audience:
neva mine Scarman will bring a blam-blam (p. 272).
To many readers and listeners, the British poet Benjamin
Zephaniah has become the more accessible and possibly acceptable
inheritor of dub poetry. Like both Mutabaruka and Johnson, his
poetry works off the dub beat and also plays with contrapuntal
rhythms. But it is possible to add that anger in Zephaniahs poetry
is slightly more muted, or focused on the domestic. Echoing
Mutabarukas Dis Poem, an early poem by Zephaniah, Dis
poetry from City Psalms (1992), plays on its dependence on
refrain as a way of moving the work through conjectures of literary
history and politics in order to situate the poem in the public sphere
where it can be heard and even imitated. Zephaniah chants that Dis
poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big words involved / An if I hav a
problem de riddim gets its solved. 29 This ongoing commentary on
the making of the poem creates two impressions. One is the
implication of immediacy, even if, as the poet confesses, Dis
poetry is not fraid of going ina book (p. 12). But possibly more
revealing of the drift away from the initial anger of dub poetics is
Zephaniahs admission in this poem that Dis poetry is not Party
Political / Not designed fe dose who are critical (p. 12). Compared
with the incitement to insurrection and anger available in Linton
Kwesi Johnsons poetry, Zephaniah views the movement and
performance of poetry as a healing gesture. According to Dis
poetry, the melodies and movement of Zephaniahs poetry,
although entitled as a form of Dub ranting, where de tongue
plays a beat, are performed fe de good of de Nation, becoming a
form of shared Chant / in de morning (p. 12).
In another poem, Rapid Rapping, Zephaniah gives thanks to
poet precursors, as well as emphasising the importance of
poetrys history as an oral performance and viewing history as
an oral narrative. Far from playing mystic, Zephaniah insists
that poetry was oral and approachable, something dat people
understood (p. 39). As an ethnopoetics, Rapid Rapping tells
how Poetry was living in every neighbourhood / Story telling
was compelling listening, an entertaining (p. 39). He lists in his
rapping poetic predecessors who include Linton Kwesi Johnson
and de Brother Martin Glynn . . . Jean Binta Breeze speaks wid
ease so dont feget de name (p. 39). Moreover, he
acknowledges a debt to Mutabaruka, Oku Onuora, John Agard
an Grace Nichols / All people who are capable an dey hav
principles as presenting work which pave de way, yu see /
Long time agu before de book existed (p. 39). This suturing
between a combative tradition and more mainstream assertion is
evident in Zephaniahs gesture to performance as a site of
restitution and reconciliation. The implications of this healing
are evident in Zephaniahs desire to create poetry, as he puts it in
Dis poetry, which goes to yu / WID LUV (p. 13).
THE POET PERFORMER: DRAMA AND COMEDY IN PAUL

DURCAN AND DON PATERSON
The perception of the poet as one who articulates through different

masks or personas is intrinsic to an idea of performance and poetry.
This sense of a dramatic narrative is key to understanding the
poetry of Paul Durcan. As Kathleen McCracken Gahern suggests,
Durcan acts as a mediator of characters and voices, fulfilling a
traditional role for the poet as humourist and chronicler:
Durcans poetry is essentially dramatic. It is comprised of

monologues and duologues, brief or connected scenarios
complete only when they are spoken, or performed. Durcan
is akin to the early Irish fili or bard in that he is a maker and
an entertainer, a satirist and an historian. He acts as a
communicator through which the thoughts and experiences of
the personages he evokes are enacted and transmitted to the
community that gave rise to them. 30
In The Beckett at the Gate, Durcans dramatic monologue is
framed within the experience of another drama. The protagonist
of Durcans poem could also be read as an updated version of
the socially awkward Prufrock in T. S. Eliots The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). In a slight but humorous swipe at the
consumers of cultural zeitgeist, our character bemoans that he
could not go anywhere that spring Without people barking at
you, / Button-holing you in the street and barking at you. 31 The
key question posed is: Have you not seen Barry McGoverns
Beckett / have you not been to the Beckett at the Gate? (p. 131).
Durcan uses this questioning as a constant refrain in his work
which successfully builds up dramatic tension. Well known for
his delivery and oral performances, Durcan has eschewed his
categorisation as a performance poet in the narrowest sense of
the word, as a poet whose work is written only for oral
performance.32 Gahern proposes that Durcans dramatic poems
echo the patterns of dramatic monologue and duologue in
Browning and Yeats to create an extremely effective method of
poetic discourse, allowing the writer a highly desirable
amalgamation of objectivity and subjectivity, it is a form which
lends itself with great facility to performance. 33
The cultural groupies have forced our speaker to attend and
hilariously he comments:
I got there in good time.

I like to get to a thing in good time
Whatever it is the bus into town,
or the bus back out of town
With at least quarter of an hour to spare,
preferably half an hour, ample time
In which to work up an adequate steam of anxiety. (p. 132)
Without even having begun to experience Beckett on stage, as
readers we are already encountering a Beckettian performance.
In a recent article Erik Martiny draws attention to the shadow of
the dramatist upon the speakers world as deeply oppressive. 34
Technically Beckett exerts an influence in the key repeating of clauses
and the macabre comedy of the time-obsessed speaker waiting for the
bus. As Martiny poses, this element of repetitive performance in the
poem conveys Beckettian unease and a sense of nightmarishly
cyclical endlessness . . . The opening lines of The Beckett at the
Gate represent Durcans foray into an existentialist world where hell
is most definitely other people. 35 Guided by his seat number, the
speaker is forced to sit next to a woman (she is later referred to as
Michelle), in a near empty theatre. At this point both dramatised stage
work and the audiences experience turn into vaudeville: Not since the
Depression of the 1950s / And the clowns in Duffys Circus / have I
laughed myself so sorry (p. 134). This sense of carnival is also
heightened by the speakers proximity to his neighbour who at each
belly laugh kicks him in the backs of my legs (p. 135) as well as
gripping his arm, howling and leaning her head on his shoulder. As a
storyteller, Durcans narrative is frequently sidetracked by excursions
into further analogies or related stories. His initial attempts at
describing his companion become a distracted listing of theatrical and
Biblical women:
I mean talk about Susannah

or Judith and Holofernes Or
any of those females
In the Old Testament
Sarah or Rachel or even Eve;
Not to mention the New Testament,
Martha or Mary or Magdalen
Michelle was well, Michelle. (p. 134)
These are all women of varying if not conflicting attributes.

Susannah is associated with innocence and subsequent betrayal,
while Judith famously seduced the warrior Holofernes and
decapitated him. A fairly prescriptive perception of female role
models is offered by the references to the moral failings of Eve, the
beauty of Sarah or the purity of Rachel. Turning to examples from
the New Testament, the speaker of The Beckett at the Gate is torn
between the domestic activity of Martha the task bearer, the virtue
of Mary, and the tenacity and belief of Mary Magdalen. These
characteristics become confused in the presence of the woman nearby
who is all rouge and polythene (p. 135). Invariably and humorously
in Durcans poem, the narrative comes to a romantic anti-climax with
the disappearance of his chance companion once the curtain rises. A
chance encounter with Michelle at a bus stop leads to no
acknowledgement, only a serene scrutiny as if she had never seen me
before (p. 137). Building from the earlier use of refrain as a
heightening device, the evocation of Beckett at the close becomes a
desperate elegy to unrequited love: Theres a beckett at the gate,
theres a beckett / at the gate, Michelle (p. 138).
Scottish poet Don Patersons The Last Waltz presents two
36
simultaneous narratives within a virtuoso display of poetic form.
Patersons poem shows how rules of rhyme are not necessarily
confining, but can create a form for elements of improvisation and
experiment. The Last Waltz is written in terza rima, a form traced
to Dantes Divine Comedy and dependent upon a strict interlocking
rhyming scheme of no determinate lineation. Within this framing,
Paterson explores through a monologue a history of World War II
combat in the Pacific interspersed with reflections on a musical tour
by two jazz musicians in the late twentieth century. On one level
the poem performs as a palimpsest, superimposed upon the latent
histories in Borneo and Malaysia. As a counter against the readers
increasing sense of familiarity with rhyme, Paterson disrupts the
modality of our expectations with the insertions of brand names,
such as SilkAir 777, ghostly intertexts from songs such as And I
feel fine, unfamiliar icons such as Padmasambhava (p. 35), the
sage guru of tantric Buddhism, as well as a synthetic alternative to
quinine, chloroquine (p. 36). Working within a traditional form,
Paterson is keen to strategically emphasise a friction between the
intoxicating global travels of the two musicians against the more
restrictive yet also enabling closures of poetic form.
In sketching the history of British involvement in the Pacific,

which is prefaced with references to Blighty and Dunkirk (p.
35), the speaker displays an alert awareness of nationalism,
nationhood and the advance of English as a global language. He
recalls their inability to play the correct anthemic song that
wed been assured / was their rallying, their I belong to Glasgow
/ their Cwm Rhondda (p. 36). The performance of music is used
as a vehicle to draw attention to distinctions of affiliation. This
humiliating awareness draws the speaker to acknowledge that this
mistake echoes historical cultural ignorance: I knew the shame the
letter feels / when it makes its address but its stamps fall short (p.
36). Paterson surreally uses the analogy of musical failure as a way
of evoking an earlier bombing of the island that infrasonic boom
/ that verdant hush that spread like a bad word (p. 36). Again
Paterson plays with the constriction that formal structure grants as
well its opportunities for expansiveness. In a sweeping pan, he
suggests that the resultant error made every bat in Kota Kinabalu
fly headlong into the nearest tree while the street dogs went lulu
and grotesquely the audience bled appreciatively / from their ears
(p. 37). Although the closed form of the terza rima may be far from
Olsons sense of a projective verse, Paterson examines ideas of
performance within the interstices of structure. Terza rima becomes
a score for a retrospective accounting of the jazz musicians failings
and sense of colonial culpability.
PERFORMATIVITY: LYN HEJINIAN
Surveying elements of twentieth-century poetic practice, critic

Charles Altieri proposes that:
There is no distinctive knowledge of the self; there are only

contingent moments of more or less charged awareness of the
psyche focused on the self, rather than on other aspects of the
world . . . Therefore there is no privileged knowledge
distinctive to the first person. Knowledge of the self must be
filtered through sensations produced by the performance of
37
self.
Altieris commentary on subjectivity in contemporary poetic
practice as mediated and enacted through performance
resonates with theoretical propositions of the 1980s examining
gender construction. Judith Butler argues that gender is neither a
pre-existent nor an innate category, but reliant upon the imitative
performance of socially accepted categories of behaviour. In
Performative Acts and Gender Construction (1988), Butler
emphasises that:
Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply,

that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. It seems
fair to say that certain kinds of acts are usually interpreted
as expressive of gender core or identity and that these acts
either conform to an expected gender identity or contest
that expectation in some way.38
Butlers focus here on ideas of the performative as opposed to

performance indicates an action that is aware that it has no basis in
origin, whereas performance assumes an object of imitation.
Performance in Butlers schema is linked to acts and gestures
which are expressive of gender and indicate that gender itself is
something prior to the various acts, postures and gestures by which
it is dramatized and known (pp. 1289). In this light, gender is
perceived as something that is constructed through sustained social
performances that emphasise the conception of an essential sex, a
true or abiding masculinity or femininity (p. 129). Moreover,
Butler views the construction of gender in terms of social power,
dominance and hierarchies: As performance which is
performative, gender is an act; broadly construed, which
constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority (p.
129).
Butlers work in the late 1980s and early 1990s opened the terms of
debate regarding how a text may perform gendered positioning.
Prevalent in elements of American experimental praxis at this time was
the interrogation of the relationship between linguistic constructs and
gender, or ideological positions. Lyn Hejinians My Life (1987)
interrogates the genre of autobiography by refuting any expectations
for a linear or chronological narrative. 39 While My Life as a prose
poem issues a challenge to any neat formal categorisation, as a
procedural text the volume is premised on a strict numerical pattern.
Originally composed when Hejinian was thirty-seven, the volume
initially contained thirty-seven chapters each comprised of thirty-seven
lines. When she was forty-five Hejinian republished My Life with an
additional eight sections of forty-five lines and supplemented the
original sections with eight lines. This process of inclusion is
remarked upon in My Life: I could feed those extra words into
the sentence already there, rather than make a new one for them,
make place in the given space, and that would be the same thing,
making more sense, which is all to the good (p. 88). In her
pivotal essay The Rejection of Closure (1985), Hejinian
remarks upon the evolving possibility of what she terms the
open text:
Language is productive of activity in another sense, with

which anyone is familiar who experiences words as
attractive, magnetic to meaning. This is one of the first
thing one notices, for example, in works constructed from
arbitrary vocabularies generated by random or chance
operations.40
In this schema, subjectivity can be thought of as a process, or

continual performance. Hejinian proposes subjectivity is less a
fixed entity than a mobile (and mobilized) reference point. 41
My Life, while certainly not being a treatise to Butlers work,
places into focus the performative element of gender
construction. Iterative actions become a hallmark of performing
motherhood. The speaker reflects upon the ritual of birthdays:
At every birthday party that year, the mother of the birthday

child served ice cream and surprise cake, into whose
slices the favours were baked. But nothing could interrupt
those given days. I was sipping Shirley Temples wearing
my Mary Janes. (p. 19)
In this extract Hejinian playfully demonstrates how names when

used as nouns retain an element of their initial inscription. This
element of repetition and iteration is evident in the texts
construction: at one point we are told I quote my mothers
mothers mothers mother: I must everyday correct some fault in
my morality of talents and remember how short a time I have to
live (p. 37). Each of My Lifes section opens with a leitmotif, or
aphoristic fragment, that is then recontextualised at various points
throughout the volume. A key fragment, I wrote my name in every
one of his books, demonstrates at one stage an entry into self-
knowledge, and worry of being perceived as feminine. The key
clause is followed by Was my handwriting dainty, or afraid? It
was a pretty plaything. She trimmed first her nails and then the
split ends of her hair (p. 44). This awareness of the feminising
of a young girl indicates an awareness that Butler ascribes to
performativity. Hejinians tactic of constantly recontextualising
key clauses indicates the evolution of different performances of
gendered conditions. For example, we have the admission of
needing to inhabit a male space: But these words are meant to
awaken in you such desire that . . . I wrote my name in every one
of his books (p. 93). Moreover, the emergence of selfhood
through the act of writing is presented as a micro-narrative,
claiming ownership amidst other narratives:
One summer I worked as a babysitter and lived with a family

and its babies at the beach, (this was the same summer that I
read fathers copy of Anna Karenina and thus made it my
own, so that later that fall it was logical that I should write my
name in every one of his books). (pp. 11112)
My Life claims that As such a person on paper, I am

androgynous (p. 105). In her essays Hejinian remains sceptical
of a so-called womens writing, or language as examined by
French feminist theorists such as Hlne Cixous and Luce
Irigaray. She responds that: the narrow definition of desire, the
identification of desire solely with sexuality and the literalness
of the genital model for a womans language that some of these
writers insist on may be problematic. Hejinian continues,
asserting that The desire that is stirred by language is located
most interestingly within language itself. 42 A compulsion for
change is made evident in My Life as a proposition of a new
composition. Midway in the volume a speaker comments that:
I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and
the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my
personality and even my appearance, that I might create
myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very
character which made such a thought possible and such a wish
mine.
Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to
new work. (pp. 478)
In her critique of an innate and stable subject, Hejinian

dramatises in its place an evolving subjectivity that is situated in
linguistic performance:
This becomes an addictive motion but not incorrect, despite

such distortion, concentration, condensation, deconstruction
and digressions that association by, for example pun and
etymology provide; an allusive psycholinguism . . . The
43
process is composition rather than writing.
This interrelationship between performance and composition is

key to Hejinians poetry. She indicates that the suggestiveness of
language generates a self-perpetuating linkage of associations.
Throughout My Life we witness a struggle between perceived
gender expectations and the person or protagonists attempt to
divert and escape such codifying. We are told a received
wisdom: If I was left unmarried after college, I would be single
all my life and lonely in old age (p. 53). Rather than offering us
a chronological narrative, elements of a life story emerge at
strategic points, codified in terms of social gender expectations.
Take for example the experience of pregnancy and motherhood
in the following extracts:
I couldnt join the demonstration because I was pregnant,

and so I had revolutionary experience without taking
revolutionary action. (p. 67)
The word version is a comparative noun, which must
imply its plural form the one that includes many. Should a
mother have more kids? (p. 68)
Far from seeing her text as offering only different versions of a life
story, Hejinians work is actively engaged in the continual
development shifts and performances of the subject. This so-called
indeterminacy is a central concern of her work: she claims that she
is constantly rewriting in an unstable text (p. 113). Cast in this
light, the ambitions of My Life bear a certain resonance with
Butlers own inflection of performativity. Butler clarifies in an
interview that It is important to distinguish performance from
performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter
contests the very notion of the subject. 44 She adds also that what
Im trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of
45
discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names. This
deconstructive impulse features in My Life as such displacements
alter illusions, which is all-to-the-good (p. 88).
PERFORMANCE, THE VOICE AND THE WORLD: KATE

FAGAN
One might ask the more general question of how the poem relates
to the world around it, or, put another way, how does the poem
perform in the world? A way of considering this inflection is to
suggest how the poem may perform phenomenologically or
46
establishes a perception of perception in the poetry. Australian
poet Kate Fagans volume The Long Moment (2002) details an
encountering of the world into a form of perceptual rhythm. Her
poems detail a self-conscious awareness of perception and how the
poets chronicle of the movement of perception may often be
thwarted. Moreover, her interest in breath and musicality draws us
in a full circle to Olsons Projective Verse. There is evidently an
awareness of the body in the world inscribed in her poetry. This
pressure to chronicle a subjective performance in Fagans poetry is
described in Return to a New Physics as: lyric interjects /
demanding specific / impatient approval / quick like junk, /
memorial about position / and meaning. 47 In an interview Fagan
focuses on the improvisatory element of her work, referring to her
long poem The Waste of Tongues as a long, serial work. I tend to
work in series that are sort of improvisations of thinking and
word, in a sense, not unlike musical improvisations. This one has, I
suppose, a social and political impetus to it. 48 David McCooey
notes that Fagans poetry performs a kind of metatextuality in
which complex notions of text, identity, and form are integrated and
interrogated . . . In this sense the lyric mode itself often makes
49
strange and operates in an uncanny way. Fagan, in commenting
upon the poetry of Hejinian, draws further attention to the sense of
poetry as an encounter with the world. She comments that for
Hejinian a sense of encounter can be read as a movement between
abstract nomination (an encounter), and a process of acting or
50
becoming (to encounter), between noun and verb. Importantly
Fagans understanding of encounter places an emphasis upon
ideas of movement and mobility: Emphasising flux, they remind
us that encounter-discoveries such as those specified by Hejinian
aesthetic, political, ethical are always mobile, and open to further
51
meetings or happenings.
In The Waste of Tongues, Fagan declares that A writer cannot
inherit an instance / To dwell in the arrangement of things (p.
105), suggesting that writing cannot merely be a commemorative
act, but needs to respond, to perform in relation to the world around
it. In this poem she writes of poetry as an accumulative act: news
that absorbs news (p. 105). Advancing on Ezra Pounds famous
dictum that poetry is news that STAYS news, Fagan insists upon
the poems mobility and that its actions are dependent upon the
world.52 This responsiveness to the world as a breaking down of
boundaries is described as wanting to touch the drifting matter (p.
105). Following through from this phenomenological reading, the
writing of the poem marks ideas of change. In writing relativity on
a blank page, the speaker notes how the way your i has changed
over time, / a swift equation forming, i / time (p. 89). This
understanding of the relationship between poet and perceived world
comes to the fore in another poem from this collection, Sentience.
Here Fagan performs an anatomy of description upon the act of
enunciating: this sound breath makes as it forms a lifting of bone
to meet bone over the long reach of a sentence (p. 85). The focus
upon breaths mutability is clear in its division from the sentence as
lust / emerging later as light (p. 85). Fagans Sentience reads the
situating of relations in the world, an erotic performance where a
sense of sudden visibility drags / an eye from point to point (p.
86), where the subject of the scene is attempting to interpret erotic
scenery (p. 86). In this schema, things become permeable and the
impetus towards description is described by the poet as a form of
leaning into attention (p. 87). Moreover, in Sentience a sense
of needing to impart or express sentiment is given in painful
terms: insides rendered outer (p. 88).
Key to understanding the term performance in Fagans poetry is
the interrelationship between text and music in her work,
particularly in Sentience where considerable attention is given to
the articulation of a poetic voice. Fagan takes great pleasure in the
sonic qualities of how her text performs linguistically. In this
context Roland Barthess essay The Grain of the Voice (1972)
offers a consideration of an understanding of music and its
performance in poetry.53 Barthes adopts Julia Kristevas terms
phenotext and genotext as part of this understanding of musical
performance. The genotext, in Kristevas account, lends itself to
melodic devices. It is an ecstatic drive closely allied to the semiotic,
while the phenotext suggests the communicative level of language
54
structures which underpin grammatical rules and conventions.
In The Grain of the Voice, Barthes transposes Kristevas
configuration to pheno-song and the geno-song, the former
becoming the impulse towards articulation, expression and
performance and the latter delighting in the jouissance of linguistic
materiality. As Barthes elucidates, the geno-song has nothing to do
with communication; instead it is:
That apex (or that depth) of production where the melody

really works at the language not at what it says, but the
voluptuousness of its sound-signifiers, of its letters where
melody explores how the language works and identifies
with that work. It is, in a very simple word but, which must
be taken seriously, the diction of the language.55
Barthes places a particular emphasis on the display of the geno-

song in the recital as a form of writing, and the recital through its
heightened performance of the genosong becomes in turn a text.
The Waste of Tongues impresses upon us the visceral and erotic
relationship between words and the body. The speaker muses that
A word-balcony begins to curl / at my minds tongue, tectorial
seduction / of a lexeme, in licked syllable against another (p. 95),
and in Sentience we are told of what seduction a tongue might
exert (p. 86). Fagan details the timing and enunciation of linguistic
performance as brushing one syllable up towards the lip, spilling
to gather more details revisited (p. 86). In The Grain of the
Voice Barthes makes the distinction of the grain as a physical
manifestation, the grain is in the throat, place where the phonic
metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that significance
explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance.56 The emphasis on
the grain forces us to reconsider how one applies the analogy of
music to poetry; as an element of resistance in the recital, the grain
raises a challenge to the idealisation of closure and perfection.
Equally we can read this physical gesture of linguistic performance
in Fagans poetry as a horizon of intimate syllables (p. 88). This
appreciation of linguistic and sonic density becomes in Sentience
a horizon of intimate syllables, each word in effect as certain as
teeth in eating space over and over (p. 88).
CONCLUSION: PERFORMANCE WRITING AND

EXPERIMENT CAROLINE BERGVALL
In the past two decades there has been a steady expansion in the
range of intradisciplinary writing which interrogates and
addresses conceptualisations of performance. This is loosely
referred to as performance writing. Ric Allsopp suggests that
the field of performance writing can be defined in its widest
sense as the investigation of the performance of language. 57 He
proposes that performance writing acknowledges that textual
events are produced not only through a syntactical and semantic
exploration of language but also through the impact of its
material treatments (p. 78). Read in this light, performance
writing challenges our conceptions of the purely literary by
emphasising multiplicity and interdisciplinarity. Allsopp
comments that performance writing highlights the great
diversity of artistic and writerly practices . . . which rely on the
use of text and textual elements (p. 78). He suggests that these
may include elements of theatre, poetry, installation art,
animation, soundworks and electronic art.
Caroline Bergvalls poetic practice may also be referred to as
performance writing. Bergvall poses that performance writing
does indeed explore relationships text-based work entertains when
developed in conjunction with other media and discourses. 58 But
she adds that the writing asks a question which is as much open to
literary analysis, as one open to the broader investigation of the
kinds of formal and ideological strategies which writers and artists
develop textually in response or in reaction to their own time and
their own fields.59 Bergvall asks a series of rhetorical questions in
her early analysis of the term performance writing:
So, what is Performance Writing not?

Is Performance Writing not writing?
Is it writing which performs not writes?
Is it not performance which writes? But
then does writing not perform?
And when does writing not perform? And what kind of not
performance are we talking about? Is it not performance to
write or is it not writing to not perform?60
Clearly all writing, as Bergvall rather gnomically points out, can

be taken at one level or another as a form of performance.
Bergvalls own poetry wants to explode that false dichotomy
between text and the articulation of voice itself as performance.
As Nicky Marsh comments, Bergvalls poetry addresses:
Not only the mutability of the realised performance but also

the centrality of the body, mouth and tongue to the
articulation of language. Such an approach questions the
false distinction between a text and voice-based poetics and
the assumed silence of the printed page. 61
Goan Atom, an ongoing work by Bergvall, explores such

distinctions between print and oral performance by emphasising
the associative patterning of words, phonemic resonance, sonic
implosions, resistances, fragments and aberrations within the
text. At key points Goan Atom interrogates constructions of
female sexuality and the performance of gender through an
imploded and semantically unstable textuality:
Enters the EVERY HOST

dragging a badl Eg
Finally !
So that the inspiration for such thoughts
becomes visible through the navel in order To
take advantage of the interior mechanism run
through the thoughts retained of little girls as
a panorama deep in the belly
revealed by multicoloured
electric illumination62
The openness of Bergvalls text enables multiple interpretations, but
one might suggest that references to the HOST and inspiration draw
some strong kernel words from Catholic doctrine and practice. Against
this we have the viscerality of the navel, possibly even a challenge to
ideas of an immaculate conception. There are suggestions here of
human reproduction: one has only to consider the little girls, badl
possibly badly and eg maybe ovum. Another critic may find
alternate readings, as Drew Milne states that Bergvalls poems work
both as residues of performance poetics and as scripts for
performative interpretation. This in turn generates ambiguities for
readers more used to studying texts in order to establish an ideal or
finalised close reading.63 Certainly, if we follow through on our initial
reading there is an equivocation here between the idea of spiritual
inspiration and the synthesised rainbow colours of an electric
illumination.
To borrow from Barthes, Bergvall delights in the
voluptuousness in the soundings of languages. One section of
Goan Atom orchestrates a multilingual play between verbs, as
well as reintroducing deconstructions of gender and the
intrusions of scientific cloning. Sonic association links this
patterning of phonemes in the text:
Forte love
Forte loot
o found ConCubicles
Some Fav affemme
an Ourites Belle
y firms Con-
Con [. . .]
Her e commaes
such Air Errs Heir Hair
Enter DOLLY
Entered enters
Enters entered
Enter entre
en train en trail
en trav Ail Ae
La bour La bour La bour
Wears god on a strap
Shares mickey with all your friends
The opening of this short extract posits importance on a gendered

and erotic language, which veers from English to a combination of
English and French and neologisms. One can hear the pleasure of a
strong or forte love becoming found, and then transforming to a
field of possible concubine or ConCubiles. A French tongue
intrudes into the word favourite. The associational phonic pattering
is heightened by the combination of Air, Errs, Heir, Hair.
These linguistic resistances in the text force the reader to consider
its performance both phonically and graphemically on the page;
how minute shifts of pronunciation can change a context for
understanding. DOLLY can be read as a girly toy, but also as the
first cloned animal, a sheep, in 1996. This propels a grammatical
exploration of cloned sounds and words, as enter mutates to
entre, and points to the intrusion of new words en train or in the
middle of a proposition. Bergvall then translates homo-phonically
travaille to labour, which is set out as La bour or, colloquially,
the bourgeoisie in French. Goan Atoms performance writing invites
and necessitates the readers response to complete a circuit of
interpretation. The final line of this excerpt highlights this gaming
or mickey that is shared between friends. Performing not only in a
participatory way, Bergvalls poetry also creates an assemblage of
political and gendered contexts for interpreting the structures of
language. Thriving on the contradictions between verbal and
visual performance, Bergvalls poetry offers us a simultaneous
examination of poetry on and off the page.
Contemporary poetry has been viewed as a score for the

voice. Modulations and pauses in the text can be represented
spatially and graphically on the printed page.
Poetry can often perform orally, especially in the context of
dub poetry.
The impression of spontaneity is often key to oral performance,
particularly as a political or countercultural response.
For some contemporary poets, performance can also be
considered as the use of dramatic devices. The intervention of
formal structures or self-imposed rules provides a framework
for the poet to explore the act of composition.
In considering the performative, contemporary poets such as
Lyn Hejinian and Caroline Bergvall examine how gender is
constructed and iterated.
Intradisciplinary writing is often considered as performance
writing, which often explores the dichotomy between
performance on the page and oral performance.
NOTES
1. Charles Olson, Projective Verse, in Donald Allen and
Warren Tallman (eds), The Poetics of a New American
Poetry (New York: Grove, 1973), pp. 14758.
2. Michael Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and
the Material Word (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997).
3. Davidson, Ghostlier Demarcations, p. 9.
4. Lyn Hejinian, Materials (for Dubravka Djuric), in The
Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), pp. 16176 (p. 166).
5. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Modern Poetry is Prose, in Poetry

as Insurgent Art (New York: New Directions, 2007), p. 87.
6. Cited from Robert Lowells acceptance speech at the
National Book Awards for Life Studies in 1960. Available
online at www. poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5903.
7. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Postmodern American Poetry: A
Norton Anthology (New York: Norton & Norton, 1994). All
subse-quent references to this edition of Ferlinghettis
poems are given in the text.
8. Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art, p. 36.
9. Amiri Baraka, Black Art, in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka
(New York: Morrow, 1979), p. 106.
10. Amiri Baraka, State/Meant [1965], in Donald Hall (ed.), The
Poetics of the New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press,
1973), pp. 3823, p. 382.
11. Baraka, Postmodern American Poetry, p. 645.
12. Amiri Baraka, Expressive Language [1963], in The
Poetics of the New American Poetry, pp. 3737 (p. 375).
13. Amiri Baraka, Postmodern American Poetry, p. 262. All
subse-quent references to this edition of Barakas poems are
given in the text.
14. Jerome Rothenberg, New Models, New Visions: Some
Notes Toward a Poetics of Performance, in Postmodern
American Poetry, pp. 6404 (p. 640).
15. Rothenberg, New Models, New Visions, p. 641.
16. Meta DuEwa Jones, Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance:
Amiri Barakas Its Nation Time , African American Review,
37.2/3 (2003), 24552 (p. 246).
17. Jones, Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance, p. 248.
18. Jones, Politics, Process & (Jazz) Performance, p. 249.
19. Amiri Baraka, Hunting is Not Those Heads on the
Wall, in The Poetics of the New American Poetry, pp. 37882 (p.
380). 20. Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African
American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), p. 201.
21. Amiri Baraka, cited in Robert G. OMalley (ed.), The Jazz
Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia
22. Linton Kwesi Johnson, in E. A. Markham (ed.), Hinterland:

Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain
23. Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of
African-Caribbean Dub Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), p. 2.
24. Habekost, Verbal Riddim, p. 1.
25. Markham, Hinterland, p. 21.
26. Mutabaruka, Dis Poem. Available online at http://aalbc.
com/authors/mutabaru.htm. Originally recorded on The
Mystery Unfolds, LP (Newton, NJ: Shanachie Records, 1986).
27. Kamwau Brathwaite, Nation Language, in History of the
Voice (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), p. 13.
28. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Hinterland, pp. 2712. All
Originally recorded LP Making History (1984).
29. Benjamin Zephaniah, City Psalms (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1992), p. 12. All subsequent references to this edition of
Zephaniahs poems are given in the text.
30. Kathleen McCracken Gahern, Masks and Voices: Dramatic
Personas in the Poetry of Paul Durcan, Canadian Journal
of Irish Studies, 13.1 (1987), 10720 (p. 108).
31. Paul Durcan, The Beckett at the Gate, in A Snail in My
Prime: Selected Poems (London: Harvill Press, 1999), pp.
1318 (p. 131). All subsequent references to this edition of
Durcans poems are given in the text.
32. Paul Durcan, Its All About Forgetting Yourself: Interview
with Paul Durcan by John Knowles, Fortnight, 435 (2005),
202.
33. McCracken Gahern, Masks and Voices, pp. 11112.
34. Erik Martiny, Demonic Forefather: Portraits of Samuel Beckett
in the Poems of Paul Durcan, Nordic Irish Studies, 5
(2006), 14956 (p. 150).
35. Martiny, Demonic Forefather, p. 150.
36. Don Paterson, Landing Light (London: Faber & Faber,
2003) pp. 358. All subsequent references to this edition of
Patersons poems are given in the text.
37. Charles Altieri, The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry:
Modernism and After (London: Blackwell, 2006), p. 163.
38. Judith Butler, Performative Acts and Gender Construction, in

Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds), The Twentieth Century
Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1289.
39. Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, [1980]
1987). All subsequent references to this edition of
Hejinians poems are given in the text.
40. Lyn Hejinian, The Rejection of Closure [1985], in The
Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), pp. 4058 (p. 51).
41. Lyn Hejinian, The Person and Description, Poetics Journal,
9 (1991), 167.
42. Hejinian, The Rejection of Closure, p. 55.
43. Lyn Hejinian, If Written is Writing, in The Language of
Inquiry, pp. 259 (p. 28).
44. Judith Butler, Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith
Butler by Peter Osbourne and Lynne Segal for Radical
Philosophy, in Kathryn Woodward (ed.) Identity and Difference
(London: Sage, 1997), p. 235.
45. Butler, Gender as Performance, p. 235.
46. See the brief discussion in Chapter 1 of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith (London: Routledge, 1999).
47. Kate Fagan, The Long Moment (Cambridge: Salt, 2002), p.
25. All subsequent references to this edition of Fagans
poems are given in the text.
48. Dom Romeo, Interview with Kate Fagan. Available online
at http://standanddeliver.blogs.com/dombo/2004/03/kate_
fagan.html.
49. David McCooey, Surviving Australian Poetry: The New
Lyricism, 1 May 2007. Available online at http://australia.
poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/
index.php?obj_id=9031.
50. Kate Fagan, A Work of Acknowledgment, A Poetics of
Happily, How2, 1.6 (2001). Available online at www.asu.
edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/
v1_6_2001/current/readings/encounters/fagan.html.
51. Fagan, A Work of Acknowledgment 1960), p. 29.
53. Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, in Music Image
Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: The Noonday Press,
1977), pp. 17989 (p. 182).
54. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 87.
55. Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, pp. 182
3. 56. Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, p. 183.
57. Ric Allsopp, Performance Writing, A Journal of
Performance and Art, 21.1 (1999), 7680 (p. 80).
58. Caroline Bergvall, What Do We Mean By Performance Writing?
Keynote paper for 1st Performance Writing Symposium
(Totnes: Dartington College of Arts, 1996). Available online
at www.carolinebergvall.com.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
61. Nicky Marsh, Review: Goan Atom, How 2, 2:2 (2004).
Available online at www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2jour-
nal/archive/online_archive/v2_2_2004/current/alerts/
marsh.htm.
62. Caroline Bergvall, from Goan Atom, Jacket, 12 (2000).
Available online at http://jacketmagazine.com/12/bergvall.
html. Print version, Goan Atom, 1. Jets-poupee (Cambridge:
rem press, 1999).
63. Drew Milne, A Veritable Dollmine, Jacket, 12 (2000).
Available online at http://jacketmagazine.com/12/milne-
bergvall.html.
chapter 4
Environment and Space
READING SPACE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
L awrence Buell in The Future of Environmental Criticism states that

In one form or another the idea of nature has been a dominant or at
least residual concern for literary scholars and
1
intellectual historians ever since these fields came into being.
Throughout literary history, poetry has always been attentive to the
environment that surrounds the perceiving subject. More recently
these ideas have been framed in terms of ecocritical think-ing and
theory. In considering ideas of environment and space, this chapter
initially examines the term ecocriticism and how poetry is
responsive to the construction of identities through regional
identifications often referred to as a poetics of place. During the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries our ideas of nature poetry
have become more complex. Some poets exercise a taxonomists
eye for detailing the natural landscape and evoking a geographical
history. Yet it should be stressed that contemporary poetrys rela-
tionship to nature is being thought of as representing not only the
immediate environment, but also its relationship to economic and
cultural change, as well as physical threat. This difference between
poetries is explicated succinctly by Jonathan Skinner: critics have
made a useful distinction between nature poetry and ecopoetry to
paraphrase Juliana Spahr one focuses (apolitically) only on the
bird, the other considers as well the bulldozer about to destroy the
birds habitat.2 We will eventually consider how an

understanding of ecopoetics might broaden our reading of
poetrys relationship to the environment.
The publication of geographer-philosopher Henri Lefebvres The
Production of Space in 1974 introduced to a broader audience a
spatial awareness to understanding the environment. According to
experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, the more general idea of
the production of space which Lefebvre references proposes that
humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn,
created by the world around them. In other words, the human
condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activ-
ity and our material surroundings. 3 We will consider the impact of
reading poetry spatially specifically as the writers response to
urban landscape. Increasingly poets are subject and alert to a global
mobility that undoubtedly challenges fixed ideas of region, cultural
identity and geographic stability. Contemporary poets often intro-
duce through their work a travelogue, or a narrative of cultural dis-
location. Responding to the threat of environmental catastrophe,
twenty-first-century poets attempt to assimilate scientific accounts,
texts and news bulletins into their work to inform both the reader
and themselves. The frequently apocalyptic scenes envisaged by
such poetry are often counterbalanced by the possibility of imag-
ined spaces. In this context contemporary poetry acts both as an
elegy for a vanishing world and as an attempt at its reconstruction
in a new ecological form.
ECOCRITICISM: LANDSCAPE AND ECOLOGY IN GARY

SNYDERS POETRY
According to Cheryll Glotfelty, ecocriticism is the study of the

relationship between literature and the physical environment . . .
ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies. 4
Increasingly ecocriticism is seen as a multi-genre critical approach,
linking disciplines such as ecology and environmental science with
the plastic, digital and literary arts. One of the poets most
associated with the ecocritical turn in the late twentieth century is
Californian poet Gary Snyder. Snyders body of work includes
environment and space 135
important volumes of essays such as The Practice of the Wild (1990)

and A Place in Space (1995), which explore humanitys complex
relationship to the environment and the need to remain aware of local
communities.5 Snyder writes that ecology as a term derives
etymologically from the Greek oikos, or household. Modern usage
refers both to the study of biological interrelationships and the flow of
energy through organisms and inorganic matter; ecology can expand
to other realms, from technology systems to
6
the ecology of thinking and composition. The interconnection
between ecological thinking and writing is apparent in Snyders
most famous poem Riprap, where the poet instructs Lay down
7
these words / Before your mind like rocks. Commenting on the
recent academic interest in ecocriticism, Snyder states:
Nature writing, environmental history, and ecological phi-

losophy have become subjects of study in the humanities.
There are, however, still a few otherwise humane historians
and philosophers who unreflectingly assume that the
natural world is primarily a building-supply yard for human
projects. That is what the Occident has said and thought for
a couple of thousand years.8
Snyders cycle of lyrics Little Songs for Gaia (2005) gestures

emphatically to environmental scientist James Lovelocks pioneer-ing
work on Gaia theory.9 Gaia theory states that the Earths bio-sphere
behaves as if it were a single organism. As Lovelock explains in his
latest book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(2009), Gaia theory presents
a view of the earth introduced in the 1980s that sees it as a

self-regulating system made up from a totality of
organisms, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as
an evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a
goal the regulation of surface conditions so as to be as
favourable for contemporary life as possible. 10
Lovelock has been seeking over the decades to dispel the belief
that humans are somehow the owners, managers, commissars or
people in charge (p. 6) of the earth. He emphasises that earth

has not evolved solely for our benefit and any changes we make
to it are at our own risk. This way of thinking makes clear that
we have no special human rights; we are merely one of the
partner species in the great enterprise of Gaia (p. 6).
Little Songs for Gaia consists of twenty lyric sections and
presents the ecology of Northern California, sounds from the
immediate landscape, dream visions and the threat to the abun-
dance of Gaias biosphere. Snyder presents a panoptic vision of
the landscape, often formed through the eye of a bird of prey.
This position allows not only a cartographic reading of the
landscape, but a comment upon the importance of humanity in
the greater scheme of Gaias ecosystem. The hawk dipping and
circling over the salt marshes of San Francisco elicits the
reflection upon Gaias slow-paced / systems of systems (p. 49).
Snyder comments that 5,000 years is all that a human can
figure, and the human in question is framed as the absurd yet
potentially destructive grass-hopper man in his car driving
through (p. 49). In a later lyric the poet pictures earths blue
planet: Deep blue sea baby (p. 54). Viewed from the Great
Birds perspective, the earth presents a magnificent curve and
momentum: Whirl of white clouds over blue-green land and
seas / bluegreen of bios (p. 54). Snyder also chides the impulse
to chronicle and assume ownership over the environment:
Im glad for once I knew

Not to look too much when
Really there
Or try to write it down. (p. 51)
The premise of the earth as a mere construction yard of building

resources is reiterated later in the sequence. The poet hears the log
trucks in the early morning, reminding him of the world that is
carried away (p. 55). Snyders poems and his essays bring to atten-
tion what he has called the art of the wild that is, to see art in the
context of environment and nature. He urges us to see nature as
process rather than as product or commodity . . . Seeing this also
serves to acknowledge the autonomy and integrity of the nonhu-
man part of the world, an Other that we are barely beginning

to be able to know.11
A POETICS OF PLACE: GEOFFREY HILL, ROBERT HASS

AND ANNE SZUMIGALSKI
According to Buell, place is a configuration of highly flexible

subjective, social and material dimensions. 12 He explains that
for political geographer John Agnew, place can be understood
as a matter of (social) locale, (geographical) location and a
sense of place. It combines elements of nature (elemental
forces), social relations (class gender and so on), and meaning
(the mind, ideas, symbols) (p. 60). While place can also evoke a
physical relationship to the environment, or indeed a physical
site, it also implies emotional and cognitive relationships what
Agnew refers to as a deeply personal phenomenon founded on
ones life world and everyday practices (p. 60). A configuration
of place is also informed by the plural geographies associated
with ethnic, political, economic, informational, cultural and
religious forma-tions (p. 60). As has been initially suggested in
a cursory reading of Lefebvre, place also exerts effects on its
inhabitants. Agnew concurs that those constructs are
themselves, in turn, mediated ecologically by the physical
environments that they also mediate (p. 60).
Geoffrey Hills Mercian Hymns (1971), takes as its geographi-
cal locus a specific area the valley of the River Trent and its
tributaries, once known as Mercia but now known as the English
Midlands.13 It has been suggested that the original old English
Mierce means border people. The book is written as a sequence of
thirty discrete verses that Hill refers to as versets, which he
describes as groupings of rhythmical prose:
The rhythm and cadence are far more of a pitched and tuned
chant than I think one normally associates with the prose
poem. I designed the appearance of the page in the form of
versets. The reason they take the form they do is because at a
very early stage the words and phrases begin to group
themselves in this way. I did immediately see it as an

extended sequence.14
The sonorous momentum of the sections is often incantatory,

fusing private history with shards of broader historical narrative.
A central figure in the sequence is the Anglo-Saxon King Offa
who ruled Mercia during the eighth century. Geographical space
and the historical figure cannot be disentangled from one
another. Within Mercian Hymns there is also a strong
autobiographical nar-rative. Hill admits a rather disturbing link
between the king and childhood:
The murderous brutality of Offa as a political animal seems

again an objective correlative for the ambiguities of English
history in general, as a means of trying to encompass and
accommodate the early humiliations and fears of ones own
childhood and also ones discovery of the tyrannical streak
in oneself as a child.15
The opening of Mercian Hymns prepares the reader for an
archaeological work, where buried in the text are strata of co-existent
histories. Beginning the sequence with a panegyric, the speakers
praise of Offa includes titles such as King of holly groves, overlord
of the M5 and architect of the historic rampart and ditch (p. 105).
Later, in section twelve, Hill presents a scene of excavation. Beginning
with Their spades grafted through the variably-resistant soil, we are
introduced to workers paid to caulk waterpipes (p. 116). Confusion
regarding time and period is delib-erate, the most immediate anchor
being the landscape and earth where Chestnut-boughs clash their
inflamed leaves (p. 116). The succeeding section presents the results
of an archaeologists dig which include Offas hoard of coins: Trim
the lamp; polish the lens; draw, one by one, rare coins to the light (p.
117). The location of this find resonates as a space where history and
ritual coalesce far from his underkingdom of crinoid and crayfish (p.
117). This layer-ing of the text enables Hill to introduce small
narrative excerpts of his childhood. In the twenty-fifth section we are
introduced to his grandmothers work in a nail shop. A visceral
memory of the build-
ing is introduced: Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the
troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust (p. 129). Hills
inclusion of compound colour-descriptors, musical resonances as
well as Anglo-Saxon and Latinate phrases reinforces the density of
the poem as strata of competing timeframes and languages.
Near the close, in hymnet twenty-eight, we are presented with a
cartographers view of the area depicting: The process of
generations; deeds of settlement (p. 132). Michel de Certeaus
distinction between panoptic vision above a settlement, and the
pedestrian experience of its inhabitants, offers a way of consid-
ering the different perspectives of place in Mercian Hymns. De
Certeaus The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) suggests that the
desire to view or map the city from such a height betrays a desire to
16
theorise, with the panoptic spectator becoming a voyeur-god. By
contrast, the practitioners of the settlement live down below (p.
93). De Certeaus commentary draws an evocative description of
the labyrinthine and the frequently illegible passage of people: The
networks of these moving intersecting writings compose a manifold
story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments
of trajectories and alterations of spaces (p. 93). Mercian Hymns is
intent on showing a landscape etched with tracks of ancient
occupation in Groves of legendary holly; silverdark the ridged
gleam (p. 132).
Robert Hasss work recreates with a keen botanists eye the
history and physical shaping of his environment. A native of
Northern California, he inscribes the flora and fauna of the San
Francisco Bay Area in his first volume, Field Guide (1973), as
the titles of some of the poems indicate: On the Coast near
Sausalito, Black Mountain, Los Altos, At Stinson Beach,
Palo Alto: The Marshes.17 In this last long poem Hass delights
in the naming of his environment:
Walking, I recite the hard

explosive names of birds:
egret, kildeer, bittern, tern.
Dull in the wind and early morning
light, the striped shadows of cattails
twitch like nerves. (p. 24)
The poem is dedicated to Mariana Richardson (183091), whose

father owned the land / where I grew up (p. 25). John Fremont
and Kit Carson seized the land in Palo Alto during the US
Mexican War (18468). Given this historical context, Hasss reso-
lute naming of what he sees can seem a sinister act of ownership.
But when this adumbration of the landscape is performed near the
close of the poem: sedge, flag, owls clover, / rotting wharves
situated near a tank which lugs silver / bomb-shaped napalm tins
(p. 27), the impression and tone are distinctly different. Hass makes
a link here with the untamed beauty of the marshes and the traffic
of naplam to another, if remote, conflict in Vietnam. His sympathy
with Richardson is emphasised at the poems close:
Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description.
Again, almost with yearning
I see the malice of her ancient eyes (p. 27)
Here Hass criticises himself for what Ralph Waldo Emerson

termed the tyranny of the eye and what the poem refers to as
the lobotomy of description. The lure of taxonomy and the
dissection of the landscape with a naturalists eye find a shift in
relations in Hasss second volume Praise (1979).18
Edward Casey stresses that Places are not so much the direct
objects of sight or thought or recollection as what we feel with
and around, under and above, before and behind.19 While
Hasss Meditation at Lagunitas is set in Marin County, the
landscape of the poem forms the basis for an enquiry into the
mechanics of language. Whereas Field Guide displays nostalgia
for a naive relationship between language and the world (an
Edenic state of taxonomy), Meditation at Lagunitas intently
assesses the role of language as a transparent vehicle of
representation. Hass com-ments that his poem was read as a
criticism of poststructuralism, in particular Derridean diffrance:
There was a time when people took my work to be dumber

than it was . . . Readings of Praise? A lot of people were ter-
rified about poststructuralism and seized on Meditation at

Lagunitas as an antistructuralist Whitmanian affirmation.
They took me to be reopening the mindless door into the
American sublime.20
The poem begins with an evocation of absence, pointing us towards

the notion that All the new thinking is about loss (p. 4). The
speaker takes elements from his environment as illustrations of this
idea. The woodpecker is by his presence, / some tragic falling off
from a first world of undivided light (p. 4). Here ref-erences to an
Edenic landscape where words are wedded to the things they
signify create an impression of a lost transcendent language.
However, Hass plays with these ideas by humorously suggesting
that since there is no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry
corresponds to / a word is elegy to what it signifies (p. 4).
Meditation at Lagunitas asks that if language is only a system of
pointing, gesturing to absence, then what becomes of concepts such
as justice, love and empathy? The speaker reflects that After a
while I understood that talking this way, everything dissolves:
justice, / pine, hair, woman, You, and I (p. 4). Far from inhibiting a
narrative, these words create their own associations and patterns of
reminiscences. The poem not only inscribes a series of losses, but
transforms abstract thought into physical-ity and eroticism. Hasss
speaker recalls a lover, which leads to a recalling of desire, a thirst
for salt, for my childhood river (p. 4). His use of personal narrative
is juxtaposed with more theoreti-cal pronouncements such as:
Longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances (pp.
45). The meditation on language theory, placed into the context of
an absent lover, devolves into a consideration of erotic love. These
final lines reinforce a linkage between the erotic and material
world, pointing to moments when the body is as numinous / as
words (p. 5). The poems close attempts to fuse the natural world
with language as the speaker reflects upon: Such tenderness, those
afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry,
blackberry (p. 5). The enforced repetition of blackberry
emphasises a delicious delight in the physicality of the word. This
appreciation for the physical world is echoed in Hasss recent
poetry where he claims Its not / Just the
violence, its a taste for power / That amounts to contempt for

the body.21
Anne Szumigalski was known during her lifetime as a
Canadian poet but was born in London before emigrating in
1951, and lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from 1956 until
her death. For a few years before leaving for Canada she lived in
North Wales. These are not incidental facts since the terrain of
her poetry is filled with what may be an unfamiliar landscape. A
perception of strangeness or making the familiar and
commonplace somewhat uncanny is not merely the experience
of a different physical landscape, although Szumigalski has a
keen botanists eye. In an interview Szumigalski stated that the
prairie landscape is key not only to the content of her poems, but
more importantly as an enabling psychological space:
Ive lived in a lot of places and a lot of poems are about these
places. But on the other hand the whole of my work is so
much influenced by the prairie that even these would not exist
. . . Somehow the prairies have given me a sort of licence its
sort of . . . as though it were in fact a licence, a piece of paper
on which is written Think as wide as you want to, infinite as
the space up and down. Jump into it. Dont confine yourself.
And I know thats what I felt on the prairie, and I know that
22
its the foundation of all my poetry.
In the narratives of Szumigalskis poetry there is sometimes a

degree of slippage as the story suddenly moves to unexpected
sur-realism. Take for example the elegy A Celebration, where
the focus on the grandmothers calcified knuckles becomes a
fantastical site of regeneration:
by September they poked out at the

surface a wide circle of little chalky stubs
* **
when All Souls came we lighted
23
eighty of them for holy candles.
The poem ends with the hope that next year they may flower with
24
rockroses / or stiff honeycomb corals. This attraction to meta-
morphosis is what draws the poet to reconsider The Mabinogion in
her erotic treatment of Pryderi in Hanner Hwch Hanner Hob
The Flitch.25 There is a comedy in the protagonists wooing of
the pig through Pryderis tale, and also something
disconcertingly atavistic at its close: he takes out his sharp pig
little knife / and sticks her one / shes gone in a minute / with one
happy sigh.26 Szumigalski judges this eroticism and suggestion
of violation well, allowing us to reconsider the narrative of the
trickster as a method of dangerous seduction.
Szumigalskis poems read as a desire to decipher marks in the
world and translate them into significant meanings or linguistic
signs. The most obvious clue to this impulse is given in the title
of her third volume The Doctrine of Signatures (1983). Dating
from the Renaissance, the concept of signature proposes that a
herbal-ists use of various plants was dictated by their form. For
example, lungwort, with its speckled leaves resembling the
lungs, was used for bronchial illness. This impulse towards
investing the world with decipherable meanings surfaces in The
Musicologist. In this poem a man, d, obsessively records and
archives the sounds of daily life in an attempt to find some
underlying structure or univer-sal code to be unscrambled:
d shows
her the place in the notebook where hes written down
the melody all the sounds that ever were are stored in
the void around us he claims the basis of some sort of
symphony she asks he snorts with laughter at her
simplistic approach.27
Szumigalski exhibits scepticism towards a doctrine of universality. It is
not until I2 = -1 from the volume, Rapture of the Deep (1991), that
the poet addresses this ambition for a transcendent meaning directly.
One cannot but read this poem as an investigation of logos, the divine
order of language. Like Hasss Meditation at Lagunitas, the poem
reveals a loss or mourning for the transcendent language where words
are linked to the objects that they signified:
But its true isnt it, that before something has become a
whole we may not refer to it as divided? The trick of the
word, the sag of the language, may mean it has always
been whole, even before the two halves were joined.
Apartness. Agglutination.28
What possible response can the poet grant in the face of such appar-
ent apartness between word and object? Szumigalskis answer is
simple: Invent me a set of pure symbols. Write me a letter in
29
unmistakable signs. Although this proposition is an untenable
one, the reader cannot help but be momentarily seduced by the
2
poems demand to create a vocabulary of her own. I = -I instructs
us in the creation of an imaginable compositional space: Now give
30
me an imaginary number; speak me an imagined word. In section
two of the long sequence poem Heroines, we are given a
botanists description of an elderly Prairie womans body. The
descriptions echo mythic transformations: her mouth becomes a
repository for herbal medicine planted with rue and artemesia, her
shoulders are shrubby branches and her breasts hang like
chokecherries.31 The grandmothers body becomes an erotic and
sexualised land-scape of transformation since around your cunt
grow stiff prairie plants / whose withies are tough / whose leaves
32
are aromatic. Szumigalski adds to this sexualised landscape of
the womans body a menstrual cycle in flowers: they flower
orange red yellow as locoweed / as buffalobean. 33 The prairie
plays an integral role in establishing psychological space to enable
the complex interplay of ideas in Szumigalskis work. The prairie
as a space of permis-sion in Szumigalskis poetry enables a
complex interplay of gnostic meditations, family vignettes, gender
relations, scientific theorems and myths.
THE SPATIAL TURN
Lefebvres The Production of Space furthers an understanding of

environment in spatial terms. Lefebvre is keen to bridge the gap
between theory and practice as well as creating connections
between mental and social space. Lefebvre states that: Not so
many years ago, the word space had a strictly geometrical meaning:
34
the idea it evoked, was simply that of an empty area. Instead, he
wishes to illustrate how (Social) space is a social product
(p. 26):
Social space will be revealed in its particularity to the

extent that it ceases to be indistinguishable from mental
space (as defined by the philosophers and the
mathematicians) on the one hand, and physical space (as
defined by practico-sensory activity and the perception of
nature) on the other. What I shall be seeking to
demonstrate is that such a social space is constituted neither
by a collection of things or an aggregate of (sensory) data,
nor by a void packed like a parcel with various contents,
and that it is irreducible to a form imposed upon
phenomena, upon things, upon physical materiality. (p. 27)
Space, according to Lefebvre, is far from being a neutral

container where events happen, but is always produced by
social processes. His work claims a political practice for space,
since it is always subject to battles for control. Moreover, he
adds that one should not view space as a container of a virtually
neutral kind, designed simply to receive whatever is poured into
it (p. 94). At its most elemental, space is created by humans,
which are in turn affected by the spaces that they create.
The English translation of The Production of Space in 1991
disseminated Lefebvres ideas to a broader audience. Critic Ian
Davidson comments upon the spatial turn around this time in the
work of other writers on postmodernism such as spacetime
compression in David Harveys The Postmodern Condition and cog-
nitive mapping in Frederic Jamesons Postmodernism, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism.35 Davidson proposes that the fascination
with spatial relationships, in both the arts and social sciences, includes
the increased visibility of information and communication
technologies that support processes of globalization, rapid move-ments
of international capital, and an increasingly mobile global population
(pp. 945). As a consequence, Davidson adds that there has been an
increased anxiety about ideas of identity in the
wake of changes in relationships between place, language, and

nationality, and an increased focus on the politics of gender and
sexuality in relation to the place of the body (p. 95). It is with
these issues in mind that we turn to the representation of the city
and its interaction with its inhabitants in poems by Edwin
Morgan, Kathleen Jamie and Paula Meehan.
SPACE, THE CITY AND THE POEM: EDWIN MORGAN,

KATHLEEN JAMIE AND PAULA MEEHAN
Edwin Morgans sequence of ten Petrarchan sonnets, entitled

Glasgow Sonnets, was published in 1972. As one of Morgans
most urban works, the sequence chronicles the consequences of
mod-ernisation in the city, the effects of planning upon social
processes as well as the decimation of large-scale heavy
industries. In an essay The Poet and the City the poet traces
writers often ambivalent relationships to the cityscape:
The city is just as capable of stirring a writers creative

imagination as the world of nature is, and this is true
whether the relations are positive or negative. It may well
be that the straightforward celebration of a city . . . will not
so easily achieve lift off in a doubtful and self critical age
like ours, but the complexities of reactions to cities,
especially in the last two centuries have initiated what is
virtually a new kind of urban writing, in heightened prose
as well as verse.36
Morgan draws attention to the work of nineteenth and early

twentieth-century writers responses to increased pressures of
modernisation upon the city. He cites Charles Dickenss London,
Charles Baudelaire and Victor Hugos Paris, Fyodor
Dostoevskys St Petersburg, as well as the futurist cities in the
poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Tommasso Marinettis prose
poems and Thea von Harbous Metropolis (1926).
Morgans choice of the sonnet form creates a useful frisson
with his subject matter as tradition jostles with urban decay.
The sequence includes gobbets of vernacular and references to

political unrest, and chronicles the impact of poor design on com-
munities. The opening sonnet maps out the state of condemned
tenement buildings: Four storeys have no windows left to smash
and an interior where Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall. 37
These, Morgan stresses, are inhabited buildings peopled by a
mother and daughter and a man who lies late since he has lost his
job (p. 78). Glasgow Sonnets is a polyphonic text in that it is
multi-voiced, sampling speech and dialect. In the third sonnet we
encounter a landlord who is prepared to illegally rent a hoose (p.
79) for 800. Morgan infuses the poem with Scots dialect, par-
ticularly in dialogue with the inhabitants whose spaces he depicts.
Empathetically, the poet urges in the second sonnet: Dont shine a
torch on the ragwomans dram? / Coats keep the evil cold out less
and less as well as sadly acknowledging that The same weans
never make the grade (p. 78).
The urban spaces depicted in Glasgow Sonnets read as a complex
interplay between history and the present. Morgan readily evokes
literary history in his depiction of the streets, and makes compari-sons
between Hugh MacDiarmids Glasgow 1960 written in 1935 and
seventies Glasgow. This extends the implications of economic
depression, and the poet in sonnet four questions the agency of his own
work. Using mock political rhetoric and aphorisms, and paraphrasing
The Communist Manifesto, Morgans speaker taunts the city, its
districts and himself:
So you have nothing to lose but your chains,

dear Seventies. Dalmarnock, Maryhill,
Blackhill and Govan, better sticks and stanes
should break your banes, for poets words are
ill to hurt ye. (p. 79)
The sequence questions the developers attempts at regeneration

and how a threatening exchange has occurred between labour and
leisure. In the background to Glasgow Sonnets is the Clyde
shipbuilders strike of 1972, and the speaker poses that We have
preferred / silent slipways to the riveters wit (p. 79). In shaping
the city, Morgan has little time for the gentrification he associates
with Environmentalists, ecologists / and conservationists, who

are described as fine no doubt. / Pedestrianization will come out
/ fighting (p. 80). He also laments the nondescript homogenisa-
tion of suburban areas which, treated by the sandblasters
grout, create pink piebald facades that pout at Mock-
Venetianists (p. 80). Space here becomes a simulation of
building styles, design and textures that fabricate a past with no
historical authenticity.
Midway in the sequence Morgan alerts us that the heavy indus-
try has been supplanted by another, if remote, powerhouse. The
amorphous but economically powerful space of the North Sea oil
strike, while tilting east Scotland up, leaves the great sick Clyde
shivering in its bed (p. 80). In building roads around the city, the
constructors give Glasgows inhabitants a raw urban beauty:
flyovers breed loops of light in curves (p. 81). Yet, in the final
sonnet this position of oversight upon the city space is associated
with confinement, atrophy and immobility. In a block of flats built
to replace the tenement building we witness a schoolboy reading
from Shakespeares King Lear: at the thirtieth floor windows at
Red Road / he can see choughs and samphires, dreadful trade (p.
82). Morgan evokes the samphire gatherers dangerous work to
evoke the modern constricted space, which becomes an incarcera-
tion of gentle load of souls in clouds and the flats themselves are
described as intimidating monoliths (p. 82). For Morgan these
vertical sites offer no immediate social space and only that of
stalled lifts generating high-rise blues; this perched immobility
and restriction generates stalled lives which never budge (p.82).
In this final image, Morgans sequence reiterates Lefebvres belief
that space is a contested site of power relations. The philosopher
proposes:
(Social) space is a (social) product . . . the space thus pro-

duced also serves as a tool of thought and of action . . . in
addition to being a means of production it is also a means
of control, and hence of domination, of power. 38
As suggested by Davidson, the spatial turn during the latter part

of the twentieth century is often accompanied by an increased
anxiety regarding identity, configurations of community and

national affiliations. Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie and Irish poet
Paula Meehan consider the relationship between civic and national
pride and space. For Jamie the narrative is occasioned in Mr and
Mrs Scotland are dead by a visit to the detritus of the landfill site. 39
Meehan, by contrast, in Six Sycamores considers the nar-rative
40
space created within St Stephens Green, Dublin. Objects
invariably litter the landscape of Mr and Mrs Scotland are dead.
Old-fashioned ladies bags with open mouth spew postcards (p.
9), and the voices from these missives inhabit the poem. Partly
elegiac, and partly irreverent, Jamie embeds the words as litter in
the environment of her poem. Death becomes a hand dealt fair but
cool and showery amid the lovely scenery (p. 9). Slowly we piece
together that these are the discarded items of the dead. Jamie asks
that we re-assemble the stories of lives in the civic dump. The title
suggests that we can take Mr and Mrs Scotland as an archetype of
an era, and the poem displays nostalgia for a time when com-munal
and local knowledge was commonplace. For example, Mr
Scotlands John Bull Puncture Repair Kit becomes emblematic of
better days when:
he knew intimately
the thin roads of his country, hedgerows hanged
with small black brambles hearts. (p. 9)
The deciphering of these objects and the lives linked to them results
in an indignant questioning: Couldnt he have burned them?
Having found the stamping of SCOTLAND, SCOTLAND on the
husbands joiners tools, the questioning becomes emphatic: Do
we take them? Before the Bulldozer comes. Jamie playfully asks,
should we save these old-fashioned views addressed / after all to
Mr and Mrs Scotland? (p. 9). These lines can be read as gesturing
to the postcard scenes of small Scots towns / in 1960: Peebles,
Largs, the rock-gardens / of Carnoustie (p. 9). But equally these
views can be interpreted as value systems that may now seem
irrelevant to a conception of nationhood. In a final act of imagined
appropriation the speaker incorporates these objects into her own
domestic space, leaving us in a quandary about whether
such an act betrays nostalgia. The closing brutal image is of the

speakers own effects being cleared by a person who enters /
our silent house performing this perfunctory rite (p. 9).
Jamies poem pinpoints an anxiety of relationship: how objects
frame our environment and remain as an elegy or fractured
narrative on our death.
Meehans poem sequence situates us in the park at the centre of
Dublin: St Stephens Green. Six Sycamores was commissioned by
the Office of Public Works in 2000 on the occasion of a new link
between their offices at 512 St Stephens Green, and was accom-
panied by a wall sculpture by Marie Foley. This immediate public
occasion for Meehans poetry places it in dialogue with civic space.
A note at the opening of the poem informs us that: The original
leaseholders around St Stephens Green had to plant six sycamores
and tend them for three years (p. 28). The six sycamores serve as a
framing of the space of the Green and bear witness to major histori-
cal acts as well as acts of love, confession and dispute in the poem.
Broken into six small subtitled lyrics, Six Sycamores depicts dif-
ferent modes of relation within this space, and framing these indi-
vidual narratives are six loosely constructed sonnets. Juxtaposed,
these different formal strategies create different perspectives and
voices. The opening sonnet, The Sycamores Contract with the
Citizens, is framed as a public document. The sycamore agrees to
look up in autumn and to release seeds helicoptering lazily
down / to crashland on paths or on pads of weeds / when you were
a child (p. 28), The sonnet is immediately followed by a lyric with
a time-monitored heading, 09.20 First Sycamore, which details a
school-girl late for school, smoking a cigarette, listening to Bob
Dylan on her Walkman. These shorter lyrics delineate the fleeting
instances of encounter, mobility and exchange in the city park.
04.26 Second Sycamore chronicles a drunken lovers argument;
12.53 Third Sycamore records a broken man asking for change;
14.48 Fourth Sycamore grants us a perspective upon a womans
anxiety over the birth of her first child; 06.17 Fifth Sycamore
records a youths ambition to win the Lotto and leave his McBoss
with his McJob (p. 32); and the final 19.38 Sixth Sycamore
recalls a mans admis-sion that he hid behind the tree on his first
date waiting for her to arrive.
By contrast, the sonnets document the less ephemeral elements

of city life and make an appeal to history, nature and time. The
second sonnet, Number Fifty-One, envisages the dissolution of
the solid world as building components return to nature, the red
bricks to clay pit, granite returns to the mountains above
Ballyknockan, shutters ache and the iron railings guard the
memory of fire (p. 29). This return of objects to their constitu-ent
elements is counterbalanced by the fourth sonnets focus on the
craftsmen and their work with chisel and clamp, diestock and
drill / edgetools and files (p. 31). Meehan reminds us that the
Greens Georgian design is the result of intensive labour. The world
of work creates a civic space procured by the makers and minders
of our material world (p. 31). In the fifth sonnet Meehan sketches
for us how the park became a brief defence for the insurgents of the
Easter Rising in 1916; and incidental details of the battle in the
park are highlighted in a citation from the Park Superintendents
report on the damage: 6 of our waterfowl were killed or shot, 7 of
the garden seats broken and about 300 shrubs destroyed (p. 32).
The view from a window overlooking the park prompts a scene
from the past where buildings made mirror to smoke and fire / a
Republics destiny in a Countess stride (p. 32). The revolutionary
nationalist Countess Constance Markieviczs bust is now displayed
on the south side of the central garden. Importantly, Meehan
suggests that the civic spaces relationship with a national discourse
is not a sacrosanct space. Indeed, the smaller lyrics of dailiness,
desiring and loss which accompany the sonnets reinscribe the sense
that living public spaces are consti-tuted by ephemeral narratives
and not only the dictates of civic pride.
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: THE POET IN THE CITY IAIN

SINCLAIR
Iain Sinclairs writing is often characterised as performing a

form of literary psychogeography. Guy Debord in his
Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (1955) defined
psychogeography as a practice that:
sets for itself the study of the precise laws and specific
effects of the geographical environment, whether
consciously organ-ized or not, on the emotions and
behaviour of individuals. The charmingly vague adjective
psychogeographical can be applied to the findings arrived
at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human
feelings, and more generally to any situation or conduct
that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery. 41
Psychogeography could be thought as an overlap where psychology

and geography meet in assessing the behavioural impact of urban
space. In Debords original hypothesis, psychogeography proposes
a new way of discovering the cityscape by relying upon tactics of
errancy, as opposed to following conventional maps. In this way,
the pedestrian travels outside of established and predictable paths to
find a new understanding of the city that is not defined by the citys
architectural forms. An important feature within Debords
discussion of psychogeography is the practice of drive or drifting,
which resembles a passage through varied ambiances. He proposes
that drives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness
of psychogeographical effects, which are thus quite different from
42
the classic notions of journey or stroll. It is a practice in which:
One or more persons during a certain period drop their rela-

tions, their work and leisure activities, and all their other
usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves
be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters
they find there.43
Sinclairs poetry Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979),

novels such as Downriver (1994) as well and the non-fiction
London Orbital (2002) (which explores the M25 encircling
London) engage with psychogeographys ways of discovering
the cityscape. Moreover, his poetry is alert to the behavioural
impression that the city makes upon its inhabitants.
The opening of Sinclairs poem hence like foxes places its
reader in unfamiliar terrain, and conventional methods of orienta-
44
tion vanish. The titles citation from Lears entreaty to Cordelia
near the end of King Lear: He that parts us shall bring a brand
from heaven / And fire us hence as foxes (5.3), gives us an
intense sense of affiliation as well as a threat of a brutal
separation. Sinclair continues by highlighting the impression of
imitation and role play. Drawing our attention to the word heat,
he suggests that we link it with simple terms such as Big or
White to be imper-sonated by Lee Marvin. Both White Heat
and Big Heat are films from the film noir era, the former starring
James Cagney and the latter Marvin, whom the speaker
considers to be the lesser actor, providing a mere simulation of
Cagneys malevolent presence. These impressions prepare us for
violent action and encounters with the law.
The poem negotiates the psychology of mass rioting in the city
space and the spatial environment is perceived as a stream of
associative impressions that intersect with one another. As Robert
Hampson states, Sinclairs approach to the city interrogates its maps
through purposeful drifting in what he terms compulsive
associationism.45 This impulse in Sinclairs poetry is described by
Jenny Bavidge as encouraging a way of reading that is not con-cerned
with excavating the city, with looking beyond surface detail to find a
London sensibility . . . but which produces a constant stream of
association on the horizontal plane of the text itself. 46 hence like
foxes challenges any claim to authentic representa-tion. The poems
law enforcers are reminiscent of 1980s television police dramas with
Rover cars to haul em off (p. 97). Linking the enforcers with
fascism, they are described as fans of the simplest situation (p. 97).
Running with the rioting crowd, the speaker hal-lucinates a dazzling
blonde that then leads to an eroticisation of violence as men
sublimate erections into truncheons (p. 97). In scraps & green heaps
a walk past a scrapyard ends in the defamil-iarising image of
redevelopment in Canary Wharf as a whole tray of bright cutlery /
exploiting opportunity (p. 112). Sinclair sets up a formidable
disjunction between locality and the architecture of economic power.
Performing psychogeographically, Sinclairs writing displays a
movement between localised sites and specific spaces as well as a
constant revisiting and re-experiencing of spaces.
TRAVELOGUE FROM THE REGIONAL TO THE GLOBAL:

ROBERT MINHINNICK AND LORNA GOODISON
Travel and mobility are important features in contemporary poets

negotiation of space as well as their representation of the global and
the local. In Return of the Natives from Robert Minhinnicks
latest volume King Driftwood (2008), the speaker suggests wryly
that could be Im / back could be supplementary information /
47
exists could be I never / left. Minhinnicks poetry is frequently
cited as incorporating elements of travel writing as his poems often
seek linkages between his native Wales and a global community.
This claim is supplemented by his collections of prose essays that
include meditations on travel, ecology, war and politics: Watching
the Fire Eater (1992), Badlands (1996) and the more recent To
Babel and Back (2005). Minhinnick states in an early essay that
Living without nature is our last art, and we are bringing it to a
48
state of perfection. Of his own seaside resort town, Porthcawl in
South Wales, he remarks on the problems of consumption that
tourism brings: Our town would die without tourists. And tourists
are killing our town.49 Ian Gregson discerns not only the impact of
the travelogue on the poets work, but also how travel impacts upon
the texture of Minhinnicks poetry. Gregson claims that the poet has
invented a kind of travel poem which is distinctively his own and
even more importantly states his environmental anxieties have
contributed to this because they lead to a sense of how local
problems are also global problems that, environmentally, there is
50
one, shared planet which is being endangered everywhere.
Minhinnick admits that North American landscapes made me want
to write longer poems, but I also wished to write in a more
variegated way.51
In An Isotope, Dreaming the poet combines the language of
science with meditations on Porthcawl, as well as narratives
highlighting the human impact of the war in Iraq. Minhinnick has
already addressed some of his experiences of travelling to Baghdad
following the first Iraq war, researching the use of depleted uranium
in American weapons.52 Nuclear waste and its radioactiv-ity
become both a benign and malign vehicle in the poem to illus-trate
the dissemination of ideas, birth of languages, acts of mobility
and spirituality, as well as death and destruction. Beginning in

South Wales, the speaker muses on redemption, which to him
comes in the form of a reactor:
Resurrection
is in the reactor.
Its the atom thats
reborn The soul perishes
but matter can never be destroyed. (p. 9)
The possible resurrection offered by a nuclear reactor is not only

the provision of energy, but the deadly half-life of a decaying
isotope. The speaker admits in a spiritual frenzy: we are all /
fuel rods spent, eternal and the half-life of angels / that the
world called waste (p. 10). Writing in the early twentieth
century Maria Rainer Rilkes poetry was accompanied by angels,
whereas it is the isotope, dreaming that inhabits Minhinnicks
twenty-first century. The isotope moves beyond the iron womb
of Sellafield, the cubist monument of Trawsfynydd and the
accelerator tunnel at Berkeley (p. 9), making three journeys.
The first is to an undisclosed nameless place where the geiger
talk / like a black habanero rattling with seeds (p. 11). Yet even
here the isotope is associated with birth and creation: I am the
Isotope dreaming / Where they bury me an idea starts to grow
(p. 10). The second journey is to Iraqs Basra and the ancient
city states of Nineveh and Babylon, while the third journey visits
Belarus and the legacy of Chernobyl.
An Isotope, Dreaming enacts a present nightmare while pro-
viding a foretelling of the future. The recuperation of the isotope
to indicate a spiritual awakening thwarts our expectations of
radio-activity as the speaker pleads:
Listen to this and

imagine inside
the reactor the
soft mutation of a
soul (p. 10)
Minhinnicks travelogue also looks for connections, for senses of

connectivity and global links between communities. The form of
the poem, with its drafted-in voices as well as stammers, visual per-
formances on the page, repetitive clauses and pared-down lyrics,
enacts an open field poetics. First coined by the American poet
Charles Olson in his manifesto Projective Verse, composition by
field combines lyrics, speeches of different kinds, conversation,
53
images and a collage of information. This impression of a poetry
written without predetermination enables the poet to enact multi-ple
conversations throughout the journeys. In the second journey we
listen to a doctor in Iraqs damning indictment of the USAs
involvement in the war: And no I dont feel sorry for your boys. /
Let them anoint their blisters / with Exxons frankincense. He adds
We all sign up for something (p. 14). Minhinnicks vast poem
returns us to the point of initial departure, but changed, with the
imminent mutation threatened in the gamma / ghosting towards /
the cells gateway (p. 17). This interrelationship between the local
and the global is made evident in another poem from the volume,
The Fairground Scholar, where one of the fairs main attractions
is our Kingdom of Evils Saddam Hussein (p. 102). From the axis
of evil to a small resort in South Wales, Minhinnicks work exhibits
an awareness of global interconnections.
Jamaican poet Laura Goodisons Run Greyhound from
Travelling Mercies (2001) presents the more familiar expectations
54
of a travelogue. For Goodison the mythic status of the Greyhound
bus enables a ludic narrative as well as vaudeville performances
from her fellow travellers. Presented in unrhymed couplets, the
movement of the poem enables the sense of an ongoing mobility.
Goodison immediately interrogates elements of American cultural
mythmaking. The legacy of the Beatniks becomes a humorous
anecdote of an overheard conversation at the Ann Arbor station. A
young woman admits that she set out after Jack Kerouac to write a
road novel but her car broke down (p. 20). Moreover, she panics
once she learns that the man she is speaking to, who has travelled
the vineyards of California and the peach groves of Georgia (p.
20), has just been released from prison. Social anxiety ensues, as
this most iconic of American institutions, representing mobility and
freedom, becomes a convict bus (p. 21) for men released from
prison that morning. The characters include an impatient man in a

bandana, a long-haired rocker, the twin of a country and western
singer, two silent black men and a Native American man.
Humorously, through this anxious lens, the passengers begin to
morph into threatening historical public figures and artists. A man
with an eye patch looks like Henry Morgan, retired wicked bucca-
neer and born-again governor (p. 21), whereas the driver becomes
like J. Edgar Hoover and the others like Tippu Tip / Augusto
Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, mile Zola (p. 22). Goodison
juxtaposes internal clanging rhymes within the lines to create a
sense of discord and heightened awareness. Travelling to Detroit
becomes a nightmarish scenario, and Goodison dramatises wryly
the fear of others joining the Greyhound bus: They have mad dogs
and fouling pieces, sheep cloning pox blankets, / anthrax warfare,
agent orange blunderbusses (p. 22). From Vietnam war-fares
agent orange to the infection and dissemination of Native
Americans through smallpox, each new passenger is a threat. But
Goodison recognises that there is humour also in the situation as the
speaker urges the Greyhound to Run, hound of the Pharaohs, run
like the twinned Blue Nile (p. 22). Goodisons poem creates a
travelogue of significant cultural dislocation, but also gen-erates
self-deprecating comedy. Jahan Ramazani proposes that Goodisons
lengthy periods away from Jamaica teaching at institu-tions around
the world enables a form of poetic transnationalism in her
poetry.55 Read in this light, we might concur with Ramazani that
Goodisons depiction of that most American of cultural repre-
sentations, the Greyhound bus, strives to counter the idea of a her-
metically sealed national or civilizational bloc, but of intercultural
worlds that ceaselessly overlap, intersect, and converge. 56
ECOPOETICS AND THE FUTURE
Considering poetry as a form of travelogue allows us to examine the

relationship between the local and the global, as well as the poets
position as an observer of other cultures. Recent developments in
ecocriticism further frame the relationship between environ-ment and
poetry. Ecocritic Buell suggests that the idea of a poet
of nature now has a suspiciously retro, neo-Victorian ring, even

when the argument is recast to emphasize not just love of nature but
57
proto-ecological knowledge and environmentalist commit-ment.
Buell proposes that this is a problem which has troubled
ecocriticism from its inception: the suspicion that it might not boil
down to much more than old-fashioned enthusiasms dressed up in
58
new clothes. Jonathan Skinners magazine ecopoetics attempts to
address these problems. Skinner asks: I wonder at the value of the
59
term itself nature writing, doesnt all writing have nature in it?
He recognises that obviously there is a value and a need for
writing focused specifically on the so-called natural world (p.
127). Importantly, he notes the difference between nature writing
and ecopoetry: the former for Skinner indicates empathy for the
envi-ronment, while the latter suggests how economic forces create
and impact on the environment. He admits that he is suspicious of
the term ecopoetry since it duplicates the eco already built into
the ecology especially if its premise is based on turning us away
from the tasks of poetry, to more important or urgent concerns (p.
127). Instead he proposes a conceptualisation of ecopoetics as a
plurality of different artistic creations. Ecopoetics becomes in this
way a site for poetic attention and exchange, where many different
kinds of making (not just poetry or even just writing and certainly
not just ecopoetry) can come to be informed (p. 128).
Usefully, Skinner differentiates between four approaches to the
umbrella term ecopoetics. The first is topological, referring
beyond the poem to a specific space or natural topos (p. 128).
Secondly, he identifies a tropological poetics, which indicates a
hybrid fertilisation of the language of environmental sciences
performing as exercises in analogy, casting poems as somehow
functioning like ecosystems or complex systems (p. 128). Next is
an entropological poetics that is a practice engaged at the level of
materials and process, where entropy, transformation and decay are
part of the creative work (p. 128). Finally, ecopoetics may also
practise in an ethnological way. Ethnological poetics neces-sitates
looking beyond Western languages and cultures to provide an
understanding of environment. As Skinner states: whether nature
contains the human or humanity contains nature is impos-sible to
conclude. What we do know is that humans have been
here a long time (p. 129). Ethnological approaches look beyond

a Western construction of landscape and involve an act of
transla-tion (p. 129). Skinners subheadings are not in
themselves dis-crete categories. It is, for example, possible for a
poet to perform both topologically and tropologically in the
same poem. John Kinsella and Juliana Spahrs poetry offers
illustrative approaches to an understanding of how ecopoetics
may function in recent poetry.
APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPES: JOHN KINSELLA
John Kinsellas poetry often depicts and examines the landscape in

his native Western Australia. Spending time between Australia and
Cambridge, he suggests that his writing encompasses both a
regional and international perspective. Indeed, coining the term
international regionalism, he believes is respecting the integrity
of place, of a region, and at the same time opening avenues for
60
com-munication and discourse. He proposes that regional
identity is enhanced and best preserved by being part of the global
commu-nity. Mutual understanding, mutual respect, and a
willingness to tolerate difference best comes out of understanding
what it is that makes and/or informs difference. 61 His poetry is also
associated with a form of radical, or neo, or post, or (even)
62
poi-soned pastoral. Traditionally, pastoral poetry presents a
roman-ticised, idealised or nostalgic impression of countryside
spaces, often targeted at an urban audience. Kinsella suggests that
his radical pastoral arises from the bleak picture I paint of
human destruction of landscapes and the external dismantling of
indig-enous cultures. Be they the Australian Aboriginal peoples or
the early fenlanders colonised by drainage engineers and
63
farmers. Kinsellas revisioning of the pastoral challenges
established criteria of aesthetic beauty in poetry: his poems may
contain The beauty horror of a polluted sky emanating a sickly red
sunset, the exqui-site crystalline formations resulting from clearing
and degrada-tion of land in the Western Australian wheatbelt. 64
This radical pastoral embraces ideas of the mutated as a vehicle for
change and activism:
I am trying to create a synthesis between the aesthetics of

creating the poem and its end result, which I always hope
is deconstructive, and ultimately impermanent, and
certainly changeable . . . and using poetry to actively stop
land-damaging (and people and animal and plant-
damaging) practices.65
The Ocean Forests: An Elegy and Lament was written by

Kinsella during an ice storm in Ohio as a response to the 2004
tsunami in the Indian Ocean. 66 The poem considers submarine
ecology, the causes of a tsunami as well as human interaction
with the environment. Beginning with a TV live feed, the
technological process of newsgathering and dissemination is
allied to the physical sculptures of trees in the ice storm: trees
tap inner heat / through fibre-optics (p. 104). Ocean Forests
performs tropologically, since it borrows from the language of
environmental science and develops into an exploration of form
as an organic system. The speaker examines the causes of the
tsunami scientifically as the movement of convergent plates:
an earthquake
miles below the oceans
floor, plate slipping under
plate, the massive release of
energy and surge of water
running the gradient
of landfall: forcing entry. (p. 104)
The impact of this submarine world upon land is cataclysmic.

Kinsella later draws our attention to the morphing of map con-
tours, which meld and curve, heaving re-alignment to create
the seaweeds of new oceans / new shorelines (p. 105).
Juxtaposed to scientific analysis is the perspective of ritual, myth
and spiritual belief. In these terms the tsunami is perceived as a
vengeful god seeking retribution: Calibrating prophesies / of the
living, some look for signs / of punishment (p. 104).
The poem reflects upon the ungovernable elements of envi-
ronmental processes in fire, air and water and their disruption
by climate change, and an associative patterning of reflections

creates a poetic form that is fluid and organic. The appeal to we
in we search, we reflect, we are, we were indicates the
need for communal intervention in the human catastrophe of
island wreckage (p. 105). Kinsella asserts that human
ownership of the seas ecosystems cannot be claimed, since he
evokes a pre-human history of hot coral forests, ice forests / and
memories of mimosa / from the driest parts (p. 105). Ocean
Forests presents a contracting of environmental space within a
global economy and both locals and visitors are brought
together (p. 106). As the geographical size of the earth appears
to contract, human societies have:
grown fluid in the wobbling

of the earths rotation
shortening all our days
bringing palm trees and ice forests
under the same cut-glass sky. (p. 106)
Kinsellas poem performs as both an elegy and lament,

reminding us of our place in the earths ecosystem, as well as a
tribute to the lost and those vulnerable through economic
disenfranchisement to climate change. One could claim that
Kinsellas poem, in its dis-comfort with statically observing the
human tragedies of the torn shores of an ocean / so close, so
distant (p. 107), echoes Lovelocks assertion that the earth is
not owned by humanity. Lovelock puts us in our place: We are
creatures of Darwinian evolution, a transient species with a
limited lifespan, as were all our distant numerous ancestors. 67
CONCLUSION: JULIANA SPAHRS ECOPOETICS AND

IDEAS OF CONNECTION
Global information and newsgathering systems form a key com-

ponent of Juliana Spahrs volume this connection of everyone
with lungs (2005).68 Spahr has insistently described poetry as
medium of thought and enquiry:
Poetry moves words around. It rearranges them from their

conventions. It re-sorts them. It uses more than one
language. It repeats. It pursues aconventional language and
divergent typography. It often experiments. It can be
ephemeral and occasional. It often uses pleasing patterns as
it does all this. And all that helps me think. 69
this connection of everyone with lungs consists of two extended

poems, one simply entitled Poem Written after September 11,
2001 and the second Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to
March 27, 2003. Set in long, prose-like lineation, the poems are
intimate and epistolary, addressing two beloveds. This hybrid
form of poetic prosody intersperses factual information with lyric
appeals and private meditation. Initially, one can frame Spahrs
diaristic entries as responses to 9/11, but as Nicky Marsh suggests,
the poems dramatise a desire to find the meaningful connections
that allow Spahr to understand her own place in the machinations of
international politics.70 Moreover, the poems are intent on
examining the relationship between the local and global, or what
the poet proposes as: I speak of boundaries and connections, locals
and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes (p. 20). Increasingly,
Spahrs desire to understand the interconnections between seem-
ingly disparate world events, and her own role in them, is revealed
71
as suspect in its hopelessness. This prospect is expressed in
Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003:
I speak of how the world suddenly seems as if it is a game

of some sort, a game where troops are massed on a flat map
of the world, and if one looks at the game board long
enough one can see the patterns, even as one is powerless
to prevent them. (pp. 201)
Taking Skinners understanding of ecopoetics, one could add that

this connection of everyone with lungs performs topologically,
tropologically, entropologically and ethnologically. The first Poem
Written after September 11, 2001 uses the analogy of lungs and air
as a connective, uniting humanity across the globe. Moreover, the
analogy with lungs and breath creates an ecosystem within the
poem, not only in terms of the duration of the line, but also as a
measure and unit of thought. The following section illustrates a
pattern of breath between individuals, in domestic interiors, then
countries and across continents:
There is space between the hands.
There is space between the hands and space around

the hands.
There is space around the hands and space in the room.
There is space in the room that surrounds the shapes

of everyones hands and body and feet and cells
and the beating contained within.
There is space, an uneven space, made by this pattern

of bodies.
The space goes in and out of everyones bodies.
Everyone with lungs breathes the space in and out as

everyone with lungs breathes the space between the
hands in and out
as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands

and the space around the hands in and out. (pp. 45)
This accumulative patterning of phrases and clauses, as space

around the hands becomes a space around a communal breathing, is
evident in Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27,
2003. Written initially as response to the US governments
intervention in Iraq, Spahrs poem delineates an overwhelming
pressure to give form to information regarding the war. She was
based in Hawaii at the time of writing, and the flora and fauna on
the island are depicted in the midst of thinking about war. We are
told that we reclined as we spoke and we were surrounded by
ditches, streams, and wetland areas, which serve as a habitat for
endangered waterbird species (p. 66). Spahr attempts to incorpo-

rate topical knowledge into a shape that forms connections with
individuals. Working entropologically, transformation and decay
become central to the poems form as facts, once posed, unravel
and are repelled by personal meditations. The movement of air in
the first poem is replaced by fire in the second:
When I wake up this morning the world is a series of

isolated, burning fires as it is every morning.
It burns in Israel where ten died from a bomb on a bus.
Yesterday it also burned in the Philippines where twenty-

one died from a bomb at the airport. And then it burned
some more a few hours later outside a health clinic in a
nearby city, killing one.
It burns and the pope urges everyone to fast and pray

for peace because it is Ash Wednesday. (p. 56)
This is a poets desperate attempt to understand the intercon-

nection between wars and her countrys involvement in Iraq, as
well as the religious rituals that are created to enable a decoding
of the threat to individuals. Commenting on Spahrs more recent
memoir examining climate change, The Transformation (2007),
Eric Keenaghan proposes that her poetry:
[e]xhibits a nostalgia for some acceptable way to talk about

identity and community. Spahr reveals the problem of
defin-ing who they are as ubiquitous in this age of
Homeland Security. So it was a time of troubled and
pressured pro-nouns.72
In this connection of everyone with lungs, Spahr is not only

looking for connections which bind communities together, but
also to show how the machinery of war appropriates the
environment. Her speaker demonstrates how Hawaiis status as a
military base redefines the ecology of the island:
And because the planes flew overhead when we spoke of

the cries of birds our every word was an awkward squawk
that meant also AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, UH-60
Black Hawk troop helicopter. (p. 67)
Trevor Paglen suggests that experimental geographers aim to

experiment with the production of space as: an integral part of
ones practice. If human activities are inextricably spatial then
new forms of freedom and democracy can only emerge in
dialecti-cal relation to the production of new spaces. 73 Equally,
Spahrs attempts to enable a poetry which performs an
ecopoetics that is not only topological and tropological, but
entropological and ethnological, creates new imaginative spaces
for environmental enquiry.
Ecological poetry can initially be understood as poetry that

addresses the environment (often associated with nature poetry).
An awareness of local spaces and cultures is often highlighted
in the poetry of contemporary poets committed to region and
locale.
Contemporary poets examine the relationships of the
individual to the cityscape through representations and
psychological interpretations of urban space.
Poetic travelogues offer a further perspective on identity,
com-munity and environment.
Recent developments in ecocriticism consider the intersection
of economic pressures and global concerns on the environment, a
gesture which has been framed in poetry as ecopoetics.
Recent poetry engaged in exploring ecopoetics often presents
future landscapes and spaces (frequently apocalyp-tic), and
searches for ways of making global relations and connections.
NOTES
1. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism

(London: Blackwell, 2005), p. 2.
2. Jonathan Skinner, Statement for New Nature Writing Panel at
2005 AWP (Vancouver) Ecopoetics, 4/5 (20045), 1279 (p.
127).
3. Trevor Paglen, Experimental Geography: From Cultural
Production to the Production of Space, in Nato Thompson
(ed.), Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to
Landscape, Cartography and Urbanism (New York:
Melville House, 2008), p. 29.
4. Cheryll Glotfelty, Introduction, in Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks
in Literary Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1996), pp. xiiixix.
5. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (Berkeley: Counterpoint,
1990); A Place in Space (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1995).
6. Gary Snyder cited in Buell, The Future of Environmental
Criticism, p. 13.
7. Gary Snyder, Riprap, in Postmodern American Poetry
(New York NY: Norton & Norton, 1994), p. 215.
8. Gary Snyder, The Rediscovery of Turtle Island, in A Place
in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (Berkeley:
Counterpoint Press, 1995), p. 237.
9. Gary Snyder, Axe Handles (Washington, DC: Shoemaker
and Hoard, 2005), pp. 4958. All subsequent references to
this edition are given in the text.
10. James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(Penguin: London, 2009), p. 166.
11. Gary Snyder, Unnatural Writing, in A Place in Space, p.
168. 12. Lawrence Buell, The Place of Place, in Writing for
an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in
the US and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2001), p. 60.
13. Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1985)
given in the text.
14. Geoffrey Hill, An Interview with Geoffrey Hill by John

Haffenden, Quarto, 15 (1981), 1922, p. 21.
15. Geoffrey Hill, An Interview with Geoffrey Hill by John
Haffenden, in Viewpoints (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), p. 94.
16. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), p. 93.
17. Robert Hass, Field Guide (New Haven, CT: Yale University,
1973). All subsequent references to this edition are given in
the text.
18. Robert Hass, Praise (New York: Ecco, 1979). All
19. Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed
Understanding of the Place World (Bloomington: Indiana
20. Robert Hass, cited in Thomas Gardner, Regions of
Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 166.
21. Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 19972005 (New
York: Ecco, 2007), p. 71.
22. John Livingstone Clark, Conversation with Anne Szumigalski,
Prairie Fire, 18.1 (1997), 2837 (pp. 334).
23. Anne Szumigalski, Dogstones: Selected and New Poems
(Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1986), p.
8. 24. Ibid. p. 8.
25. Anne Szumigalski, On Glassy Wings: Selected Poems
(Regina: Coteau, 1997), pp. 8990.
26. Ibid. p. 90.
27. Szumigalski, Dogstones, p. 68.
28. Anne Szumigalski, I2 = -1, in Susan McCaslin (ed.), A
Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary
Canadian Poetry (Victoria, BC: Ekstasis, 1998), p. 237.
29. Ibid. p. 237.
30. Ibid. p. 237.
31. Szumigalski, On Glassy Wings, p.
59. 32. Ibid. p. 59.
33. Ibid. p. 59.
34. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 1.
35. Ian Davidson, Picture This: Space and Time in Lisa

Robertsons Utopia, Mosaic, 40.4 (2007), 87102.
36. Edwin Morgan, The Poet and the City, Comparative Criticism,
18 (1996), 91105 (p. 92).
37. Edwin Morgan, GlasgowSonnets, in SelectedPoems(Manchester:
Carcanet, 1985), pp. 7882 (p. 78). All subsequent references to
38. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 26.
39. Kathleen Jamie, The Queen of Sheba (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1995) p. 9. All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
40. Paula Meehan, Painting Rain (Manchester: Carcanet,
2009), pp. 2833. All subsequent references to this edition
are given in the text.
41. Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban
Geography, in Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di
Mauro (eds), Critical Geographies: A Collection of
Readings (Kelowna, BC: Praxis e-Press, 2008), p. 23.
42. Guy Debord, Theory of the Drive, in Joanne Morra and
Marquard Smith (eds), Visual Culture: Spaces of Visual Culture
(London: Routledge, 2006), p.
77. 43. Ibid. p. 77.
44. Iain Sinclair, Penguin Modern Poets: Douglas Oliver, Denise
Riley, Iain Sinclair (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 97. All subse-
quent references to this edition are given in the text.
45. Robert Hampson, Spatial Stories: Conrad and Ian Sinclair,
The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, 31.1
(2006), 5271 (p. 69).
46. Jenny Bavidge, cited in Hampson Spatial Stories, p. 69.
47. Robert Minhinnick, King Driftwood (Manchester: Carcanet,

2008), p. 97. All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
48. Robert Minhinnick, Watching the Fire Eater (Bridgend: Seren,
1992), p. 21.
49. Ibid. p. 23.
50. Ian Gregson, The Baghdad Moon, the Pepsi Globe: Robert
Minhinnick, PN Review, 31.6 (2005), 53.
51. Ian Gregson, Interview with Robert Minhinnick, Planet

(2004), 49.
52. Robert Minhinnick, To Babel and Back (Bridgend: Seren,
2005).
53. See Chapter 3 for a discussion of performance and Charles
Olson.
54. Lorna Goodison, Travelling Mercies (Toronto: McClelland
& Stewart, 2001), pp. 203. All subsequent references to
55. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, American
Literary History, 18.2 (2006), 33259.
56. Ibid. p. 355.
57. Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, p. 2.
58. Ibid. p. 3.
59. Skinner, Statement for New Nature Writing Panel , p. 127
60. John Kinsella, Interview John Kinsella, The Poetry Kit.
Available online at
www.poetrykit.org/iv98/kinsella.htm. 61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. John Kinsella, Can there be a Radical Western Pastoral?,
Literary Review, 48.2 (2005), 12033 (p. 132).
65. John Kinsella, Geodysplasia: Geographical Abnormalities
of an Activist Poetics, Poetry Wales, 44.4 (2009), 30.
66. John Kinsella, The Ocean Forests: An Elegy and a Lament,
Iowa Review, 36.1 (2006), 1047. All subsequent
references to this edition are given in the text.
67. Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, p. 6.
68. Juliana Spahr, this connection of everyone with lungs
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). All
subsequent refer-ences to this edition are given in the text.
69. Juliana Spahr, in Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (eds),
American Poets in the 21st Century (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2007), p. 131.
70. Nicky Marsh, Going Glocal: The Local and the Global in
Recent Experimental Womens Poetry, Contemporary
Womens Writing, 1.1/2 (2007), 192202 (p. 199).
71. Ibid. p. 199.
72. Eric Keenaghan, Performance and Politics in Contemporary

Poetics: Three Recent Titles from Atelos Press, Post
Modern Culture, 17.3 (2007).
73. Paglen, Experimental Geography, p. 31.
chapter 5
Dialects, Idiolects and

Multilingual Poetries
GLOBAL POETRY OR, ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL
LANGUAGE
Jonathan Arac voices concern for the situating of nation in a period of

globalisation. In tandem with recent debates over ideas of post-nation
literatures, Arac identifies that the processes of globalisation are linked
to the proliferation of English as a global language:
Globalisation pluralizes: it opens up every local, national or

regional culture to others and thereby produces many
worlds. Yet these many worlds can only be known through
a single medium: just as the dollar is the medium of global
com-merce, so is English the medium of global culture,
producing one world.1
Almost 200 years after Goethe proposed the idea of Weltliteratur
(1827), or a world literature, debates proliferate on how to respond
to the impact of English upon the perception of national litera-tures.
Romana Huk notes: There are very few conversations today that
2
escape the g words global, globalization. Mostly associated with
actions in market trading, corporate finance, mass media . . .
political negotiations (p. 758), Huk questions what such proc-
esses might mean for literary studies. Distinguishing between
global and globalisation, she suggests that the former indicates an
already-existing state of things, whereas the latter suggests a process
thats been inaugurated, a condition were constructing (p. 762). The
utopian image inscribed at the heart of the propo-nents of a new global
poetics raises key problems for Huk. For her, terms such as cross-
cultural and transnational retain at least some traces of writings
sitedness and specific historied movements over borders (p. 770).
Huk is far more suspicious of terms such as Americas, world and
global since these poetics correspondingly permit no intra-national,
national or discreet group identifications or projects aside from the
largest impossible ones (p. 770). Central to Huk is what is lost in
these larger totalities; she probes What gets elided in these
constructions of negative totality . . . [i]n other words what have we
got to lose (both in the possessive and imperative sense of that
phrase)? Or perhaps what do we want to lose? (p. 770).
While this chapters focus is not upon the processes of globalisa-
tion per se, or the proposition of a world literature, it is important to
discern how contemporary poetry addresses the development of
English as a global language. Indeed, we may well ask how do
contemporary poets respond to a plurality of Englishes? In the past
it had become axiomatic to consider that processes of globalisa-tion
create a stylistic homogeneity. Jahan Ramazani, paraphrasing
Kwame Anthony Appiah, suggests that as a response to globalisa-
tion people are constantly inventing new forms of difference, new
hairstyles, new slang, even from time to time, new religion and we
might add new forms of poetry. 3 Ramazanis proposition of a
transnational poetics explores how contemporary poets have also
imaginatively transvalued and creolized these global forces to bring
into expression their specific experiences of globalized locality and
localized globality.4 Equally, Wai Chee Dimock reminds us that
English-language poetries can no longer be seen as the product of
one nation and one nation alone, analyzable within its confines. 5
In considering Anglophone poetries in tandem with the globalis-ing
tendencies of the post-war period, it is important to acknowl-edge
Sujata Bhatts ambivalence about how an oppressors tongue may
eventually shift to grandchildren learning to love that strange
language.6 Since English is a global language, we need to con-
sider how one language can reflect plurality and diversity without
reducing all identities to uniformity. Looking at specific examples
of bilingualism and multiple language use, this chapter considers
the differences between dialect, linked to a direct transcription of
regional accent and idiom, and idiolects, often equated with the
deformation of linguistic rules in an attempt to create an assertive
identity. Frequently, contemporary poets evoke in their work an
ongoing attempt at the translation between languages, which will be
illustrated through processes of translation from Chinese to English,
Welsh to English and Spanish to English. In addition, the chapter
considers how contemporary poetry documents the expe-rience and
legacies of immigration.
DIALECT AND PHONETIC POETRY: TONY HARRISON,

TOM LEONARD AND LIZ LOCHHEAD
In an early interview, Tony Harrison draws attention to his per-

ception of hierarchical forms within English literature. He
stresses that his evocation and negotiation of metrical verse were
an attempt at ownership and occupation:
Originally I was drawn to metrical verse because I wanted

to occupy literature as I said in Them and [uz]. Now that
Ive occupied it in the sense that I can do it I learned it as
skilfully as I could in order that people would have to pay
attention.7
The title of Harrisons second volume From the School of Eloquence
(1978) was borrowed from E. P. Thompsons seminal book The
Making of the English Working Class (1963). In the pivotal poem
Them and [uz], from this volume, Harrison shows how the
instruction of so-called traditional English literature allowed no space
for regional identifications. Neil Roberts suggests that the poem
creates an initial focus upon the parallels between social and literary
hierarchies in the Elizabethan period and later the imposi-tion of RP
and its stultifying association with the reading aloud of poetry. 8 The
teacher castigates Harrisons enunciation as a slur on our glorious
heritage (p. 122). The immediacy of the distinctions between classes,
our as opposed to your, mirrors the title Them and [uz].
Roberts comments on how the title underlines phonically working-
class speech patterns, since [uz] represents the word us as
spoken with a working-class Leeds accent (long vowel, voiced
consonant) as opposed to the short vowel, unvoiced con-sonant of
Received Pronunciation (p. 157). The speaker queries the
proposition of uniformed pronunciation, allying his enun-ciation
Littererchewer to John Keats and Wordsworths accented rhyming
9
of matter / water as full rhymes. The poet wages war on all
those who seek to limit English literature to the confines of a
perceived properly enunciated speech, and promises to occupy /
10
your lousy leasehold poetry.
Harrisons desire to inhabit the metrical structures of English verse
evokes a desire to affirm regional identifications and negotia-tions
against a monolothic positioning of English language. Terry Eagleton
proposes that No modern English poet has shown more finely how the
sign is a terrain of struggle where opposing accents intersect, how in a
class divided society language is cultural warfare and every nuance a
political validation.11 As a working-class scholar trained as a
classicist, Harrisons work creates a space for a variation of Englishes.
This advancement of a poetic vernacular as a democratising art is
evident in Harrisons attempt to promote poetry to a more general
audience. The poem Book Ends portrays an inchoate inability to
express grief between son and father, since education separates the
scholar me, you worn out on poor pay. 12 His celebrated long poem v.
(1985) caused controversy for a broader audience when it was
broadcast as a poem-film in 1987 on Channel 4. Written by Harrison
during the miners strike (19845) which arguably was one the most
traumatic events visited upon post-war British working-class
communities v. documents the poets visit to a Leeds graveyard to
pay his respects to his parents. The grave-yard is vandalised: graffiti on
the gravestones proclaim tribal affini-ties to football through
expletives. This long poem attempts to open a dialogue between the
poet and the disenfranchised voices of the unemployed. Harrisons
poem performs as a site of verbal interac-tion which theorist Mikhail
Bakhtin associated categorically with the novel as heteroglossia, in
comparison with the largely mono-logic or singular language of
poetry.13 The novel he suggests is a dialogic site with a diversity of
social speech types, and allows for interaction between the
multiple voices within the work. Bakhtin frequently describes
the novel as saturated, impregnated and contaminated.
Bakhtins implication of a contaminated language is evident in
the use of expletives which litter the text. The poems construc-tion
in iambic pentameter creates a space for the voice of a young
skinhead. As the epithet at the beginning of v. by Arthur Scargill
emphasises, an ideal of mastery of language dominates the opening
section: My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says
14
your life depends on your power to master words. Harrison
admits that his linguistic knowledge has made him more aware of
his working-class background: I thought that somehow language
would take me away, but on the contrary the more I became
articulate, the more I was conscious of what I owed to the goad of
15
the inarticulate. The footballing failures of Leeds United make
the vandals lose their sense of self-esteem (p. 236):
and taking a short cut home through these graves

here they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer (p. 236)
Importantly, the remnant of heavy industry casts a shadow over the

burial ground since the graveyard stands above a worked-out pit
/ Subsidence makes the obelisks all list. The rhymes that are now
found are CUNT, PISS, SHIT and (mostly) FUCK! (p. 236). The
versus or v. of the poems title informs the divisions orches-trated
in the poem, the conflicts between football clubs, educated and
uneducated, workers and jobless, racist and ethnic groups, British
working-class ambition and post-industrial unemploy-ment, poet
and graffitist. As Harrison puts it: These Vs are all the versus of
life which also include man and wife, US and THEM
/ personified in 1984 by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM
(p. 238).
When the poet questions whether the graffiti is just a cri-de-

coeur because man dies, another voice intrudes in the poem
with a vehement riposte:
So whats a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Cant you speak
the language that yer mam spoke. Think of er!
Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek?
Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur! (p. 241)
This division between voices imprints a further element of

conflict in the work. In an attempt to enable conversation, the
poet assumes the vernacular:
Listen, cunt! I said, before you start your

jeering the reason why I want this in a book
s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing!
A book, yer stupid cunt s not worth a fuck! (p. 242)
As Roberts notes there is a measured degree of discomfort once
the poet enters into the vernacular of the vandal. He contrasts the
poet who grew up poor but in a full employment economy
trying to access the world of the unemployed and alienated
youth of the early 1980s (p. 165). In his articulation of the
skinheads voice, Harrison questions the efficacy of poetry as a
political weapon: Dont talk to me of fucking representing / the
class yer were born into any more, ending with the assertion
its not poetry we need in this class war (p. 244).
Tom Leonard, well known for his poetic compositions in
Glaswegian dialect, declares in The 6 OClock News that the
newscaster has a BBC or RP accent: coz yi / widny wahnt / mi
ti talk / aboot thi / trooth wia / voice lik / wanna yoo / scruff. 16
Leonards mordant and sardonic work transcribes speech
patterns and dialect into staccatoed lines. The implication of this
poem is that other accents do not have the authority of trooth.
Leonard is, however, emphatic that his poetry does not aim to
inscribe nationalistic sentiment at the heart of poetry. On his
website he has posted a note for all GCSE students countering
the BBC Education websites pedagogical reading of his poem:
The poems take on accents has nothing to do with the writer

being Scottish as a BBC GCSE bitesize model answer on
the poem suggests, it is instead about social class. The six
oclock news is as unlikely to be read by a working-class
Liverpudlian, London, Birmingham, Swansea, Belfast,
Portsmouth, Aberdeen etc etc voice as by a Glaswegian. This
has nothing to do with any difficulty in understanding, as
audiences have no difficulty understanding lower class
accents in phone-ins, gameshows, Eastenders etc.
Why cant someone with for example a strong East London
accent read the six oclock news? The speaker of the poem
suggests the answer lies in an attitude about who and what is
considered to be authoritative, and this attitude is the hidden
news inside the six oclock news itself. Scruff means
scum or the muck gathered at the top of dirty water, and is
17
used as a term of social disdain. belt up means shut up!
Usefully, Leonard points out in an interview that he does not see

himself as a nationalist, but instead I suppose I have to use -isms
18
as a localist and an internationalist. Leonards move-ment
away from standardised dictionary spelling marks an attempt to
politicise his poetry. He requires a different form of literacy from
his reader, which is far more dependent on the simultaneous
translations and modification of sound. As he writes in Six Glasgow
Poems, Good Style: helluva hard tay read theez init while
declar-ing humorously a poetic power: ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz
19
so ah um. Within these six poems we read a plurality of voices,
from the grumpy poet to the voice counselling his son in The
Miracle of the Burd and the Fishes: thirz a loat merr fish in thi
sea, to the raucous voices of women in A Scream: o yi shooda
20
seeniz face / hi didny no wherrty look. Leonards poems take
play with audience challenging our expectations by stressing the
phonetic valences of linguistic use. Take for example the burd,
which in colloquial use points to female or lover, and the scream,
not as angst or fear, but as having a laugh. Leonard in a review
declares that it is important to acknowledge:
how a language is seen to have status according to whether it is

used by the governing or the governed; whether professional
linguists have published academic works on it; whether it can be
shown to have a grammar, a distinctive sound-pattern, a full
range of reference; whether agreed value has been, or can
be, placed on works of literary art that use it as a medium;
above all, whether ways have yet been found of agreeing a
form of the language in serious dictionary, thus more
even than fixing meanings to words fixing pronunciations
to fixed spellings.21
Both Harrison and Leonard recognise that class is displayed in

linguistic hierarchies.
Helen Kidd reflects upon the relationship of dialect to the works
of women poets. Responding specifically to the work of Scottish
women poets, Kidd suggests that Scots dialect is recognisable by
certain tropes whereas women do not have a language that is
specifically female, nor a specific set of dialects which are identifi-
able to women from other cultural contexts. 22 In place of such an
emphatic dialect, she suggests that the subversive linguistic experi-
mentation is offered in the work of female poets: ironies, digres-
sions, musicalities as well as a sense of the dangers of certain male
discourses which lace the female subject in a subordinate posi-
23
tion. In Liz Lochheads poem Lady Writer Talkin Blues, the
figure of the female poet asserts her voice through an intonation of
blues rhythm, but this appropriation of the blues is rendered more
complex by the intrusion of syntax and grammar which inscribe a
24
Scots inflection. Lochhead plays with the melodies of both
clashing intonations and the phonetic texture of colloquial speech.
The speaker is told by her partner that Mah Work was a load a
drivel / I called it detail, he called it trivial (p. 38). Substitution, or
the rewriting of the speakers voice, enacts hierarchies of power
and an enforced editing. The male voice intrudes upon the blues
rhythm to damn the speaker: I was woolly in my politics / And
personal poetry gave him the icks (p. 39). Finally, we are told that
He couldnt do His brainwork in the same house as me / Because I
screwed up his objectivity (p. 39). Lochheads redeployment of the
blues enables her work not only to present the intonation of a Scots
idiom, but to place the woman poets voice on a vast stage of call
and response, as well as humorously jostling with the ego of the
male artist.
THE BIG ONE, BETTER TONGUE: JACKIE KAY
The intervention of Scots dialect in Jackie Kays poetry empha-

sises the relationship of language to a sense of place, tribalism and
identity. Kay is the child of a Nigerian father and white Scottish
mother (later adopted by a white Scottish couple). Her poetry
documents the difficulty of her positioning in a Scottish landscape,
and how language use asserts affiliations while also presenting
diversities. Nancy Gish suggests that Kays self-conscious play on
voices, dialects and discourses destabilizes any notion of a consist-
ent unified self.25 Kay states that people cant contain being both
things, being Black and being Scottish without thinking there is an
26
inherent contradiction there. These tensions come to the fore in
In My Country, in which the poet is asked by a woman, Where
do you come from? and Kays response is, Here. These parts. 27
Finding a space of identification is key to many of Kays poems
and this sense of in-betweenness or liminality, Scottish-Nigerian,
gay vs straight, Scots dialect vs English, permeates her work:
If you are brought up in a place, you get that identity very,

very fixedly. And you dont necessarily get a sense of your
being Black, because theres nothing around you affirming
that you are. So although I was steeped in Scottish culture,
of which Im very appreciative, I never had any sense of
Black culture at all, until I went about finding that and
creating that for myself.28
In Old Tongue from Life Mask (2005), Kay negotiates her rela-
tionship with received pronunciation and Scots dialect. Describing a
childs journey south, the poem portrays the colour and vibrancy of
dialect language against the staid confines of so-called correct
enunciation. This movement from place is coupled with an abstracted
sense of loss. Words are mourned since the poem chronicles not only
the loss of accented speech, but of an alterna-tive language use.
Attempting to fit into a new environment, the child suffers the loss of
an alternative language which gives expres-sion to emotion and even
insult: eedyit for idiot, heidbanger for someone out of control. 29
Other words describe the timbre of an emotional state such as
crabbit, ill tempered, or dreich as drab or dreary. Emphatically, Kay
illustrates how this loss is a visceral sensation, with the defecting
words described as having their own anarchic personalities. Hence,
the speaker admits that if she had found the words wandering she
would have swallowed them whole, knocked them back (p. 50).
The imposition of a new accent is also seen in physical terms, since
her vowels start to stretch like my bones (p. 50). Kays
description of a linguistic metamorphosis indicates how identity
can be inhabited in a language. This dual inhabiting becomes
towards the end of the poem a struggle for the restitution of
identity, dramatised as My dour soor Scottish tongue (p. 50). The
closing vigorous statement I wanted to gie it laldie (p. 50), with
its emphasis on giving it all, affirms not only a Scottish identity but
the role of a minor language as a powerful vehicle of self-
expression.
Kays sensitivity to minority languages and dialects takes centre stage
in Sign, from Other Lovers (1993). Sign dramatises the failure to
recognise alternate languages as having any agency or role. This
failure to acknowledge is perceived as a brutalising state-ment of no
language at all (p. 20). The poem focuses upon the role of sign
language as a space of immediacy where body and abstract thought
conjoin in the presence of Everything grows / in the right place,
where things are seen in the present tense: a flashback is something
held between her thumb and her index finger (p. 20). Kay places the
focus on the spatial relationships created in signing between mouth,
eyes and hands, which become a cosmic map of space between
planets (p. 21). The intricacy of the patterning of space through body
language, gesture and eyes creates an impor-tant inter-subjective space.
Yet, through the perspective of those who cannot read these actions
they become mere miming or pan-tomime (p. 21). A dominant drive
towards vocal expression is por-trayed in distressing terms where the
subject of the poem has her hands tied behind her back and is forced to
repeat words without signing until / she has no language at all (p.
21). Provocatively, Kay uses the startling perceptions of signing as a
language of space and body where abstracted thought becomes
tangible to chart the threat posed to minority languages: The little
languages / squashed, stamped upon, cleared out / to make way / for
the big one, better tongue (p. 21). This attention to multiple
language use and challenge to a dominant English tongue is
articulated in Kays work through its multiple references to
inclusion and multiplicity. As Gish states in her assessment of
contemporary Scottish poets: these poets who are complicating
these linguistic borders are cre-ating not something in between
mainstream and experimental but culturally specific
experimentation demanding of those who have internalized the
dominant dialect the effort required to read genuinely different
cultural work.30
FROM ORALITY TO TEXT: ETHNOPOETICS IN SIMON

ORTIZ AND JOY HARJOS POETRY
In a recent interview, Native American poet Simon Ortiz, a

member of the Acoma Pueblo tribal community in New Mexico,
discusses the fate of indigenous languages of the Americas and
the subsequent domination of English and Spanish:
After 1492, European languages became the prominent and

dominant colonial languages that helped to achieve settle-
ment, invasion, occupation, also known as conquest of the
Americas. English was introduced to North America in the
1600s along the eastern or Atlantic seaboard, although by
then Spanish was already the strongest European colonial
instrument of social, economic, political control and domi-
nance in the Caribbean and North American continental
lands known now as Mexico and Guatemala.31
Responding specifically to the situation of Native Americans, Ortiz
states that English in the USA has invariably become the language-
cultural choice that has determined the lives of Indigenous peoples. Go
to reservations anywhere in the US, and youll hear English as the
common language (p. 7). While he stresses that there are exceptions
and that indigenous languages are spoken in both South and North
America, he emphasises that English has become the first language for
most indigenous poets and writers: Why not? It is the language that
has to be dealt with face to face personally, socially, and politically
(p. 6). For him Indigenous language can be a strong part of this
consciousness, but it doesnt have to be the only or main ingredient
since language is only one part of cultural consciousness, while
physical engagement and involvement in spirited activities is a
bigger part of consciousness (p. 8). Central to Ortiz is the sense of
being communal beings within a holistic universe and the principle
of continuance (p. 8).
Ortiz and Harjos poetry enables a sense of continuance through
their transfer of oral histories, ritual and mythology into text. This
approach to poetry has been read under the moniker ethnopoet-
ics, meaning writing that offers a questioning of the traditional
Western literary canon. Often combining an interest in anthro-
pology and linguistics, ethnopoetics considers a history of non-
Western and indigenous literatures while questioning the division
between so-called primitive and civilised cultural production. As a
general analytic approach, a form of ethnopoetics existed before the
twentieth century, but the term was first introduced to public
attention by Jerome Rothenberg in 1968 as part of a momentum
guided towards issues formed by race and ethnicity:
Closely related to the primitive is the approach that focuses on

the idea of oral poetry though the dominance of the oral clearly
continues in cultures that could by no stretch of the imagination
be thought of as technologically primitive. The approach
through performance over a wide range of cultures might
almost be synonymous with that through the oral while spilling
over as well into cultures with a fixed system of writing.32
Rothenberg in this more recent revisiting of the term is keen to

emphasise that ethnopoetics must not be seen as a dichotomy
between so-called primitive and advanced societies and cultures.
Ortizs poem Telling about Coyote uses ideas from the trick-
33
ster tradition to present his narrative. In folklore and myth the
trickster is a figure or spirit (often represented anthropomorphi-
cally) who breaks rules and challenges hierarchies. Drawing from
the Coyote as a trickster figure in Native American folklore, Ortiz
presents a character who defies multiple deaths. Gary Snyder sug-
gests that the Coyote in Native American folklore is: a trickster . . .
he is always traveling, hes really stupid, hes kind of bad . . . most
of the time hes just into mischief. 34 Jarold Ramsey adds that the
basic narrative is that coyotes are unkillable and although they
may suffer bad luck or just retribution in the form of starvation,
poisoning, dismemberment, ingestion by monsters, incineration,
drowning, fatal falls . . . it is a universal convention that they
35
survive. Ortizs Coyote, travelling to his own wedding, gets
sidetracked into a gambling party. The inflection of the poem is a
casual orality which communicates a guarded affection for the
Coyote: . . . you know, Coyote / is in the origin and all the way /
through (p. 434). Placed in a literary framework, the Coyote is
described humorously as an existential man / a Dostoevsky
Coyote (p. 434). We are told that, losing dramatically at cards, he
had quite literally lost everything including his skin and fur. Some
mice, finding Coyote in the cold, take pity on him and reclaim
pieces of fur, pasting them onto his body, the result being an old
raggy blanket which looks like scraps of an old coat (p. 434).
Ortiz frames Coyote as dependent upon those who are around him.
Wai Chee Dimock comments upon this interdependency: Coyote is
literally what others make of him. His stories have to be about other
animals, for they need to be there if these stories are to have their
36
customary semi-happy ending. In effect, Ortiz uses the Coyote
story as a way of indicating strong bonds of community and inter-
subjectivity. The conversational and discursive framework he
establishes enables the poetic text to perform the retelling of an oral
narrative with immediacy.
Joy Harjo is of Cherokee descent and a member of the Muscogee
Nation of Oklahoma. Her prose poem Deer Dancer is a lament for
the disconnection of contemporary native experience with ancestry
and an affirmation of reconnecting with ancient rituals and
beliefs.37 Set in a run-down bar, the tale is narrated by a com-
munity we, who identify themselves as Indian ruins or broken
survivors, the club of the shotgun, knife wound, of poison by
culture (p. 5). A stranger enters to dance for and amongst them:
No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we recognized, her
family related to deer (p. 5). Harjo evokes as a basis to her poem
the Native American mythology of a deer woman. Interpreted as a
siren, the deer woman is associated with dancing, seduction, danger
and even personal transformation. As with the trickster
mythology, the deer woman is aligned with shape-shifting, and
her figuration as a woman is betrayed by having deers hooves
instead of feet. The speakers dual vision portrays the conflict
between contemporary and Native cultures. As the woman
finishes the dance, we are told she is dressed in a stained red
dress with tape on her heels (p. 6). Yet during the dance she is
portrayed as a myth-maker slipped down through dreamtime,
becoming eventually a collective ideal: The promise of feast we
all knew was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a
curse to find us (p. 6). Key to the poem is the difficulty of
finding the words to describe the experience of the dance that the
community witnesses:
In this language there are no words for how the real world
col-lapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds
would come into focus, but I couldnt take it in this dingy
envelope. (p. 5)
Harjo skilfully presents the tensions between the spiritual and

material; the poem searches for reparation with the world as a
holistic presence. At the close, a promise of reaffiliation exists in
her fawn a blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left (p. 6).
We can extend Stuart Cochrans analysis of Simon Ortizs poetry to
Joy Harjos poem. Cochran proposes that Ortizs ethnopoetics
speak of identities inseparable from particular landscapes and of
the spiritually and culturally disintegrative impact of the loss of that
38
connection. Through this perspective, we can concur that Harjo
and Ortiz also affirm the primacy of storytelling and the
significance that stories give to the land and its people. 39
BILINGUALISM AND TRANSLATION IN POETRY
For some poets, the relationship with an Anglophone culture

necessitates elements of translation, a process which is made
evident through the act of writing. Lawrence Venuti considers that
literary translation is often reliant upon the translators invisibility.
He argues for translations to be read as texts in their own right
permitting transparency to be demystified, seen as one discursive
effect among others.40 Venuti emphasises the destabilising element
in the translation practice the contingency of signification: the
chain of signifiers that constitutes the foreign text is replaced by a
chain of signifiers in the translating language (p. 13). He alerts us
to multiple valences of interpretation:
Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences

among signifiers along a potentially endless chain (polyse-
mous, intertextual, subject to infinite linkages), it is always
differential and deferred, never presents as an original
unity. Both foreign text and translation are derivative; both
consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that
neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and
that destabi-lize the work of signification, inevitably
exceeding and pos-sibly conflicting with their
intentions . . . Meaning is a plural and contingent relation,
not an unchanging unified essence. (p. 13)
Three poets Gwyneth Lewis, Li-Young Lee and Lorna Dee
Cervantes perform different acts of translation in their poetry.
Their work dramatises a keen awareness of the erotic,
authoritarian and often homogenising characteristics of English.
An exploration of how bilingualism is performed in their work
provides insights into the cultural conflicts which arise in
multiple language use an experience which Li-Young Lee
describes as You live / a while in two worlds / at once. 41
MY GLOSSOLALIA SHALL BE MY PASSPORT:

GWYNETH LEWIS
As a poet writing both in Welsh and English, often translating

her own poetry, Lewis emphasises that her translations must be
read as departures from the original, if not new explorations. In
consider-ing the inter-relationship between both languages,
Lewis reflects in one of her essays that:
The smuggling of familiar material from one language to
another seemed to me on reflection, too easy a way of
exploiting a Welsh subject matter in English. I wanted to be
a full English language poet when I wrote in English and
not just a translator of material which might not work in
Welsh.42
Provocatively, Lewis adds that translation doesnt just happen
between languages its sometimes needed within one, which
suggests that it is not only bilingualism which establishes a fertile
textuality in the poetry.43 Pentecost, the opening poem of
Parables & Faxes (1995), alerts us immediately to the gift of
languages or glossolalia, which enables the speakers safe passage
through the checkpoints of Europe to Florida. Lewis suggests that
linguistic multiplicity is a passport, a point of entry into a per-
petual Pentecost.44 As is often the case in Lewiss work, language
is linked to the erotic and the tactile: I shall taste the tang / of
travel on the atlas of my tongue / salt Poland, sour Denmark and
sweet Vienna (p. 9). This entry into language (or languages in this
case) is presented as a quest for symbolic significance, resonant of
Jacques Lacans interpretation of the childs initiation into lan-
guage as a manifestation of a lack. According to Lacan, language
offers a symbolic order in which the subject can represent desire
and so compensate, albeit inadequately, for the experience of
lack.45 This is a process that Lewis correlates to an understanding
of her bilingualism:
They say that language develops in infants as the baby

finds itself alone and calls out for its absent mother. At its
very root then, language is about needing your mother and
about responding to your desolation without her . . . A truly
bilin-gual person has not one mother tongue, but two.
Welsh was my blood mother, English my stepmother. 46
Lewiss poem celebrates linguistic multiplicity, its speaking in

tongues while also seeking correspondence with the immediate
world of things. Drawing from a cabalistic notion of language as a
supreme order ordained from God, the poem suggests that there is
continuity between how things are represented through language
and an innate symbolism:
Then the S in the tail of the crocodile will

make perfect sense to the bibliophile
who will study this land, his second Torah. All

this was revealed. Now I wait for the Lord to
move heaven and earth to send me abroad and
fulfil His bold promise to Florida. (p. 9)
This desire for a unity between word and object becomes a pil-
grims quest. Lewis is alert to the humorous ambitions of such a
journey. Indeed, even God intervenes at the end, closing the
Atlantic, bridging the gap between the continents of Europe and
the Americas, allowing the speakers immediate passage. The
poem points towards a landscape where there was once not only
geographical unity but a divine linguistic order.
Lewiss sequence Welsh Espionage navigates with clarity the
immediate cultural clash between English and Welsh. A father
teaches his daughter English through gesturing to parts of the body.
As a consequence Lewis embeds Welsh names with English, such
as penelin for elbow, gwallt for hair, dwrn for fist, gwe-fusau
for lips and llygaid for eyes as part of the fetishist quiz (p. 42).
We are told that Each part he touched in their secret game / thrilled
as she whispered its English name (p. 42). Critics have commented
upon the suggestion of sexual abuse in this poem, and it is clear that
the site where the two languages intersect is the body. On first
glance the translations seem straightforward, but on closer
consideration both languages are jostling for ascendancy and
power. Italics switch their roles; pedagogy is represented through
the English and a certain active agency in Welsh. The duality of
what the poet refers to as having two mother tongues is underwrit-
ten with unease and guilt. Lewiss commentary is insightful:
I suspect that this sinister suggestion was a way for me to

explore the discomfort I felt at being born between two
cultures. Early on I had an acute sense of the cultural clash
between the social values tied up in both languages. I
suppose, that in some way, I still feel guilty about being
Daddys girl and writing in English at all. 47
To harness the poem solely to a reading of sexual abuse would be to

narrow its focus. Lewis examines the complex process of
establishing and transgressing boundaries be they sexual, cultural or
linguistic. The poems resistance to a singular reading (malign or
benign) indicates that it is precisely this ambiguous relationship
between the two languages which the poem depends upon.
Deryn Rees-Jones points to a consideration of the dualities of
Welshness and Englishness, suggesting that the future for such
writing may be found in establishing correspondences between
binary oppositions. This would be a poetics which while celebrat-
ing differences, works towards the exploration and interrogation of
48
connections. Yet, there are occasional resistances in the text by a
bilingual poet that cannot be solely resolved by mobility between
cultural identities. Lewis proposes that If youre truly bilingual its
not that there are two languages in your world, but that not
49
everybody understands the whole of your personal speech. One
way of considering her words is to think about bilingualism as a
sort of simultaneity in the writing, not just as the inclusion of Welsh
words in an English-language text. Tzvetan Todorov urges us not to
think of bilingualism as two distinctive languages operat-ing
independently. Instead, he suggests that we must approach
bilingualism as the simultaneous existence of more than one cul-
tural model, or what he refers to as a form of dialogism. This in
turn becomes a sort of excess or intractable multiplicity:
Placing bilingualism within the framework of dialogism also
allows us, rather than turning it into a purely linguistic ques-
tion, to consider it in direct relation with two phenomena: the
problem of the co-existence of cultural models within the
50
same society, and the internal multiplicity of personality.
Todorovs essay gives a troubling prognosis for any bilingual poet.
In Oxford Bootlicker, from the extended sequence Parables &
Faxes, the speaker starts off eating a religious scroll, moves to
Tolstoy and nourishing Kafka, then proceeds to lick the fat (p.
56) from all the other books in the vicinity. Religious symbol-ism,
knowledge and fantasy intertwine as the speaker states:
I am voracious
for the Word a lexicon is wine
to me and wafer, so that home, at
night, I ruminate on all thats mine
inside these messages. I am the fruit of

Gods expressiveness to man. (p. 56)
The speaker imagines that once she is ripe, multiple languages,

texts and even a metropolis of inhabitants will be evacuated from
her body: I spew up cities, colonies of words / and flocks of
sentences with full-stop birds (p. 56). This is taking Todorovs
internal multiplicity to an extreme, but satisfyingly humorous,
conclusion. Syntactical disruption and the radical dislocation of
language on the page are perhaps not viable options for a bilingual
poet, especially one sharply attuned to the literal silencing of a
language. Lewis chooses discursiveness over estrangement. As the
epilogue to Parables & Faxes reminds us, such a position would
restrict Lewiss poetry to a partial vision and halt a productive
conversation scarcely begun (p. 77).
IMMIGRATION AND LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCE:

LI-YOUNG LEE
Following the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China,

Li-Young Lees parents fled to Indonesia, where he was born.
Lee eventually settled in the USA, and his experience as a child
immigrant with no English is dramatised in his early poetry. In a
memoir, The Winged Seed (1995), Lee remarks on his
awareness of linguistic and cultural difference:
I noticed early on that accents were not heard alike by the dom-
inant population of American English speakers. Instead each
foreigners spoken English, determined by a mother tongue,
each persons noise fell on a colouring ear, which bent the
listeners eye and consequently the speakers countenance . . .
While some sounds were tolerated, even granting the speaker
a certain status in the instances of say French or British, other
51
inflections condemned one to immediate alien.
Lees Persimmons presents this sense of linguistic exclusion or

difference as well as interrogating a cultural legacy. 52 The poem
examines ideas of integration, the mourning of a mother language and
the importance of memorialising what survives the process of
immigration. Zhou Xiaojing comments that Persimmons con-ceives
of the past as consisting of memories, experiences, received
knowledge, established notions, and culturally and historically
constructed ethnic identity, all of which are reconstructed, ques-
tioned, challenged, and re-created.53 Initially, the poem recalls the
violence of the sixth-grade teacher Mrs Walker, who hits the child for
mispronunciation, for not knowing the difference between per-
simmon and precision (p. 17). Lee shows how processes of cultural
translation and equally importantly mistranslation operate. The teacher,
rather than naming the fruit persimmon, refers to it as a Chinese
Apple (p. 18) and failing to identify it as unripe, is exposed herself as
failing in precision. Within the poem, persimmons are associated
with the childs need to integrate, a physical sexuality and the attempt
to retain a cultural legacy through processes of memory. These
linkages in the text are asserted as exploratory performances within the
poem. A key section recreates a scene of erotic translation as the
speaker attempts to teach a lover Chinese. Onomatopoeia guides the
speaker initially, but amnesia also inter-venes as he tries to translate the
setting: Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: Ive forgotten / Naked: Ive
forgotten. / Ni, wo: you and me (p.
17).
Lee presents a relationship to an unfamiliar language in expe-riential
terms. The differences between words such as fight and fright and
wren and yarn (p. 17) are described in terms of agency, action and
family activity. Fight is what the child does when he was
frightened, and fright (p. 17) is what the child feels while fighting.
Equally, wrens are presented as indistinguishable from domesticity.
While the child recognises that wrens are birds, and yarn is knitting
material, the translation becomes magically alive when the speaker
comments that wrens are soft as yarn / my mother made birds out
of yarn (p. 18). It is in these small micro-narratives that family
histories become tangible. Moreover, the persimmon is identified
by his mother in spiritual and nurtur-ing terms since every
persimmon has a sun / inside, something golden, glowing, / warm
as my face (p. 18). Lee proposes that the initial strangeness of
English language helped his writing: I cant tell if my being
Chinese is an advantage or not, but I cant imagine anything else
except writing as an outsider. He adds that: Its bracing to be
54
reminded [that] were all guests in the language, any language.
Usefully in this context, poet Lyn Hejinians reflection on the Greek
word xenos suggestive of foreigner or stranger creates a
meditation upon the figure of the border as a point of both
reciprocity and differentiation. Hejinian suggests that encounters
with difference create a site of contradiction and confluence since
the stranger it names is both guest and host . . . The guest / host
55
relationship is one of identity as much as it is of reciprocity. For
Mikhail Bakhtin, the meeting of the outsider with the dominant
culture necessitates dialogue and in many ways a sense of cultural
translation and examination:
In the realm of culture, outsidedness is a most powerful factor

in understanding. It is only in the eyes of another culture that
foreign culture reveals itself fully and profoundly . . . A
meaning only reveals its depths once it has encountered and
come into contact with another, foreign meaning: they engage
in a kind of dialogue, which surmounts the closedness and
one-sidedness of these particular meanings, these cultures. We
raise new questions for a foreign culture, ones that it did not
raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and
the foreign culture responds to us by revealing to us its new
56
aspects and new semantic depths.
At the close of the poem Lee presents us with the immigrants
perspective of cultural memory. The poem is infused with indica-
tions of amnesia and its close affiliation to acts of memorialisation.
Returning home as an adult, the son finds three scrolls, one
which details two persimmons so full they want to drop from
the cloth (p. 19). He presents this picture to his blind father who
reas-serts through touch, memories of the past as well as a
sensual patterning of evocation. These are persimmons he has
painted blind with his eyes closed hundreds of times (p. 19).
Evoking both familiarity and cultural identification, the
persimmons are finally translated into a pattern of mourning and
remembrance; the memory of their shape and texture are equated
with the immediacy of recollecting the scent of the hair of one
you love (p. 19).
INTERLINGUAL POETICS: LORNA DEE CERVANTES
Lorna Dee Cervantess first volume of poetry Emplumada

(1981) was credited with showing the barrio life from a
Mexican-American woman, or Chicanas perspective. The
emergent wave of first-generation Chicana poets writing in
English was responding to a degree to the emergent politics of
Chicano writers beginning in the 1960s. Appeals for the
reclamation of a spiritual homeland lineated in the Amerindian
myth of Aztln were key to the early Chicano manifesto by
Alberto Baltazar Urista, El Plan Espiritual de Aztln (1969):
We the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land

of Aztln from whence came our forefathers reclaiming the
land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our
people of the sun, declare the call for our blood is our power,
57
our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.
The rewriting of these rhetorical positions from a female per-

spective was central to the development of Chicana writing. The
pivotal writer and critic Cherrie Moraga describes that, as
women: we sought and believe we found non-rhetorical, highly
personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday
terms.58 Cervantes suggests that Chicana poetry is a poetry of
the observer class and points towards gendered differences:
Whereas the mens poetry was more linguistically free,
when Chicanas started publishing it was all about
perceptions, what was observed. To me, its not history, oral
history, written. Its a matter of the relationship between
power and language. But again, that kind of participation
through the language was for us one of our strengths. Its
the keen power of observa-tion.59
This drive towards personal female experience is validated by critic

theorist Gloria Anzalda, who echoes the perspectives of Moraga
and Cervantes by emphasising that The danger in writing is not
fusing our personal experience and world view with the social
reality we live in, with our inner life, our history, our economics
and our vision.60 She adds that No topic is too trivial, since the
danger for the Chicana writer is in being too universal and human-
itarian and invoking the eternal to the sacrifice of the particular and
61
the feminine and the specific historical moment.
An immediate feature of Cervantess early poems is the inter-
section of Spanish and English language. Born in the Mission
District of San Francisco and raised in San Jose, Cervantes was
deprived of speaking Spanish or, as she puts it: Mama raised me
62
without language / Im orphaned from my Spanish tongue. As a
consequence, her poetry is splintered with phrases from the Spanish
that often assert a disjunctive and warring texture in the poem.
Poema para los Californios Muertos is inscribed with the epithet:
Once a refuge for Mexican Californios, plaque outside a restaurant
in Los Altos California, 1974. Cervantes meditates on the battles
of the CalifornianMexican Wars of the 1840s. The Amerindian
narrative of Aztln is read here in a feminised description of the
original Mexican California (inhabited by native Californios), with
its present-day landscape of the freeway exert-ing a clean
cesarean / across belly valleys and fertile dust (p. 42). This
rewriting of the Aztln myth is accompanied by reflections in
Spanish on revenge for the loss of life and native inhabitants: Yo
recuerdo los antepasados muertos (p. 42) [I remember the dead
ancestors]; Soy la hija pobrecita pero puedo maldecir estas
fantasmas blancas (p. 42) [I am only your poor daughter, but I can
curse these white ghosts]. The intersection of both languages
excavates a violent history of conquest and subordination.
Commenting on the development of Chicana writing, Norma
Alarcn poses that her aim was to encourage those who
challenged linguistic hierarchies: the silence and silencing of
people begins with the dominating enforcement of linguistic
conventions, the resistance to relational dialogues, as well as the
disablement of people by outlawing their forms of speech. 63
Moreover, Louis Reyes Rivera proposes that: When you speak
the language of your oppressor you either absorb all of his
values or your recreate your tongue to change each image and
syllable into weapons for the peoples awakening. 64 Read
within these critical contexts, Cervantes mounts an attack, using
Spanish as an agency for recovery and reaffirming cultural
complexity. The actions of revenge and memory are also viewed
in gendered terms: tierra la madre (p. 42) [mother earth], as
well as Los recuerdo en la sangre, / la sangre frtil (p. 42) [I
remem-ber them in my blood, my fertile blood]. It seems
particularly apt that the poem closes with a reflection upon the
Californian indigenous tree, the eucalyptus, as the pure scent of
rage (p. 43).
Cervantes comments on her use of Spanish that I dont want
to pretend I know more / and can speak all the names. I cant (p.
45). The amalgam of English and Spanish in Freeway 280
grants an intimate perspective on the speakers relationship to
the land, culture and past wishes of escape. Opening with the
Spanish description of Las casitas (p. 39) [small houses] next
to an industrial site, a sense of intimacy is continued by the
descrip-tion of the abrazos [embraces] of wild roses around the
houses (p. 39). Chicano critic Juan Bruce-Novoa proposes that
this form of combined language use differs from the experience
of bilingualism:
The two languages inform one another at every level. There

are certain grammatical usages, words, connotations, spell-
ings which to a native speaker of Spanish or English, or to
the true bilingual appear to be mistakes, cases of code
switching or interference in linguistic terms, but which to
the Chicano native speaker are common usages, the living
reality of an interlingual space.65
In addition, for Bruce-Novoa Bilingualism implies moving from
one language code to another, whereas interlingualism implies the
66
constant tension of the two at once. This tension is illustrated in
the images of the reclamation of land near the freeway by indig-
enous plants. The apricot, cherry and walnut trees are named as
Albaricoqueros, cerezos, nogales, and we are told that old women
come to collect the spinach, purslane and mint: Espinaca, verdola-
gas, yerbabuena (p. 39). One effect of the interlingual processes of
the poem is to present the neglected physical spaces as defamiliar-
ised, yet also emotionally proximate. Cervantes seeks a placing of
these conflicts within what she names los campos extraos de esta
ciudad [the strange fields of this city] (p. 39). The transcription of
these tensions between warring languages creates a form of poetic
realism that challenges assumptions and preconceptions.
IDIOLECTS OR IDEOLECTICAL POETRIES
The inclusion of dialect in poetry is often a way of affirming

identities often regional, national, economic and racial that
may be seen in a dialectical relationship with standard English
use. Derek Walcotts book-length Omeros (1990) is often cited
as a poetics of creolisation, with its complex inflection of epic,
Caribbean speech acts and local history. We may also consider
the advent of a distinct topography of Caribbean speech of the
late sixties which Brathwaite has taken to be the affirmation of
nation language.67 A further understanding might also include
idiomatic linguistic use, often referred to as idiolectical language
use. The OED suggests that an idiolect refers to the linguistic
system of one person, differing in some details from that of all
other speakers of the same dialect or language. 68
The word idiolect surfaces in Charles Bernsteins provocative
essay of 1996 Poetics of the Americas, where it is transmuted to
ideolect. In this essay Bernstein argues for an ideolectical
approach to an American poetry, reliant less on a multiplicity of
identities, than a plurality of different languages. Taken at its
broadest sense, Bernsteins ideolects draw a vast perimeter around
an experimental poetics and the conceptualisation of a shared
language. As opposed to dialect in poetry, Bernstein argues that an
ideolectical approach creates a virtual poetics of the Americas,
allowing in effect for a range of different idioms. Above all,
Bernstein stresses that an ideolectical poetics is provisional,
unlike dialect in poetry which is still informed, if not regulated,
by its difference to standard language practices:
By linking dialect and ideolect I wish to emphasize the

common ground of linguistic exploration, the invention of
new syntaxes as akin to the invention of new Americas, or
of new possibilities for America . . . nonstandard writing
practices share a technical commonality that overrides the
necessary differences of interpretation and motivation, and
this commonality may be the vortical prosodic force that
gives us footing with one another . . . dialect understood as
nation language, has a centripetal force, regrouping often
denigrated and dispirited language practices around a
common center; ideolect in contrast, suggests a centrifugal
force moving away from normative practices without
necessarily replacing them with a new center of gravity, at
least defined by self or group.69
Bernstein is proposing languages of differentiation, not merely

the placing of words in unusual grammatical orders. Initially,
this development in the poets conceptualisation of poetic
language appears to promote a solipsistic enquiry advocating
multiple forms of private language. Yet, Bernstein in an early
essay categori-cally states that the idea of a private language is
illusory because language itself is a communality, a public
domain. Its forms and contents are in no sense private they are
the very essence of the social. 70 On reflection, what is shared in
this enterprise of an ideolectical approach to poetry is the
creation of a common social space for these linguistic
endeavours, and an attempt to decentralise the informing role of
rule-governed practices in poetic language:
The use of dialectical or ideolectical language in a poem

marks a refusal of standard English as the common ground of
communication. For poets wishing to obliterate or overcome
such marks of difference, the choice of the conventional liter-
ary language whether understood as mask or not, reflects a
willingness to abide by the linguistic norms of a culture and to
negotiate within these norms. Nonstandard language practice
suggests an element of cultural resistance that has as its lower
limit dialogic self-questioning and as its upper limit secession
and autonomy.71
It could be argued that Bernsteins reliance upon multiplicity may

only promote an increasingly atomised resistance to the con-ventions
he wants to challenge. Paradoxically, Bernstein also argues that the
problematising of identity that an ideolectical approach provides may,
in effect, forge new collective identities.72 Already we can see how a
poet such as Tom Leonard challenges the central-ising role of standard
English in his language. Bernsteins harness-ing of an ideolectical
approach to an experimental poetics can be seen as overtly idealistic. It
perhaps acknowledges the development of multiple Englishes, a
process of devolution which the perform-ance poet cris cheek
acknowledges as a dispersal of the sounds of Englishes and the loss
of a centralising authority: I celebrate that loss, as a positive sign that
is a language in a turmoil of great promise, opening rather than
resistant to, that vibrant plethora of influences and change which has
enabled it to become so translo-cal.73 Bernsteins appeal to an
ideolectical poetics can also be read in recent criticisms fascination
with establishing an aesthetic for a post-national literature, or what
Ramazani terms a transnational literature: a nation-crossing force that
exceeds the limits of the ter-ritorial and judicial norm. 74 Key to
Ramazanis identifications are the practices of creolisation and
hybridisation which he reads not only as essential to the formal
advancement or the growth of dis-crete national poetries, but as
cross-cultural dynamics . . . among the engines of modern and
contemporary poetic development and innovation. 75 However,
Ramazanis transnational poetics does not advocate a vapid idea of a
global aesthetic, as we are reminded that given the complex nature of
current poetic practice the homog-enizing model of globalization is
inadequate for the analysis of specifically poetic transnationalism. 76
LINGUISTIC CROSS-FERTILISATION: TUSIATA AVIA
Tusiata Avias poetry shows how the poetic text can become a
space for linguistic cross-fertilisation and the exploration of idi-
omatic, or idiolectical, texture. Of Samoan decent, Avia was
raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. As a performance poet, her
poetry engages with oral storytelling, often focusing on the
intervention of folklore from her Samoan heritage and modern
New Zealand. The opening poem of her volume Wild Dogs
Under My Skirt (2004) offers a rendition of the Samoan
alphabet O le pi tautau through a series of poetic narratives,
as well as a glossary of words at the back of the volume. 77 The
stories in this work seek to translate between two idioms and two
cultures. We are told that A is for Afakasi [half-caste], and
represented as a child / left at the crossroads about whom the
poem asks: Who will save her from the snakes? / Who will save
her from the dark-ness? (p. 9). This position of being in-
between two cultures, identities or at a crossroads is enforced
by the doubling posi-tions enacted in O le pi tautau. T for
example stands for teine lelei / good girl and also T is for teine
leaga / bad girl (p. 12). Through this alphabetised poem Avia
also enforces a sense of pedagogy and the imposition of what
might be considered correct pedagogy. It comes as no surprise
that V stands for virgin, and the speaker communicates
confusion regarding religious doctrinal thought:
Mary was a virgin

and God was her husband but
Joseph was her husband and
Jesus was her baby. (p. 12)
The positioning of women is crucial in Avias volume, as are the

narratives inherited by the young female child that dominates the
volume. In O le pi tautau, S we are told is for Slut which is
then translated into Samoan: I know what it means / it means
paumuku / like my mother (p. 12). Avia uses Samoan as a method
for framing the contesting representations of both women and
female sexuality. Her prose poem Alofa, translated as love, uses
the Samoan firstly as a name for young woman, then for framing
gestures that are misinterpreted. The idiomatic stress on a Samoan
background suggests sexual naivet and innocence. A simple equa-
tion is created between love and pleasure. Alofa goes for a walk and
finds alofa everywhere in da bush in da tree under da tree in da
dark alofa . . . plenty alofa in da dark (p. 62). In the poem alofa
also becomes a currency to be traded, since Alofa sings and prays to
Jesus: Jesus bring me plenty alofa plenty money too Jesus make
me win da bingo den I make da big donation show my alofa to all
da peoples in da church (p. 62). When she does win she goes to the
town and a nightclub to perform with faafafine [drag queens or
transsexuals], as well as Palagi mans (p. 62) or white men. The
poem eventually chronicles Alofas exchange of her body for alofa
Alofa making alofa in da Seaside Inn with da Palagi man name
Bruce (p. 63). On return to her community Alofa becomes the
paumuka kirl pregnant with an illegitimate child an when its
finish Alofa call it Alofa too (p. 63). Avias ideolectical tenor to
the poem adds to a sense of cyclicality; it also frames a brutal
encounter with racial prejudice and the tensions between commu-
nity and urbanity.
CONCLUSION: DALJIT NAGRA
The publication of British Asian poet Daljit Nagras Look We Have

Coming to Dover (2002), was heralded as a new male perspec-tive
and voicing of minority poetry in the UK. As Dave Gunning notes,
Nagras poetry leads to important questions about what is being
promoted as an authentic British Asian poetic voice, and to what
extent he is being authorized to speak as a representative for the
78
plurality of cultures that make up British Asian communi-ties.
Gunning argues that Nagras texts are open to a plurality of
different voices from the experiences of immigration, as well as
those of first- or second-generation Indian immigrants. More than
even Avias poems, Nagras work performs ideolectically in
Bernsteins configuration by creating a text which acts not only
against the established hierarchies of English grammar, but which is
sonically adventurous, pushing boundaries through challenging
expectations. Gunning offers an insightful reading of the texture
and porosity of Nagras poetry:
Nagras portrayal of working class Punjabis is always less

about verisimilitude to a reified culture, or an authentic
capture of an idiom, as it is concerned with the possibilities of
refracting this speech into his poems and of dislocating the
expectations of an audience who receive a racialized perform-
ance as indicative of a particular way of being in the world.
The voices that speak in Nagras verse are alienated; they
reveal less of the worlds that their named speakers inhabit
than of the poets concerns that his enunciation will always be
over-determined by the pre-text of racist or patronizing
liberal-multicultural expectations of the British Asian poet. 79
This textual density and transcription of radical speech patterns

is evident in The Man Who Would Be English. Seeking assimi-
lation into a community through football, the speaker becomes part
of a group: we plundered up gulps of golden rounds for the great
80
game. Within this poem there lies a carefully orchestrated
tension between vernacular such as just for kicks, and the more
archaic language of lark-about days of school (p. 15). These
phrases add an intertextual intrusion into the layering of the text
performing a ventriloquising of familiar phrases. This need to
assimilate phonetically is a survival strategy, which requires that the
speakers voice is passed into theirs (p. 15). A desire to be
unobtrusive is asserted by the negatives: I wasnt Black or Latin or
/ managed by a turbaned ghost (p. 15). But the assertion is chal-
lenged by the intrusion of a wifes voice, clearly marked in stacca-
toed syntax, taking her husband to task for his affiliation. The wife
brutally emphasises the degrees of difference: Lookk lookk ju nott
British ju rrr blackkk . . .!!! (p. 15). Another poem, The Speaking
of Bagwinder Singh Sagoo, renders a voice which criticises the
sexualisation of the western woman selected for him in the UK.
Malapropisms add to the texture of his berating. His beaus actions
towards the praying father threaten to give him cardigan arrest and
cosmetics are described as odour toilet (p. 27). The language of
television advertising and consumption intrudes upon the
descriptions of the relationship. His friends work at the Sugar Puff
factory and his partner is described as dressed in film-star red as
well as Dulux of British poodle pink and is accompanied by her
doctor, the Avon Lady (p. 26). Nagra presents cultural complexi-
ties which require assiduous deciphering.
This process of interpretation is made complex by Nagras
positioning of the speech patterns in his poetry. Gunning proposes
that Nagras poems are Trapped between racist expectations that
delimit the meanings open to the racialized or ethnicized subject,
and the burden of representation that would deny the particularity
of his enunciation in order to impose a derogatory function upon
it.81 Nagras poetry illustrates that for many twenty-first century
poets writing in English, the complexities of cultural expression
necessitate not only an intricate linguistic texture, but a poetics that
can enact ventriloquism and critique.
While English is recognised as a global language, poets across

the world writing in English embrace variations in language
use, emphasising a plurality of Englishes as opposed to a
monolithic or totalising language.
The way that poets insist upon the particularity of language
use in their poetry is through the inclusion of dialects and
idiolects in their poetry.
The poetry of native cultures is often marked by the
transforma-tion of orality into text.
For poets such as Li-Young Lee, Gwyneth Lewis and Lorna
Dee Cervantes, bilingualism is key to their poetic practice,
and the texture of their poetry is informed by translation and
inter-lingual practices.
The deformation of established rules and grammatical
practices may also be thought of as an ideolectical poetics.
In the poetry of Tusiata Avia and Daljit Nagra the cross-
fertilization of different language use results in the exploration
of not only idiom, but also cultural expression.
NOTES
1. Jonathan Arac, Anglo-Globalism?, New Left Review, 16

(2002), 3545 (p. 35).
2. Romana Huk, A New Global Poetics?, Literature Compass, 6.3
(2009), 75884 (p. 758).
3. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 10.
4. Ibid. p. 10.
5. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American
Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
6. Sujata Bhatt, Point No Point: Selected Poems (Manchester:
Carcanet Press, 1997), pp. 245.
7. John Haffenden, Interview with Tony Harrison, in Neil Astley
(ed.), Tony Harrison: Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1
8. Neil Roberts, Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), p. 157.
9. Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1987), p.
123.
10. Ibid. p. 123.
11. Terry Eagleton, Antagonisms Tony Harrisons v. in Astley,
Tony Harrison, p. 349.
12. Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 126.
13. For a full reading of Bakhtin, see Chapter 2.
14. Harrison, v., in Selected Poems, pp. 23549 (p. 235). All
sub-sequent references to this edition are given in the text.
Arthur Scargill is a former president of the NUM, National
Union of Mineworkers.
15. Tony Harrison, Interview, Poetry Review, 73.4 (1984),
reprinted in Astley, Tony Harrison, pp. 22746, (p. 234).
16. Tom Leonard, personal webpage. Available online at www.
tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate-voices/the-six-
oclock-news.html.
17. Ibid.
18. Tom Leonard, Interview with Tom Leonard by Attila
Dosa 2003. Available online at www.tomleonard.co.uk/
online-poetry-a-prose/interview-with-tom-leonard-by-attila-
dosa-for-hungarian-literary-magazine-2003.html.
19. Tom Leonard, Glasgow Poems. Available online at www.
tomleonard.co.uk/main-publications/intimate-voices/six-
glasgow-poems.html.
20. Ibid.
21. Tom Leonard, Review of Language and Power. Available
online at www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-a-prose/
review-roxy-harris-language-a-power.html.
22. Helen Kidd, Writing Near the Fault Line: Scottish Women
Poets and the Topography of Tongues, in Vicki Bertram (ed.),
Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth Century Women Poets
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 100.
23. Kidd, Writing Near the Fault Line, p. 100.
24. Liz Lochhead, True Confessions & New Clichs (Edinburgh:
Polygon Books, 1985), pp. 379. All subsequent references
25. Nancy Gish, Complexities of Subjectivity, in Romana Huk
(ed.), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries
Transnationally (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2003), p. 268.
26. Jackie Kay, Sleeping with Monsters, ed. Rebecca Wilson and
Gillean Somerville-Arjat (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), pp.
1212.
27. Jackie Kay, Other Lovers (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993), p.
24. 28. Kay, Interview, in Sleeping with Monsters, p. 122.
29. Jackie Kay, Life Mask (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2005), p. 50. All
30. Gish, Complexities of Subjectivity, p. 273.
31. Janet McAdams, A Conversation with Simon Ortiz,
Kenyon Review, 32.1 (2010), 18 (p. 6).
32. Jerome Rothenberg, Poetics and Polemics 19802005
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), p. 132.
33. Jerome Rothenberg and Diane Rothenberg (eds), Symposium
of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 433
6. 34. Gary Snyder, The Incredible Survival of the Coyote, in
Rothenberg and Rothenberg, Symposium of the Whole, p. 426.
35. Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 42.
36. Dimock, Through Other Continents, p. 180.
37. Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1990). All subsequent
38. Stuart Cochran, The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits,
and the Land in Native American Pueblo and Aztln Writing,
MELUS, 20.2 (1995), 6991 (p. 70).
39. Ibid. p. 70.
40. Lawrence Venuti, The Translators Invisibility (London:
Routledge, 2008), p. 13.
41. Li-Young Lee, Indigo, in Rose (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions,
1986), p. 31.
42. Gwyneth Lewis, Whose Coat is That Jacket? Whose Hat is
That Cap? Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, 27
(19967), 5868 (p. 63).
43. Ibid. p. 67.
44. Gwyneth Lewis, Parables & Faxes (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1995), p. 9. All subsequent references to this edition are
given in the text.
45. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
46. Gwyneth Lewis, Sunbathing in the Rain (London: Flamingo,
2002), pp. 402.
47. Lewis, Whose Coat is That Jacket?, p. 59.
48. Deryn Rees-Jones, Editorial, Poetry Wales 32.2 (1996),
23 (p. 3).
49. Lewis, Whose Coat is That Jacket?, p. 58.
50. Tzvetan Todorov, Bilingualism, Dialogism and Schizo-
phrenia, New Formations, 17 (1992), 1625 (p. 16).
51. Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 76.
52. Li-Young Lee, Persimmons, in Rose, pp. 1719. All
subse-quent references to this edition are given in the text.
53. Zhou Xiaojing, Inheritance and Invention in Li-Young
Lees Poetry, MELUS, 21:1 (1996), 11332, p. 123.
54. Li-Young Lee, in Earl G. Ingersoll (ed.), Breaking the

Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (New York:
BOA Editions, 2006), p. 94.
55. Lyn Hejinian, Barbarism, The Language of Inquiry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 326.
56. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 7.
57. Alberto Baltazar Urista, Aztln: Chicano Journal of Social
Sciences and the Arts, 1.1 (1970), ivv.
58. Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda (eds), This Bridge
Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color
(Berkeley: Third Women Press, 2002), p. liv.
59. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Poetry Saved My Life: Interview with
Lorna Dee Cervantes, MELUS, 32.1 (2007), 16380 (p. 178).
60. Gloria Anzalda, Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World
Women Writers, in Jennifer Browdy de Hernndez (ed.), Women
Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean
(Cambridge, MA: South-End Press, 2005), pp.
7990 (p. 85).
61. Anzalda, Speaking in Tongues, p. 85.
62. Lorna Dee Cervantes, Refugee Ship, in Emplumada
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), p. 41.
63. Norma Alarcn, The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called
My Back and Anglo American Feminism, in Hctor Caldern and
Jos David Saldvar (eds), Criticism in the Borderlands Studies in
Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 2839 (p.
36).
64. Louis Reyes Rivera, Introduction, in Sandra Mara Esteves
Yerba Buena: Dibujos y Poemas (New York: Greenfield Review,
1980), p. xvii.
65. Juan Bruce-Novoa, cited in Nina M. Scott, The Politics of
Language: Latina Writers in Unites States Literature and
Curricula, MELUS, 19.1 (1994), 5771 (p. 61).
66. Ibid. pp. 634.
67. See Chapter 3.
68. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1989).
69. Charles Bernstein, Poetics of the Americas, Modernism/
Modernity, 3.3 (1996), 123 (p. 7).
70. Charles Bernstein, Thoughts Measure, in Contents Dream
(Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), p. 81.
71. Bernstein, Poetics of the Americas, p.
11. 72. Ibid. p. 19.
73. cris cheek, cited in Assembling Alternatives, p. 248.
74. Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics, p. 2.
75. Ibid. p. 3.
76. Ibid. p. 8.
77. Tusiata Avia, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (Wellington:
Victoria University Press, 2004). All subsequent references
78. Dave Gunning, Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet: Burdens of
Representation and Anxieties of Influence, Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, 43.3 (2008), 95109 (p. 96).
79. Gunning, Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet, p. 98.
80. Daljit Nagra, Look We Have Coming to Dover (London:
Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 15. All subsequent references to
81. Gunning, Daljit Nagra, Faber Poet, p. 107.
Conclusion
I n his poem Killing Time, Simon Armitage describes a human-

oid built out of technological bric-a-brac. Far from the utopian-ism
of early twentieth-century conceptions of the robotic human,
Armitages creature is a monkey gone wrong with loud speakers
for earlugs and a microphone tongue.1 This creature, with body
parts made from communication and information hardware, sub-
sists on news and information networks, even having a mouse for a
hand. We are told that observers sit at the monkeys feet switched
on and tuned in (p. 4), while the creature is sated by its consump-
tion of electronic information: After booting up with a virtual fart /
it flickered and started to sing (p. 4). Armitages humorous if
dystopic poem exhibits an anxiety about our relationship with
technology; any technological advance is portrayed with a corre-
sponding brutish behaviour.
Do all poets share Armitages concerns? If not, how does tech-
nology impact upon our reading of the present and future scene of
contemporary poetry? It has become somewhat axiomatic, in con-
sidering poetry of the early twentieth century, to equate the advent
of new technologies with a corresponding impact upon literary
form. The genuine impact of the Internet upon contemporary poetry
is less immediately quantifiable. However, one element is evident
in considering twenty-first-century poetry: the exchange of
instantly accessible information has an impact upon the content and
texture of writing. Certainly, not all poets share Armitages
alliance of networked information with brutishness. American poet

Juliana Spahr, for example, admits in an interview from 2003:
Now I cant imagine how one wrote poetry before the Internet.
When I write poetry I spend a lot of time with search engines like
Google and Nexis.2
My conclusion offers a reading of the impact of multimedia and
web technologies upon poetic language and form. The inflection of
web technologies as we will see in the case of Claudia Rankine
can result in creating mock-epic poems that juxtapose a litany of
facts with personal meditation. For some poets the overwhelming
perception of a vast information resource is perceived as a threat.
To others, such as John Cayley, the possibilities of technology are
celebrated as a site for visual and textual experimentation,
otherwise known as electronic writing. These sites do not share
the identity of magazines, presses or poetry organisations, but are
conceived primarily as websites. Other poets consider the Internet
as a tool of poetic composition, and chance operations such as
Flarf poetry. Most obviously, the Internet enables a mass audi-
ence and speedy dissemination. On one level this dissemination can
be of poetic material itself to a broader audience such as in the
response to 100 Poets Against the War.3 From a further
perspective, new technologies enable the awareness of breaking
news material instantly, which proves vital to the work of Labour
activist and poet Mark Nowak. It will become evident that poetry is
always grappling and responding to the new be it new artistic,
scientific or technological developments. But we might also need to
consider whether new technologies can overall be viewed as a
panacea to political activism, or as supplement to more traditional
forms of response and protest.
WHAT IS ELECTRONIC WRITING?
The proliferation of media technologies over the past decades and

the possibilities that they offer in the construction of literary texts
have invariably impacted on the composition of poetry in a digital
age. The critic of contemporary poetry is well accustomed to
accessing materials through digital archives, or entering into con-
conclusion 209
versations and debates through litservs as well as through individ-

ual blogs. Poets such as John Cayley, Peter Finch, Ingrid Ankerson,
Megan Sapnar and Jenny Weight have all used web technologies,
computer programming and multimedia presentations in different
ways with varying intentions. One of the key commentators on the
impact of technology and literature, N. Katherine Hayles, argues
that the umbrella term electronic literature or electronic writing
(which might characterise some of the work by the poets mentioned
above), can be thought of as excluding print literature that has
been digitized since it is by contrast digital born, a first genera-
tion digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be
4
read on a computer. Within the categorisation of digital object,
one might include the familiar term hypertext which could be
understood, according to Ted Nelson, as series of text chunks
5
connected by links which offer the reader different pathways. Or,
as Jakob Nielsen proposes: Hypertext is non-sequential writing, a
directed graph where each node contains some amount of text or
other information . . . Hypertext should also make users feel that
they can move freely through the information according to their
6
own needs. Other categories we might associate with digital
forms could be interactive fiction, generative texts, installation
video and sound poetry. Poet-critics, such as Loss Pequeo Glazier,
consider that there is an ongoing conversation between electronic
writing and a tradition of experimental verse, that the digital field in
effect extends a published tradition. For poet Brian Stefans,
electronic writing encapsulates a compendium of identifications.
His online entry What is Electronic Writing? offers a most useful
7
overview.
Stefans argues that electronic writing could be thought of as a
genre in its own right, but at its most general it takes advantage of
the possibilities afforded by digital technology such as the
Internet, or graphics programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop, or
animation / audio / interactive programs such as Flash in their
creation and presentation. Most importantly, he suggests that the
forms that the writing may take are informed by new ways of
thinking brought on by the way digital technology has impacted our
world. Specific to poetry, he identifies the following: the
hypertextual work, a poetic narrative which enables interaction,
the animated poem where the viewer or reader is not asked to do

anything but watch and listen while the text performs, con-ceptual
blogs or websites, word toys where the user is invited to play
with an experimental interface in effect creating her own text,
poetic works which are generated by computer programme, and
documentary websites such as UBU.com which Stefans credits as
offering a collection of concrete, audio and avant-garde video
files. In addition he adds collaborative poetic practices which take
advantage of the forms of communication peculiar to electronic
media such as email. It should be noted that the recent CD-ROM
anthology Electronic Literature Collection (also available online at
http://collection.eliterature.org), advances the following expla-
nation of poetic electronic writing. Poetry in this context can be
understood as:
Writing native to the electronic environment is under con-

tinual construction (poiesis) by its creators and receivers.
Works of electronic literature are poietic, in this sense,
and are often constructed by strategies analogous to those
found in experimental print poetry, or cinema, as well as by
strate-gies native to the digital environment. 8
In this definition electronic poetry straddles two objectives: it

establishes an ongoing conversation with an established trajec-
tory of experimental writing while also highlighting an
electronic process of revision and remaking.
CONTENT-SPECIFIC ELECTRONIC WRITING: JOHN

CAYLEY, JENNY WEIGHT, INGRID ANKERSON AND
MEGAN SAPNAR, REINER STRASSER AND M.D.
COVERLEY
Anglo-Canadian poet John Cayley is one of the most established

of electronic poets. He began experimenting with compositional
tech-niques on personal computers during the late seventies.
Speaking retrospectively, Cayley notes:
conclusion 211
There were a small number of practitioners, a small number of

systems for composing text in digital media and a growing
realization that at some indeterminate point in the future . . .
text and textual practice would migrate to the new writing
space of networked programmatons.9
Cayleys work windsound, winner of the 2001 Electronic Literature
Award for Poetry, can be labelled under the following categories:
ambient, appropriated texts, audio, multilingual and text
movie.10 It is not an interactive work, but demands that the reader
watch carefully the morphing letters on the screen. Initially, a
paragraph forms that eventually is set and spoken in English. Sound
recordings of wind and ambient noise are also ever-present.
Immediately lyrical, the opening includes lines such as taut winds
listen as the inn-keepers footsteps fade deep across the court-yard.
Cayleys text is algorithmically generated, that is words and letters are
gradually replaced onscreen, chronicling a move-ment from illegibility
to legibility that is constantly reviewed on a twenty-three-minute
program. The work includes intertexts from Cayleys own translation
of a song lyric Cadence: Like a Dream by Qin Guan (10491100),
which also is subject to textual mor-phing based on letter replacement.
Stefans suggests that Cayley has exploited the programmaton the
poetic object that is both literary language and the language of code. 11
Hints of a psycho-logical landscape emerge and retreat in lines such as
long sunk long drowned in the far waters of the night and I cannot
sleep. In her adjudication of windsound, Heather McHugh proposes
that the work challenges established reading practices by revealing the
power of letters, even as it plays with the limits of literal intelligi-
bility and explores the power of sequences, even as it plays with non-
sequitur.12 Central to Cayleys poetics is that electronic media enable
the creation of provisional yet dynamic communities, since he argues
that: On the net and in new media this potentially and in a number
of demonstrable instances translates to the spawning of radical,
marginal, evanescent, provisional text art communities and
collaborations that come together in software virtuality.13
Jenny Weights Rice (1998) by contrast, depends on hypertex-

14
tual links. Enacting a travelogue, this interactive travel poem
requires that the reader select her way through sixteen items of
tourist memorabilia from Vietnam, including a hotel information
card, a tin of lip balm and a fragment of manuscript. Each object
reveals a narrative, giving sixteen aspectual readings of Vietnam.
One direction, clicking on a small red cardboard box with a croco-
dile branded upon it, reveals that: The previous things never /
happened to me in Vietnam. I / acquired the Vietnam experience
/
on the internet before I left / Australia. It was vastly more /
efficient. Then, to get them out of / the way, I wrote these poems.
/
Whew. Radically transforming our expectations of the travel
narrative, Weight playfully indicates how we create the conditions
of our experience through a pre-established narrative. Moments of
lyrical intensity emerge from the setting of Vietnam such as: At
dawn a sampan splits / the silence on the / Mekong River. These
are placed in conjunction with ironic commentary on advertising
images: when one clicks on an icon for Wrigleys chewing gum,
three words are thrown up on the screen: TRUTH FREEDOM
HAPPINESS. Weight explains that Rice examines my experi-ence
as a Western tourist in Vietnam. Issues of colonialism, war, poverty,
and cultural difference arise. Technically and aestheti-cally, Rice
belongs to an early period of web-based poetry. It uses Shockwave,
15
popup windows, and frames.
Most alluring and self-referential is the search elicited in the
poem for the poem factory since The cyclo drivers say they know
where it is, / but we never actually get there. As we con-tinue
through the hypertext we are told On the third-last day / we found
the poetry factory which turns out to be a Temple of Literature
where / they made laws, / letters and literature for over 900 years.
Against the accolades made to scholars 500 years dead. They are /
engraved into the backs / of stone tortoises and we are faced with
the Army Museum / (where touching / photos of War Mothers /
serve like slaves / for poetry). On clicking a red script with
ideograms, Weight gives us a history lesson of the 12-point plan
which includes the stimulating poem, Long live the victorious
Resistance! and citations from Ho Chi Min extol-ling victory is
built with the people as / foundations. Through the hypertext
Weight presents an aspectual impression of Vietnam, rendering in
effect multiple Vietnams which succeed in fracturing
conclusion 213
the authoritative and often appropriative narrative of the travel

guide.
As a flash poem, Cruising (2001) uses oral recitation written
from the perspective of a young teenage girl driving in her
friends car up and down Main Street in small-town Wisconsin. 16
Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnars collaboration presents
filmic black-and-white images played at varying speeds and
sizes, showing neon signs, billboards and shop hoardings. In
addition a ribbon of script is also performed throughout, and can
be rewound or fast-forwarded in varying sizes. The recitation
describes a coming-of-age ritual in the form of cruising: we
wanted love maybe in a pick up truck. The poem mirrors the
cinematic visual world which is created, since the speaker
associates night rolling through Mary Jos fathers station wagon
with movie credits. As an example of visual poetry, Ankerson
and Sapnar enter into the adrenalin-fuelled world of the young
women. The speaker declares that, I was the skinny girl in the
bag sniffing the street like a dog and that they all were eyeing
life in a car we couldnt yet take to the world. Above all the
interaction required by Cruising creates an experiential poem, as
the authors notes indicate:
Cruising reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the

poem by requiring the user to learn how to drive the text. A
new user must first struggle with gaining control of the speed,
the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path
of the narrative . . . The viewer moves between reading text
and experiencing a filmic flow of images but cannot exactly
have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to
highlight the materiality of text, film, and interface. 17
Finally, Reiner Strassers poetic collaboration with M. D. Coverley,

ii in the white darkness (2004), explores the experience of
Alzheimers and Parkinsons patients.18 Building from the expe-
riential element that an electronic poem can offer, the text explores
dimensions of memory. Coverley states that: It was not the erasure
that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer
can identify.19 The interface consists of pulsing dots, which
once activated by a pointer, trigger different images and sounds

in varying combinations. As the poets explain:
In this process the experience of remembering and loss of

memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappear-
ance of words, pictures, animations and sounds. Memories
(readable with a general metaphorical meaning) are
unveiled and veiled in transition at the same time, arranged
by or using your own memory.20
The network of materials created by the random patterning of dots

in this electronic text is not dissimilar to the pulsating of synaptic
ends. An initial quotation guides the exploratory text: Just a
whisper at least of the persistence of this memory, this
forgetfulness. This linking of reminiscence with forgetfulness is an
overarching momentum of the work. We are shown images of
interiors to houses we cannot quite navigate, seascapes which fade
and words which appear, shift and refuse to be captured. An image
of sunrise has a loop of recurring text upon it: a sunrise is a sunrise
is sunrise. Another click on a dot leads to a blurred image of a
passing train with a successive display of words: pass by / passed
by / past. The possibility of simultaneously accessing and viewing
these images and words makes for a densely textured interactive
poem. These processes of encountering memories reinforce the
complexities of mnemonic patterns which guide life histories. As
the text itself asks, we build our history thru the experience of our
life / do we lose our history when we lose our memory?
ELECTRONIC EXPERIMENTATION AND LANGUAGE:

PETER FINCH AND TREVOR JOYCE
Poets whose work is read in conventional print format often engage

with electronic media as a way of enquiry, experimentation with
form, and collaboration. Peter Finchs poetry is engaged with an
inventive rewriting of the Welsh cultural landscape. There is often
something distinctly uncanny about the spaces that his poetry
creates. Psychoanalytically, this sense of cultural defamiliarisation
conclusion 215
could be read in Freudian terms as unheimlich, when a quotidian

over-familiarity is dispersed in a synchronous haunting. Finch has
systematically experimented with methods of rewriting origi-nal
documents, poems, essays and manifestos. These techniques
include filleting a government text such as the poem Words begin-
ning with A from the Governments Welsh Assembly White
Paper, which introduces key phrases from cultural policy making.
Finch in the 1980s went as far as to create a computer program that
aimed to create the archetypal Anglo-Welsh poem:
Back in the early 80s when the best home computer in the
world was the BBC B with 32k memory, no printer and a
cassette-tape A-drive I wrote a program in Basic which would
compose Anglo-Welsh poems for me. I set up a number of
word pools containing the sort of vocabulary the Anglo-Welsh
were famous for sheep, stipple, cariad, hillside, hiraeth,
chapel, pit and then a couple of rules for how these words
could be combined. Up it all came on screen.
slate fences on farmers hillsides,

shrouded cockles and grass-polished
deacons, the nation majestically watered. 21
Drawing from techniques of ostranenie or defamiliarisation, Finch

enacts a dialogue with earlier modernist techniques and experi-
mentation, which enables him, however randomly, to interrogate a
legacy of Anglo-Welsh poetry. It is this sense of a recuperated and
adaptive modernism which energises a reading of Welsh cultural
history and its evolution without retreating to struggles with poetic
precedents, and even in this early example of experimentation, by
using technology as an impertinent wordsmith. His ongoing cyber-
textual R. S. Thomas Information Project relies for its formation
on the hypertext.22 The work presents information on the Anglo-
Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, instructed by biography, bibliography
and Thomass own texts. Finch declares that Thomass vocabulary
is broken down and re-ordered and filled with fixed and random
links. There are side leaps into descriptions of some of his recent
mind-states and into critical coverage of his work (appropriately
redrawn and reworked).23 But most central to the work is that it

comes into being digitally and has not existed in any prior form:
The information (the essence of the web) becomes a new

piece of creative work in itself and is then, in turn, remade
to become further information as an end in itself . . . The
poem is never finished only abandoned certainly this
one. And it simply cannot exist in any other medium. 24
For Irish poet Trevor Joyce, electronic information technolo-

gies offer possibilities as well as problems of surveillance. Joyce
has approached electronic resources as a field for exploration in
a collaborative project entitled Offsets. Including poets cris
cheek, Alison Croggon, Billy Mills and Mairad Byrne, the
project was dependent on submissions to create a collaborative
poem, using a structure not dissimilar to a listserv and asking
poets to compose by free association. Marthine Satris comments
that, as the electronic submissions increased, the identification of
individual authorship became more difficult:
One loses the flow that gives each series of poems its
cohesion, and so essentially what results is that in this
mode of publi-cation, the authors individuality is
subsumed to the group poetics, as they are required to be
influenced by someone unknown, and that first persons
words are then added to, sometimes in very similar form to
what they wrote. There is no ownership of the poem, no
copyright, and it would be challenging to say the least to
pick out the Irish vs. the British vs. the Icelandic vs. the
born in Ireland but now lives in the USA, as each addition
to the poem incorporates the idiom of at least one other. 25
Joyces poetic sequence Syzygy (1997), was dependent for its

composition upon the transformation of twelve lyric poems by a
computer spreadsheet. The sequence also evokes medieval poets
Guillaume de Machauts cancrizans, which, as Joyce explains, is a
musical form where one or more parts proceed normally while the
imitating voice or voices give out the melody backwards.26 Yet, his
conclusion 217
work also shows an acute awareness of how electronic data do

not work in our interest. Joyce comments about the sinisterly
entitled Data Shadows:
The data shadow cast by an individual in a series of elec-

tronic transactions (via ATM, credit card or Internet usage
for example) can be assembled into a pattern which will
allow a profile of that person to be developed, including
personal habits and buying power and preferences.
Information col-lected on one context is routinely re-used
in entirely unan-ticipated and even hostile ways without the
knowledge or consent of the individual involved. (p. 239)
This poem combines data, technological and ecological language with

the presentation of an unnamed landscape of no definite historical
time. Data Shadows makes us aware of systems hunger, dear
instruments, the clock, databases (p. 167), as well as sys-tematic
breakdowns (p. 167) and behaviour banks. The sequen-tial repetition
of key clauses in the poem affirms a systematic industry at work, a
world of data retrieval without managed rivers or cultivated fields /
only human bodies massed in their billions / will flash before you here
(p. 168). The unsettling decompositional process outlined in the
opening, with its swarming vermin that / disarticulate the fast frame
(p. 163), is allied to a landscape of data
a vastness stretching towards all horizons (p. 168). Joyces
ironic use of the childish phrase losers keepers finders weepers
(p. 165) alerts us to the dystopic scene of managing information.
POETS PLAYGROUND: FLARF POETRY
The Internet has spawned a loosely defined movement of poets

(particularly in the USA) who use Internet search engines as a tool
for composition of what is sometimes known as spam poetry,
Google sculpted poetry, but more often than not as Flarf poetry.
Michael Gottlieb proposed that Flarf is a self dubbed group of
young poets mainly associated with both east and west coasts. 27 He
adds that: A defining characteristic of their work can be said
to be the embrace of the dizzying opportunities proffered to those

who are inclined to engage in chance-generated poetry, or artistic
composition, by the stunningly voracious, simply overwhelming
28
power of the Internets search engines. The texts can veer from
whimsy, with a focus on bizarre and humorous facts, to collabora-
tive enterprises. Flarf was coined as a descriptive term by Gary
Sullivan, and has been described as the first recognizable move-
ment of the 21st century, as an in-joke among an elite clique, as a
marketing strategy, and as offering a new way of reading creative
writing.29 A loose grouping emerged in 2001 under an email list
entitled The Flarflist. As Sullivan adds, The Flarflist Collective is
hardly the first e-mail based collaborative enterprise, but it has
been, despite the relatively occult nature of the project, one of the
most visible.
A special edition of the online journal Jacket (2006) was
dedi-cated to Flarf poetry and focused upon the work of early
key names associated with the collective impetus. These
included Benjamin Friedlander, Anne Boyer, Drew Gardner, K.
Silem Mohammad, Rod Smith and Christina Strong. Turning to
an example of col-laborative web-based work gives a sense of
how Internet informa-tion and poetry collide with one another.
In Infinity Revisited, the poets have collaged elements of
information from animal experimentation reports as a basis to
their collaboration: As I said to my Spontaneously Obese Rat
Friend, I said.30 We are told that the aim of the poem is to
assess weather produced from rat feed, grain, / and four doses.
Using the language of scientific report, the poem asserts:
The study used 480 male and female rats

and their little rat cell phones (under Simulated Microgravity)
which did not have cancer. One will study acupuncture.
The other will look at the old rats.
Dan Hoy notes that using the Internet as a collage machine

presents ethical dilemmas to the poet. He asks: The flarfists may
be aware of the webpage from which they borrow material, but the
only reason theyre aware of that webpage is because Google (or
AskJeeves, or Yahoo!, or . . .) showed it to them so the question
conclusion 219
is, are they aware of why theyre aware of that webpage? 31 Hoy
contends that Flarfists need to recognise that business and market
interests often dictate the results that search engines feature as their
most immediately popular. He adds: Do they wonder how it is that
their poem is determined as it is that is, of the process at work on
their work by an outside force, one not divine or natural but
corporate? This is a fundamental aesthetic concern as well as a
socioeconomic one. It should be recognised that for most Flarfists
the Internet is a perfect playground for creating biting playful social
critique and satire, but an awareness of the data offered must also
be regarded with a sceptical eye.
DOCUMENTATION AND POETRY: MARK NOWAKS COAL

MOUNTAIN ELEMENTARY
The possibility of making a politically responsible poetry from

Internet source materials is evident in the work of labour activist
and poet Mark Nowak. His recent book of poems Coal Mountain
Elementary (2009) combines photo-document, reportage, govern-
ment reports, workers testimony and academic primers. 32 One
could even add that Nowaks role is as an arranger or compositor of
source material. Nowak in his Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist
Poetics II makes it clear that poetry must be linked with political
activism. He asks: As the US economy transitions from a modern-
ist manufacturing economy to late capitalisms service economy,
what would a service economy poetry and poetics look like and
who among us is prepared to step forward and imagine it? 33 The
ques-tions that Nowak seeks to address are enacted through poetry
and through on-the-ground organizing work in corporate bookstores
and throughout working-class communities and anti-capitalist
34
social movements. He adds that his own poetics are a form of
writing that is to me, dialogue and dialectical materialism, and
documentary and drama all rolled into one, writing as a vehicle
35
through which I form and inform.
Coal Mountain Elementary juxtaposes three categories of source
material, which are interspersed throughout the volume and com-
bined with photographs taken by Nowak and Ian Teh. Nowak
places in bold, verbatim extracts from the transcripts of testimony

of mineworkers who survived a methane gas blast in Sago, West
Virginia, on 2 January 2006, when twelve miners lost their lives
and fourteen were rescued. The testimonies were recorded between
17 January 2006 and 19 June 2006 and the 6,300 pages uploaded
36
to the West Virginia mine safety website. Secondly, Nowak uses
three lessons excerpted from the American Coal Foundations
37
Lesson Plans. Finally, sources placed in italics throughout focus
on Chinese mining disaster news reports and bulletins accessed
from the web. Nowaks relentless use of news material informs the
sick-ening regularity of mineworkers deaths to this end he has
also established an ongoing web page which records recent
disasters and reports.38 The dispersal of these different documents
enables the distinct textures of pedagogical instruction, intimate
account and reportage to reflect upon one another. Frequently,
Nowak uses these materials against one another as ironic
commentary, or coun-terpoint. A deliberate contrast is created by
his juxtaposition of an extract from a lesson plan and a report of a
mine blast in the Sihe Coal Mine in North Chinas Shanxi province:
Procedure (cont):
5. Have each student

purchase mining
equipment (flat and round
toothpicks and paper clips).
More than one piece of
equipment may be purchased,
but no tools may be shared among
students Sell a flat toothpick for $2,
A round toothpick for $4
And a paper clip for $6.
Sell replacement tools when necessary. (p. 110)
A colliery gas blast on Wednesday killed at least 23 miners and

sickened 53 others in North Chinas Shanxi Province, local mine
safety authorities said yesterday. Altogether 697 miners were
working in the pit when the blast went off around 7:00 p.m. at
conclusion 221
the Sihe Coal Mine under the State-owned Jincheng Mining

Group, said an official with the provincial coalmine safety super-
vision bureau who declined to be named. No more deaths will
occur in the mine as the rest of the miners are all safe, Tai Jie,
an employer of the general office of the mining group, told China
Daily in a telephone interview yesterday. She was the only
person on the managerial staff who could be reached to comment
on the fates of the more than 600 miners. The tragedy happened
on the fourth day of the Year of the Dog, according to the lunar
calen-dar. Local sources told China daily that most of the miners
were from villages nearby who had hoped to earn some extra
money by working during the Spring Festival holiday. (p. 111)
The first extract is an attempt by the American Coal Foundation to

integrate the processes of mining as a pedagogical classroom game,
illustrated by cookie mining (or removing the chocolate chips
from cookies). The overall aim of the exercises is to find ways of
max-imising profit. Nowaks scathing juxtaposition of these
materials foregrounds the disparity between toothpicks, paperclips,
human bodies and machinery. Coal Mountain Elementary through
its arrangement and filleting of this primer communicates
contempt for the intrusion of corporate interests into the teaching of
elemen-tary school mathematics. This is highlighted with a later
extract which encourages: Working in tandem to complete the
profit/loss worksheet might be helpful for those with math-related
learning disabilities (p. 130). On the facing page the citation from
China Daily reports in bald facts the Sihe Coal Mine disaster and
the sub-sequent inability of authorities to immediately comment or
accept any responsibility. The bare reportage does, however,
present a humanising of the disaster with the general comments on
nearby villagers aiming to earn extra income by working through
the holiday. Compare these rather clinical statements with an
extract from one of the Sago testimonies:
When we got back to the fresh air base, the backup

team had performed a task that we were initially sent in
to recover the first miner that they located. And he was
on a stretcher that was loaded in another scoop in
the intake, but he wasnt in a body bag. So our team

took the bag over and prepared him to be brought out.
Otherwise he was just covered up in a blanket. And it
wasnt very I dont want to paint a disparaging
comment. It wasnt really a professional, I guess, way of
bringing the gentleman out. He was strapped on this
backboard with a blanket covering him up. So we took
him off the backboard and put him in a body bag, put
him back on the stretcher. And I said backboard, but I
think it was a stretcher. Put him back on the scoop. And
then we waited for further instructions from command.
(p. 98)
The graphic human cost of mining is made evident as well as the

co-workers desire to enact the retrieval of bodies with respect
and dignity, hence the reference to the gentleman and ideas of
professionalism. Apparent also is the workers grief and shock,
which are indicated in the conflicting reporting of backboard
and stretcher. The extract conveys the traumatic scenes await-
ing accident response teams, and how the tally of numbers
reported by newsgathering agencies translates into immediate
experience.
It is important to note that Nowaks work builds upon a tradition
of poetry as documentary in American poetry. Earlier poets writing
in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Muriel Rukeyser and Charles
Reznikoff, used poetic forms as a way of examining social inequity
through their own investigations. Examples are Rukeysers serial
poem The Book of the Dead (1938) and Reznikoffs account of the
fate of Jewish families in Holocaust (1975), which was composed
solely of Holocaust survivor testimony taken from twenty-six
volumes of documentation of the Eichmann and Nuremberg trials.
There are parallels that can be drawn between Rukeysers inves-
tigation of one of the worst industrial accidents at Gauley Bridge,
West Virginia, and Nowaks work. In examining Union Carbides
tunnelling of the Gauley tunnel, and the subsequent cases of recur-
ring silicosis amidst miners (due to mismanagement of health and
safety issues), Rukeysers documentary sources included local
geography, medical reports, design plans, congressional reports,
conclusion 223
personal testimonies and accounts of legal action. The arrange-

ment of these materials, combined with lyric interludes, creates
in Rukeysers work a poetry that can extend the document. 39 In
a similar way, Nowaks organisation of web-based materials into
a poetic form creates a composition that highlights the cruelty of
social inequities in a way that a governmental report cannot. Tim
Dayton comments that Rukeyser challenges any poetics that
removes poetry from the ugliness and conflict of the real world
of labor and politics.40 Daytons comment is clearly applicable
to the contemporary industrial landscape explored by Coal
Mountain Elementary.
TEXTURED INFORMATION: JOSHUA CLOVER AND

CLAUDIA RANKINE
Hazel Smiths Visibility and the Generation of the Text asks us to

consider how we quantify ideas of poetic form at a time when
twenty-first-century formats challenge our vocabulary for ideas of
time, space and reception. Smith suggests that reader inter-activity,
real-time imaging, morphing and text generation can all produce
textual variability . . . new media has the capacity to change how
we think about textual variability in general both on and off the
41
page. Already we have seen how new media and information
technology offer ways for sourcing material, perform-ing poetry,
organising material as well as enabling political poetry. Finally, we
can offer a reflection on how interaction with global information
networks may impact on poetic form and poetic lan-guage, as well
as the representation of subjectivity in the contem-porary poetry
volume. Joshua Clover and Claudia Rankines poetry offers insights
into how poetic language responds to the pressures of a perceived
giddying arena of information. In a poetic manifesto Clover draws
attention to the premise of superinformation:
Data is a phenomenon of life organized by survival; super-

information hangs out near where the waves of data crash
against the seawall of the sublime, mixing metaphors in the
infinite. Superinformation is a manifesto; the manifesto is
the most passionate hoax. Categories are preparation for

thinking, but the mighty superinformationists are no Boy
Scouts.42
This combination of different textures of writing and the

pressures exerted by rapid movements between different forms
of language are evident in Clovers volume The Totality for Kids
(2006).43 In Early Style language is presented promenading
around the failures of the codex (p. 8). Whiteread Walk takes
on the role of nineteenth-century Charles Baudelaires Parisian
flneur, or walker of the cityscape. Strange and unexpected
formulations of language appear as the speaker is identified with
the illbiqui-tous promenaders near the square, which becomes
part of what Clover refers to as social forms of grieving (p.
56). Far from being offered a direct spatial commentary upon
Georges Haussmanns Parisian boulevards, we are thrown into
sonic overload in hardcore Autumnophage echolocation (p.
56). This phrase draws reference to the sensory overload of
extreme music in a neologism which conveys seasonal shifts and
repeated sound. The poem then closes with a visual implant of
Brooklyn Bombs over Baghdad (p. 56). Whiteread Walk is a
poem which multitasks: it simultaneously explores city space in
tandem with a focus on American foreign policy.
Finally, Claudia Rankines Please Dont Let Me Be Lonely
(2004) examines the possibilities for autobiography by combining
44
the format of her work with media imagery and commentary.
Diverse texts ranging from photographs, TV news, labels on
pharmacy bottles, Google and medical textbooks prompt the telling
of a personal meditation which splays in different directions. The
nar-rative of Mr Tools, the only person in the world (p. 71) with
an artificial heart, prompts one such meditation:
Mr Tools had the ultimate tool in his body. He felt its heavi-
ness. The weight on his heart was his heart. All his apparatus
artificial heart, energy coil, battery and controller
weighed more than four pounds. The whirr, if you are not
Mr Tools, is detectable only with a stethoscope. For Mr
Tools that whirr was his sign that he was alive. (p. 71)
conclusion 225
Rankine moves the personalised lyric into a realm of bizarre and

micro-narratives that fill newsprint and media networks. The
impact of solitude is made evident in the book, but co-exists
with a disturbing need to verify the sentiment through data and
infor-mation. Walking alone to her apartment one night, the
speaker meditates:
After we part and I am climbing the stairs to my apartment,

I think surely some percentage of women hasnt been
raped. I dont know though really. Perhaps this is the kind
of thing I could find out on Google. Then I think, maybe,
that what woman hasnt been raped could be another way
of saying this is the most miserable day of my life. (p. 72)
Moreover, the book dramatises how religion and science fiction

merge into a futuristic field of data and information. Responding to
the evangelist with her pamphlet BE LIKE JESUS, she is drawn
to reflect upon the character of Neo from The Matrix Reloaded: I
say aloud to Neo, be like Jesus (p. 121). Rankine adds:
Neo cant save anyone; Morpheus will have to have

another dream: the one in which salvation narratives are
pass; the one in which people live no matter what you
dream; the one in which people die no matter what you
dream; or no matter what, you dream. (p. 121)
Performing in between different texts in this way enables

Rankine to probe how autobiography and subjectivity are
formed and created. These tissues of intersecting and often-
found narratives recuperate a life story from an overwhelming
volume of competing data.
DISSEMINATING POETRY
My conclusion has attempted to show how poetry is responsive to

technological advancement, as well as the pressures that may be
placed upon poetic language in some future poetries. It remains to
be stated that technology has offered important avenues for the dis-
semination of poetry on a global scale. In entering the twenty-first
century, the possibilities inherent in a web-based dissemination of
poetry were realised with the creation of the e-book, 100 Poets
Against the War. The trilogy of chapbooks were first published
online on 27 January 2003 as a response to the threat of entry into
a war against Iraq by both the UK and USA. The editor, Todd
Swift, explains that the anthology was timed to correspond with the
appearance of Hans Blixs weapons inspections report to the United
Nations. As Swift adds, 100 Poets Against the War
may hold the record for being the fastest assembled global
anthology . . . Only the speed of the Internet, and the over-
whelmingly positive support of so many poets, who shared the
project with their colleagues and personal networks, could
have made it happen. These poets are from Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, England, Canada, Australia, India, France, America
and elsewhere; many are cultural and/or peace activists; some
45
are emerging poets, others very well-known.
The anthology has been followed by French, German and Brazilian
versions, which denotes quite literally a global poetic dissemina-
tion. The introduction to the electronic version made it clear that
poetry could have agency and a power for change through its
circulation of protest. The readers of the original version were
encouraged to spread the word about the 100 Poets Against the
War project in your community, and beyond. Technology and
poetry can thus make significant interventions in the public sphere.
The Retort group from the San Francisco Bay Area, reflecting upon
the subsequent global demonstrations against the Iraq war in
February 2003, concedes that:
One ingredient of the February dynamic was the appear-
ance on the world stage of something like a digital multi-
tude, a worldwide virtual community, assembled . . . in the
interstices of the net and that some of the intensity of the
moment derived from the actual experience of seeing or
hearing, feeling, facing up to an image of refusal become
a reality.46
conclusion 227
One fragile possibility is that poetrys conversation with

informa-tion technology imagines a possible reconvening of
community and political engagement. Such reconvening and
creation of communi-ties, however virtual they may be, can still
respond with agency in the face of adversity.
NOTES
1. Simon Armitage, Killing Time, in Killing Time (London:

Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 34. All subsequent references to
2. Joel Bettridge, A Conversation with Juliana Spahr, How 2.
Available online at www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2jour-
nal/archive/online_archive/v2_3_2005/current/workbook/
spa/media/spa.pdf.
3. Todd Swift (ed.), 100 Poets Against the War (Cambridge:
Salt, 2003). Available online as e-book at www.nthposition.
com/100poets0.pdf.
4. N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons
for the Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2008), p. 3. All the electronic writing discussed is
available online at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/index.
html.
5. Ted Nelson, cited in Loss Pequeo Glazier, Digital Poetics:
The Making of E Poetries (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2002), p. 87.
6. Jakob Nielsen, cited in Glazier, Digital Poetics, p. 87.
7. Brian Kim Stefans, What is Electronic Writing? 21
February 2006. Available online at www.arras.net/brown_
ewriting/?page_id=54. All immediate citations from
Stefans, unless noted, refer to this online source.
8. Contents by Keyword, in N. Katherine Hayles, Nick
Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland (eds),
Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. Available online
at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/aux/keywords.html.
9. Brian Kim Stefans, From Byte to Inscription: An Interview
with John Cayley, The Iowa Review Web (February 2003).
Available online at http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/

TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/cayley/index.html.
10. John Cayley, windsound. Available online at http://collec-
tion.eliterature.org/1/works/cayley__windsound.html. All
further citations from windsound refer to this online source.
11. Stefans, From Byte to Inscription.
12. Heather McHugh, cited in description of windsound. Available
online at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/cayley__
windsound.html.
13. Stefans, From Byte to Inscription.
14. Jenny Weight, Rice. Available online at http://collection.elit-
erature.org/1/works/geniwate__rice.html. All further cita-
tions from Rice refer to this online source.
15. Ibid.
16. Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar, Cruising. Available
online at http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/anker-
son_sapnar__cruising.html. All further citations from
Cruising refer to this online source.
17. Ibid.
18. Reiner Strasser and M. D. Coverley, ii in the white darkness.
Available online at http://nonfinito.de/ii. All further citations
from ii in the white darkness refer to this online source.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Peter Finch, Real Cardiff. Available online at www.peter-
finch.co.uk/btidc.htm.
22. Peter Finch, R. S. Thomas Information Project web page,
www. peterfinch.co.uk/depot.htm.
23. Peter Finch, Binary Myths: Andy Brown Interviews Peter
Finch. Available online at www.peterfinch.co.uk/binary.htm.
24. Ibid.
25. Marthine Satris, Paper Spaces and Spatial Places. Available
online at www.cltc.ucsb.edu/roundtables/papers/satris.doc.
26. Trevor Joyce, With the First Dream of Fire They Hunt the
Cold: A Body of Work 19662000 (Dublin: New Writers
Press, 2003), p. 237. All subsequent references to this
27. Michael Gottlieb, Googling Flarf, in Craig Dworkin (ed.),
conclusion 229
The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (New

York: Roof Books, 2008), pp. 199203 (p. 199).
28. Ibid. p. 199.
29. Gary Sullivan, Introduction, Jacket, 30 (2006). Available
online at http://jacketmagazine.com/30/fl-intro.html.
30. Flarf Collective, Infinity Revisited. Available online at
http:// mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com.
31. Dan Hoy, The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and
the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens when Poets Spend
Too Much Time Fucking Around on the Internet, Jacket, 29
(2006). Available online at http://jacketmagazine.com/29/
hoy-flarf.html.
32. Mark Nowak, Coal Mountain Elementary (Minneapolis,
MN: Minneapolis Coffee House Press, 2009). All
subsequent refer-ences to this edition are given in the text.
33. Mark Nowak, Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist Poetics II, in
Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (eds), American Poets in the
University Press, 2007), pp. 3334.
34. Ibid. p. 334.
35. Ibid. p. 334.
36. See www.wvminesafety.org/sagointerviews.htm.
37. See www.teachcoal.org/lessonplans/index.html.
38. Dedicated site for Coal Mountain Elementary, http://coal-
mountain.wordpress.com.
39. Muriel Rukeyser, Note, in US 1 (New York: Covici and
Friede, 1938).
40. Tim Dayton, Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeysers The Book
of the Dead, Journal of Modern Literature, 21:2 (19978),
22340 (p. 225).
41. Hazel Smith, Textual Variability in New Media Poetry, in
Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz (eds), Multiformalisms:
Communications, 2008), pp. 485516 (p. 512).
42. Joshua Clover, Once Against (Into the Poetics of
Superinformation), in American Poets in the 21st Century:
The New Poetics, p. 163.
43. Joshua Clover, The Totality for Kids (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2006). All subsequent references to this

44. Claudia Rankine, Please Dont Let Me Be Lonely (Saint
Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004). All subsequent
45. Todd Swift, 100 Poets Against the War.
46. Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts,
Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
(London: Verso, 2005), p. 4.
Student Resources
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
T here is an extensive range of materials available for students of

contemporary poetry on the Internet. Here is a cross-section of sites
representing a diverse range of work from essay and text-
based poems to performances, recordings and visual poetries.
General
Academi
www.academi.org
A Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for
Authors, Academi runs events, competitions (including the
Cardiff International Poetry Competition), conferences, interna-
tional exchanges, events for schools, lectures and festivals. It
offers resources for writers and information for readers and is
responsible for the National Poet of Wales project.
The Academy of American Poets

www.poets.org
Has a wide range of material on modern and contemporary
poets. A good site for background information, manifestos,
bibliographies and critical responses.
The Archive of the Now

www.archiveofthenow.com
An online and print collection of recordings, printed texts and
manuscripts, focused on innovative contemporary poetry written
or performed in Britain. The site is hosted by Queen Mary
College, London.
The Argotist
www.argotistonline.co.uk
Publishes non-mainstream contemporary poetry. Also offers
inter-views, reviews and critical works.
Australian Poetry Centre

www.australianpoetrycentre.org.au
A promotional site that offers archive material and information
regarding performances and events.
BEPC: British Electronic Poetry Centre static site

www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc
Launched in May 2002, a joint venture of the Contemporary
Poetics Research Centre in the School of English and
Humanities at Birkbeck College, the Poetic Practice Group at
Royal Holloway College, and the Department of English at
University of Southampton. The site offers a guide to the work
of contemporary British poets from an experimental tradition.
Contemporary Poetics Research Centre

www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc
This centre hosted by Birkbeck College London is a forum for the
study and performance of contemporary poetries, and research into
their historical, political and theoretical contexts. It holds readings,
performances, workshops, exchanges, seminars, lectures and
conferences. The site offers two web journals.
student resources 233
Electronic Literature Collection

http://collection.eliterature.org
Offers access to a range of contemporary electronic writing via
the site.
Electronic Poetry Center

http://epc.buffalo.edu
One of the earliest websites specialising in avant-garde and
experi-mental American poetry. Offers a vast amount of single
poet pages, criticism and discussions as well as oral poetries,
bibliographies and extracts from essays.
Electronic Poetry Review

www.epoetry.org
A US-based ezine spanning a range of contemporary poetry from
North America and beyond.
How2
www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal
This site specifies that it explores non-traditional directions in
poetry and scholarship by women. Provides critical material on
performance, ecology, poetry and poetics. Offers an extensive
archive of material.
Jacket
http://jacketmagazine.com
A vast online magazine from Australia which offers a variety of
English-language poetries. The archived issues in particular are
impressive. Issues can be thematised and Jacket covers a range
of issues from ecocriticism to feminism.
Meshworks: The Miami University Archive of Writing in

Performance
www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks
A site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound
recordings of writing in performance.
Modern Australian Poetry

www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/poetry
A showcase site for Australian poetry. Offers some useful links
and website resources.
National Poetry Foundation

www.poetryfoundation.org
Hosts a range of poetries and offers some practical guides to
poetry as well as information about reading, publications and
profiles of poets. A very comprehensive site.
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre

www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz
Offers online material and digital poetics, as well as more tra-
ditional text-based material. Includes native poetries as well as
archive material relevant to New Zealand.
Nthposition
www.nthposition.com
An online political magazine, offering poetry. Site which
initially circulated 100 Poets Against the War.
PennSound
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound
One of the most impressive and cavernous websites for contempo-
rary poetry and poetics. Offers up-to-date information, podcasts,
archived readings and discussions, all run through the University

of Pennsylvania Poetics programme.
Poemtalk
http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com
Downloadable as a podcast, this is a poetry show hosted by
PennSound and fronted by Al Filreis. A group of poet-theorists
discuss at length a single poem, often featuring archive poetry
readings. Versatile and often very enlightening.
The Poetry Archive

www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/home.do
Includes a wealth of contemporary and historic recordings, as
well as information for students and teachers.
Poetry Daily
http://poems.com
Showcases new work daily with featured poets. Also collates
essays from around the world to showcase the website for a
week. Essays are then archived for a year.
Poetry International Web

www.poetryinternationalweb.org
A site which covers a range of worldwide poetries ranging from
Australia to Zimbabwe, and in between. Offers introductions,
bibliographies, biographies and further links to poetry-related
websites.
The Poetry Library

www.poetrylibrary.org.uk
On the South Bank, the Poetry Library is the national public
library devoted to poetry. Contains a wealth of information and
many links to other websites.
poetrymagazines.org.uk
Gives access, with search facility, to some back issues from a range
of UK magazines from the Poetry Librarys archives, including:
Angel Exhaust; 10th Muse; Ambit; Fire; Oasis; Painted, spoken;
Poetry Nation; Shearsman; The Interpreters House; The
London Magazine.
Poetry Society
www.poetry.society.org.uk
Hosts National Poetry Day in the UK. Also has information
regard-ing the societys magazine Poetry Review. Information
regarding poets as well as poetry events in the UK.
Salt Poetry Directory

www.saltpublishing.com/links Folder/index.php
On the poetry publishers website, this dedicated resource lists:
agents, archives, authors, blogs, bookstores, centres, competitions,
conferences, courses, directories, festivals, funding, libraries, mag-
azines, organisations, prizes, publishers, radio shows, television
programmes, venues and workshops, worldwide.
The Scottish Poetry Library

www.spl.org.uk
Offers annual lists of the best Scottish poems and a range of
Scottish poetry.
Sillimans Blog
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com
American poet Ron Sillimans blog, which offers responses to
recent work as well as pithy essays on all kinds of poetic histories
and materials. Allied to the experimental vein in American poetry.
UBU
www.ubu.com
A site dedicated to non-writing-based texts: visual, concrete and
sound language spanning twentieth- and twenty-first-century
experimentation.
Publishers Websites
Arc: www.arcpublications.co.uk
Barque: www.barquepress.com
Bloodaxe: www.bloodaxebooks.com
Carcanet: www.carcanet.co.uk
Equipage: www.cambridgepoetry.org
Etruscan: http://llpp.ms11.net/etruscan/index.html
New Directions: www.ndpublishing.com
Salt: www.saltpublishing.com
Seren: www.serenbooks.com
Shearsman: www.shearsman.com
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Chapter 1: Lyric Subjects

How do contemporary poets present subjective states in their
work?
What are the characteristics of a discursive lyric?
Examine how a contemporary poet uses elegy to convey
intense emotion.
Consider the different ways that autobiography can be repre-
sented in contemporary poetry.
Explore how autobiography offers a way into exploring race
and ethnicity in the work of contemporary poets.
How do contemporary poets represent more than one perspec-
tive in their work?
Consider how two poets use the practice of self-portraiture as a
way of investigating the processes of writing and composition.
Is indeterminacy a compelling factor in writing the self

in contemporary poetry?
Explore how contemporary poets play with constructions of
subjectivity in their work.
How do poetic forms aid or hinder the representation of
subjec-tivity in recent poetry?
Chapter 2: Politics and Poetics

What do you consider Adorno meant by his statement to
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric? And how have
contempo-rary poets responded to his statement?
W. H. Auden famously stated that poetry makes nothing
happen. Do you agree?
How political is the poetry from 1980s Northern Ireland?
It has been suggested that language for the poet is always
politi-cal. Do you agree?
What do you understand by poetry acting as witness?
Examine the use of reportage in recent poetry.
Consider the role served by allegory in representing the
political in contemporary poetry.
How does poetry represent the perspective of the exile? Compare
two contemporary poets different approaches to com-
posing anti-war poems.
Why do contemporary poets often use challenging forms to
make a political statement?
Chapter 3: Performance and the Poem

Consider the importance of Charles Olsons Projective Verse
to ideas of performance in the work of recent poets.
Compare the way two poets present a poetic voice.
How does poetry perform a countercultural critique?
Examine how contemporary poetry uses jazz compositional
techniques as a method for poetic writing.
What do you understand by the term dub poetry?
Consider the relationship between Olsons ideas of open
form and an oral poetry.
What techniques do contemporary poets use to present

humour in their work?
Is there a relationship between the body and poetic perform-
ance?
Examine whether ideas of the performative aid a reading of
contemporary poetry.
How does poetry perform an understanding of gender in lan-
guage?
How spontaneous is performance poetry?
Chapter 4: Environment and Space

Consider the impact of ecocriticism on the work of contempo-
rary poets.
To what extent are contemporary poets suspicious of language
as a vehicle of representation?
Examine how two contemporary poets represent the impact of
environment on human communities.
Consider the relationship between civic spaces and the
everyday in the work of one poet.
Illustrate how contemporary poets reimagine spaces in their
work.
Examine how two poets map the cityscape in their work. What
do you understand by the term psychogeography? Consider the
relationship between the global and the local in the
work of a poet.
How do contemporary poets respond to the challenge of
writing an ecopoetics?
Chapter 5: Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries

As a global language, how is English made different by
poets from different countries?
Examine how the use of dialect creates a sense of affiliation to
a region.
Consider how class may be represented through poetry.
How do native cultures deal with the transformation of oral
story into poetic text?
What techniques do poets use to dramatise the intersection of

competing languages in their work?
How do two poets represent minority languages and identities
in English?
Is the relationship between minority languages and English in
the work of contemporary poets always a problematic one?
Is Charles Bernsteins configuration of an ideolectical
poetics particularly useful to an understanding of recent
poetic prac-tice?
Examine how poetic experimentation furthers the reinvention
of English use in poetry.
GLOSSARY
avant-garde
The term has a military origin (advance guard) and in the context
of the literary arts denotes work which is pathfinding, experimen-
tal, ahead of its time and exploratory. Often associated with a revo-
lutionary ambition; always associated with innovation.
cancrizans or cancrine
In Latin, meaning crab-wise. Poetry which reads both ways, as
a palindrome.
confessional poetry
The term is often confined to the work of poets in the 1950s and
1960s associated with what was termed a movement inward.
The poetry associated with confessionalism often examines and
reveals extreme states of being as well as states of violence. Yet
it is worth being reminded that there is also a strong element of
performance implicit in this revelatory impulse.
dialect
Often referred to as idiom, a language or manner of speaking
indicative of a particular class or regional identity. In poetry, the
term frequently denotes a deviation from so-called standard
English.
dub poetry
Allied to the Caribbean practice of speaking while DJing, often
called toasting. Dub poetry is often performed with music
depend-ent on a strong reggae beat, and is also associated with
ideas of spontaneity and political responsibility. Dub poets in the
past have used their poetry to comment on social inequities,
racism and violence.
ecocriticism
The study of literature and the environment with the aim of pro-
viding solutions for endangered environments. The work often
stresses its interdisciplinary nature. In the past ecoliterature would
often focus on idealised depictions of landscape and wilderness.
Increasingly ecocriticism and literature take into account the eco-
nomic and political forces which harm the earths sustainability.
electronic writing
Writing which is digitally born and not literature which has been
digitised. Often the practitioners embrace new media in innovative
ways, combing text with audio and visual imageries. Practices we
might associate with electronic writing forms could be interactive
fiction, generative texts, installation video and sound poetry.
elegy
Poetry of a commemorative nature, often to mark a death or
express an experience of mourning and loss.
epic poetry
A long narrative poem vast in scale and ambition, often addressing
the deeds of warriors and heroes. Frequently epics are attached to
ideals of nationhood embodying a countrys aspirations. The form
often contains references to myths, history, folklore and legends.
epistle
An intimate poem addressed to a close companion or friend,
often reading like a conversational letter in verse.
ethnopoetics
Often combining an interest in anthropology and linguistics, eth-
nopoetics considers non-Western and indigenous literatures
while questioning the division between so-called primitive and
civilised cultural production.
Flarf poetry
A poetry which is occasioned by text from the Internet. The title
covers an array of approaches, with some poets using the
Internet for chance operations, and others seeking humorous
narratives to arrange into poetic forms. For yet others it takes the
form of a range of different material sutured together with
disconcerting shifts in subject matter and texture.
found poetry
A form of poetic composition which takes texts from other
sources to create new work. Often the original texts are placed
into an entirely new context.
free verse
Poetry which has no regular meter or line length, often dependent
upon natural speech rhythms and musical counterpoint.
globalisation
Often associated with actions in mass media, corporate finance,
market trading, and the political negotiations where interests are
interlinked or interdependent across nations. What such processes
might mean for literary studies is complex, but for some critics it
can be seen as a celebration of multilingual practices and formal
approaches which are transnational. For others there is a fear that
globalisation will ultimately lead to a corporate similarity, in effect
challenging and eroding difference. Frequently these fears are
couched in relation to the fate of minority languages, in the face of
English as a global language.
hybridity
Literally means a mixture or mixing together, often contextualised
in terms of race and ethnicity. In literary production the term is
often associated with the creation of new transcultural forms.
identity poetics
The literary exploration of what is referred to as identity poli-
tics. Identity politics, premised upon distinctions between groups
according to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, finds
a fertile and often recuperative role in contemporary poetry.
Essentially identity politics focuses upon the experience of often
marginalised identities as an enabling possibility for political
discussion and action.
idiolect
A form of language unique to an individual or individual use. In
linguistics, however, the term is often used to refer to the speech
acts of a particular community.
intertextuality
An expansive term which is used to refer to the inclusion of
many texts or references within a work. For the literary arts,
intertex-tuality may also denote a history of earlier writing, as
well as the inclusion of contemporary cultural references.
lyric
A broad umbrella term to encompass a range of different poetries
often associated with the expression of the subjects wishes, desires
and recollections. Traditionally associated with music and song:
many contemporary poets insist on the musicality of their work. In
contemporary practice, the lyric has mutated into different forms.
An analytic lyric or self-reflexive lyric will often draw attention
to the linguistic textual making of its own utterance. A discursive
or expressive lyric offers the poets voice in a conversational
mode, often meditating on the world around her.
malapropism
The misuse of a word, or its use in a wrong context. For some
contemporary poets the error may be deliberate in a spirit of
play, humour or performance.
narrative poetry
Essentially a poem which tells a story, often traditionally divided
into three categories: epic, romance and ballad.
nation language
A term first coined by poet-theorist Edward Kamau Brathwaite.
It offers a challenge to the imperial correctness of English, and
acknowledges the infusion of different languages, idioms and
dialects spoken in Caribbean English.
panegyric
A praise poem, often celebrating an individual, institution or
group, and frequently associated with rhetorical prowess.
performance writing
A form of writing which stresses its interdisciplinarity and links
with performance. The field of performance writing can be
defined in its widest sense as the investigation of the
performative nature of language.
periphrasis
In Greek peri as a preposition means around, about or beyond.
Another equivalent term would be circumlocution, generally a
roundabout description of something. In poetry it can show itself as
a tendency to journey around an object or situation, often gen-
erated by the movement and patterning of words themselves, as
opposed to a direct recalling of events or action.
petrarchan sonnet
Named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco
Petrarch, the petrarchan sonnet is a fourteen-line poem of iambic
verse usually divided into two parts. The first eight lines are known
as an octave or octet, with a typical rhyming scheme of abbaabba.
The last six lines are known as the sestet. Petrarchan love poems
often feature a distant and unobtainable object of devotion.
phenomenology
A philosophical movement whose origins can be traced back to
the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Broadly speaking the aim of
phenomemology is to provide an objective account of the
nature of subjectivity, consciousness and how things are
perceived. Key practitioners associated with phenomenology are
Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger.
poetics
For our context it is useful to think of poetics as a philosophy of
poetry, the thinking of the art of poetic composition. Key early
philosophers and thinkers whose work is associated with the crea-
tion and discussion of a poetics are Aristotle, Horace and Dante.
The New Princeton Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics states that
poetics is at its most specific a systematic theory of poetry.
polyphony
At its most literal, the term refers to a work which has more than
one voice and is therefore multi-voiced. Users of the term often
pay homage to Mikhail Bakhtins theory of the novel as a demo-
cratic form of writing saturated or impregnated with different
types and levels of language, which undermine the univocal
nature of authoritative/authoritarian discourse.
psychogeography
Associated with the French theorist Guy Debord, the term refers
to inventive and experimental ways of representing the
landscapes and cityscapes around us, which extend beyond the
way they are represented in cartography (or mapping). As
Debord stated in 1955, psychogeography can be thought of as
the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the
geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of individuals.
terza rima
Associated with Dantes epic poems, terza rima consists of three
interlocking three-lined stanzas, in which the second line of each
one rhymes with the third line of the successive tercet.
villanelle
Originally used for pastoral poetry sometimes called chain
poetry. It is a strict traditional form which is fixed into five
three-lined stanzas or tercets with a final quatrain. The first and
third lines of the first tercet recur in alternation as a refrain in the
following stanzas, forming a final couplet.
POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Abbs, Peter, Earth Songs: A Resurgence Anthology of

Contemporary Eco-Poetry (Totnes: Green Books, 2002).
Allen, Donald (ed.), New American Poetry, 19451960
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Alvarez, Al (ed.), The New Poetry: An Anthology (London:
Faber & Faber, 1962).
Astley, Neil (ed.), New Blood (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1999).
Bertram, Vicki (ed.), Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women
Poets (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).
Bornholdt, Jenny, Gregory OBrien and Mark Williams (eds), An
Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (Melbourne:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
Burnett, Paula (ed.), The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English
(London: Penguin, 2005).
Caddel, Richard and Peter Quartermain (eds), Other: British and
Irish Poetry since 1970 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
Conquest, Robert (ed.), New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956).
Couzyn, Jeni (ed.), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Women
Poets: Eleven British Writers (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000).
France, Linda (ed.), Sixty Women Poets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1993).
Gioia, Dana, David Mason and Meg Schoerke (eds), Twentieth-
Century American Poetry (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 2003).
Heiss, Anita and Peter Minder (eds), Anthology of Australian
Aboriginal Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-
Queens University Press, 2008).
Herbert, W. N. and Matthew Hollis (eds), Strong Words: Modern

Poets on Modern Poetry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2000).
Hilson, Jeff (ed.), The Reality Book of Sonnets (Hastings: Reality
Street, 2008).
Hoover, Paul (ed.), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton
Anthology (New York: Norton, 1994).
Hulse Michael, David Kennedy and David Morley (eds), The
New Poetry (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1993).
Kinsella, John (ed.), Landbridge: Contemporary Australian Poetry
(Todmorden: Arc, 1999).
(ed.), The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry
(Camberwell: Penguin, 2008).
and Paul Henry (eds), The Salt Anthology of Contemporary
American Poetry (Cambridge: Salt, 2008).
Lasell, Michael and Elena Georgiou (eds), The World in Us:
Lesbian and Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (New York: Saint
Martins Press, 2001).
Leonard, John (ed.), Contemporary Australian Poetry: An Anthology
(London: Gollancz, 1991).
McClatchy, J. D. (ed.), The Vintage Book of Contemporary
American Poetry (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Markham, E. A., (ed.), Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the
West Indies and Britain (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989).
Marsack, Robyn and Andrew Johnstone (eds), New Zealand
Poetry (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009).
Mengham, Rod and John Kinsella (eds), Vanishing Points
(Cambridge: Salt, 2004).
Messerli, Douglas (ed.), From the Other Side of the Century: A New
American Poetry 196090 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Classics,
1994).
Miller, Kei (ed.), New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology
(Manchester: Carcanet, 2007).
Muldoon, Paul (ed.), The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish
Poetry
(London: Faber, 1986).
Ormsby, Frank (ed.), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern
Ireland Troubles (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992).
Paterson, Don and Charles Simic (eds), New British Poetry
(Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004).
Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellman and Robert OClair (eds), The

Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (New
York: Norton, 2004).
Rankine, Claudia and Juliana Spahr (eds), American Poetics in the
Rees-Jones, Deryn (ed.), Modern Women Poets (Newcastle:
Bloodaxe, 2005).
Roberts, AndrewandJonathanAllison(eds),PoetryandContemporary
Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002).
Ross, Jack and Jan Kemp (eds), New New Zealand Poets in
Performance (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008).
Rothenberg, Jerome (ed.), Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional
poetry of the Indian North Americas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
and Pierre Joris (eds), Poems for the Millennium
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Rumens, Carol (ed.), New Women Poets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1990).
Shepherd, Reginald (ed.), Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology
of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Denver, CO:
Counterpath Press, 2008).
Sinclair, Iain (ed.), Conductors of Chaos (London: Picador, 1996).
Swensen, Cole (ed.), American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of
New
Poetry (New York: Norton, 2009).
Thayil, Jeet (ed.), The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets
(Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008).
Tuma, Keith (ed.), Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and
Irish Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
General Resources
Buell, Lawrence, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature,
Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
Donnell, Alison and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds), The Routledge

Reader in Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, 1999).
Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004).
Matterson, Stephen and Darryl Jones, Studying Poetry (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2000).
Padley, Steve, Key Concepts in Contemporary Literature
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
Waugh, Patricia and Philip Rice (eds), Modern Literary Theory:
A Reader (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001).
Wisker, Gina, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
Wolfreys, Julian, Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002).
Contemporary Poetry Resources

Acheson, James and Romana Huk (eds), Contemporary British
Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996).
Alderman, Nigel and C. D. Blanton (eds), A Concise Companion to
Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).
Altieri, Charles, Self and Sensibility in American Poetry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry:
Modernism and After (London: Blackwell, 2006).
Armand, Louis, Contemporary Poetics (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2006).
Baker, Peter, Obdurate Brilliance: Exteriority and the Modern
Long Poem (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991).
(ed.), Onward Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (New
York, NY: Peter Lang, 1996).
Barry, Peter, Contemporary British Poetry and the City
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
, Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of
Earls Court (Cambridge: Salt, 2006).
Beach, Christopher, Poetic Culture: Contemporary Poetry Between
Community and Institu tion (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American

Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
(ed.), Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998).
Bernstein, Charles (ed.), The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry
and Public Policy (New York: Roof Books, 1990).
(ed.), Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Bertram, Vicki, Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and
Sexual Politics (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2005).
Boykoff, Jules and Kaia Sand, Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla
Poetry & Public Space (Long Beach: Palm Press, 2008).
Brinton, Ian, Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry since 1990
Broom, Sarah, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An
Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
Buell, Lawrence, The Future of Environmental Criticism
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
Butling, Pauline and Susan Rudy, Writing in Our Time:
Canadas Radical Poetries in English (19572003)
(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004).
Campbell, Matthew, The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary
Irish Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Caplan, David, Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry
and Poetic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Clark, Heather, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast
1962 1972 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Corcoran, Neil, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman,
1993).
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English
Poetry (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2007).
Damon, Maria and Ira Livingstone (eds), Poetry and Cultural
Studies: A Reader (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2009).
Davidson, Michael, The San Francisco Renaissance
, Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material
Word (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Dawes, Kwame and Kadija Sesay (eds), Red: Contemporary

Black British Poetry (Leeds: Tree Press, 2010).
Dsa, Attila, Beyond Identity: New Horizons in Modern Scottish
Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
Dowson, Jane and Alice Entwistle (eds), A History of Twentieth-
Century British Womens Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge
Draper, R. P., An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Poetry in
English (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).
Duncan, Andrew, The Failure of Conservatism in Modern
British Poetry (Cambridge: Salt, 2003).
Dworkin, Craig, The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century
Poetics (New York: Roof Books, 2008).
Finch, Annie and Susan M. Schultz (eds), Multiformalisms:
Communications, 2008).
Gardner, Thomas, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary
Poetry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).
Glazier, Loss Pequeo, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries
Goodby, John, Irish Poetry Since 1950: From Stillness into History
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Gregson, Ian, Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism:
Dialogue and Estrangement (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996).
Hayles, N. Katherine, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the
Literary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2008).
Hinton, Laura and Cynthia Hogue, We Who Love to be Astonished:
Experimental Womens Writing and Performance Poetics
Jeffries, Lesley and Peter Sansom, Contemporary Poems: Some
Critical Approaches (Sheffield: Smith/Doorstop Books,
2001).
Keller, Lynn, Re-making it New: Contemporary American
Poetry and the Modernist Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
Longley, Edna, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1986).
McGann, Jerome, The Point is to Change It: Poetry and

Criticism in the Continuing Present (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 2007).
MacGowan, Christopher, Twentieth-Century American Poetry
(London: Blackwell, 2004).
McGuire, Matt and Colin Nicholson (eds), The Edinburgh
Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009).
McHale, Brian, The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole:
Postmodernist Long Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2004).
Mark, Alison and Deryn Rees-Jones (eds), Contemporary Womens
Poetry: Reading/Writing/ Practice (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
2000).
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and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2005).
Nielsen, Aldon, Lynn and Lauri Ramey (eds), Every Goodbye Aint
Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans
Perloff, Marjorie, The Dance of the Intellect Studies in the Poetry
of the Pound Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1985).
, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of the Media
, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2004).
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(Cambridge: Salt, 2011).
Roberts, Neil, A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry
(London: Blackwell, 2003).
Rothenberg, Jerome, Poetics and Polemics 19802005
Severin, Laura, Poetry off the Page: Twentieth Century British
Women Poets in Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate,
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Vendler, Helen, The Music of What Happens (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1988).
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, Souls Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Index
Abrams, M. H., 4, 27 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 172

Adam, Helen, 9 Arac, Jonathan, 171
Adorno, Theodor, 60, 61, 85 Arendt, Hannah, 78
Cultural Criticism and Society, 60 Aristotle, 4
On Lyric Poetry and Society, 85 Armitage, Simon, 2078
Agnew, John, 137 Killing Time, 207
Alarcn, Norma, 194 Ashbery, John, 9, 19, 3943, 47
Alexander, Elizabeth, 19, 63, 64, 657 Novelty Love Trot, 40
Praise Song for the Day, 657 Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,
Allen, Donald, 3, 910 403
The New American Poetry, 3, 910 The One Thing That Can Save
Allsopp, Ric, 124 America, 40
Altieri, Charles, 28, 116 Auden, W. H., 5960
Alvarez, Al, 3, 89, 26 In Memory of W. B Yeats, 5960
The New Poetry, 3, 89 author, 312
The Writers Voice, 9, 26 autobiography, 32
Amis, Kingsley, 7 Avia, Tusiata, 21, 198
Anfal, 19, 801 Alofa, 1989
Angelou, Maya, 19, 645 O le pi tatau, 198
On the Pulse of Morning, 645 Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, 1989
Anglophone poetries, 2, 7, 18, 21 Aztln myth, 192
Ankerson, Ingrid, 209, 213
Cruising, 213 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 77, 1745, 191
Anzalda, Gloria, 193 Baraka, Amiri (Le Roi Jones), 9, 10, 13,
Apelles, 44 20, 1027, 109
Baraka, Amiri (cont.) Nothing is Black, Really Nothing,

AM/ TRAK, 1056 445
Black Art, 103 The Stinking Rose, 435
Expressive Language, 11, 103 bilingualism, 6, 20, 173, 1849, 1945
How do you Sound?, 103 Black Mountain School, 9
Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Black Power, 10
Wall, 105 Blair, Tony, 589, 77
KaBa, 104 Blanchot, Maurice, 51
Leadbelly gives an Autograph, Bolan, Eavan, 12
104 Boyer, Anne, 218
State/meant, 10, 103 Brathwaite, Kamau, 5, 378, 109, 195
Barthes, Roland, 312, 73, 1234 Breeze, Jean Binta, 12, 109
Death of the Author, 312 Brown, Mark, 58
The Grain of the Voice, 123 Browne, Laynie, 1617
Baudelaire, Charles, 224 Daily Sonnets, 17
Bavidge, Jenny, 153 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 1945
Bennett, Louise, 18 Buddhism, 10
Bergvall, Caroline, 5, 20, 1248 Buell, Lawrence, 133, 137, 157
Goan Atom, 1257 Burr, Zofia, 63
Bernstein, Charles, 5, 13, 19, 61, 726, Bush, George W., 77
1957 Butler, Judith, 98, 11617, 121
Aftershock, 74 Byrne, Mairad, 216
Broken English, 75
Girly Man, 745 cancrizans, 216
Its 8.23 in New York, 74 Caribbean (Creole) English, 378, 39
Letter from New York, 74 Carson, Ciaran, 69
Lost in Drowned Bliss, 75 Casey, Edward, 140
Poetics of the Americas, 5, 1957 Cayley, John, 5, 21, 208, 209, 21011
Report from Liberty Street, 74 windsound, 21011
Second War and Postmodern Celan, Paul, 48, 87
Memory, 61 Cervantes, Lorna Dee, 21, 185, 1925
Some of these Daze, 74 Emplumada, 1925
The Ballad of the Girly Man, 74 Freeway 280, 1945
The Folks Who Live on the Hill, Poema para Los Californios
75 Muertos, 1934
Berrigan, Ted, 16 cheek, cris, 197
Sonnets, 16 Chicana poetry, 193
Berryman, John, 8 Chow, Rey, 7
The Dream Songs, 89 Cixous, Hlne, 119
Bhatt, Sujata, 19, 39, 435, 47, 172 climate change, 161
A Colour for Solitude, 43 Clinton, William Jefferson, 63
index 257
orary n l
Clover, Joshua, , 3 , t
6, 2234 4 u
Leave the Cov 1 r
Manifesto erley a
9
Alone: A , M. l
Manifesto 5
D., ,
,6 ,
213
Once
14
Against (Into 1 1
the Poetics of ii in the
7
white 9
Superinfor 2
darkness, 7
mation),
21314
2234
C D
The Totality C
r a
for Kids, 224 r
e h
Whiteread o
Walk, 224 e l
g e
Cochran, Stuart, l
184 g n
e
Coleridge, o ,
y
Samuel, 26 n
,
Lyrical , B
Ballads, 26 e
Collingwood, R
A v
Luke, 87 o
l e
Coltrane, b
i r
John, e
s l
1056 r
o y
confessio t
n ,
nal ,
poetry, 8, ,
10 1
9 6
Conquest, 2
Robert, 3, 1
78, 10, c 6
D
13 r a
N e n
c t
ew o
r e
Line l
o ,
s, 3, i
s
78, s
s
10, a 4
13 - Davidson, Ian,
t
cont c 1456, 148
i
emp u
o
D 2 i
a 2 D c
v 3 o n
i de Certeau, v a
d Michel, 139 e rr
s The , a
o Practice of ti
n Everyday v
R
, Life, 139 de e,
i
M Machaut, 1
t
i Guillaume, 1
a
c 216 Debord, 2
,
h Guy, 151 d
a Introduction u
2
e to a b
Critique of 0
l, p
,
1 Urban o
0 Geography e
0 , 151 8 tr
D defamiliarisation 5 y,
a (ostranenie), 2
21415 7
v 0
dialect, 20, 147, ,
i
17381, 1957
e 1
dialogism, 188
, P 0
diffrance, 140
D a 7
Dimoc
o r
k, Wai
n s 1
Chee,
a l 2
172, D
l e
d 183 y u
, docum ff
7 entary , y,
D poetry, C
a 2223 a
8
y r
5
t o

o l
7
n A
d
, n
r
T n
a
i ,
m
m 5
a
, 8
t
l, Obj s, 121
9 2 ectiv Sentie
0 e nce,
P , corre 1224
o 1 lative The Long
l 1 , 27 Moment, 121
i 2 The 4
t Love The Waste of
i 1 Song Tongues,
1213
c 5 of J.
Ferlinghetti,
s The Beckett Alfre
Lawrence, 9, 20,
at the Gate, d 623,
, 11315 Prufrock, 1012
5 113
A Coney
8 Eagleton Tradition and Island of the
, Terry, the Individual Mind, 1012
174 Talent,
9 Constantly
ecocritic 25
Risking
ism, 10, Em
D Absurdity,
20, 134, ers
u 101 I am
158 on,
n Waiting,
ecologic Ral
c 1012
al ph
a Insurgent Art,
writing, Wa
n 623
20 ldo,
, Mode
ecopoeti 10
R rn
cs, 20, Enr
o Poetry
134, ight
b is
1589, , D.
e Prose
1615 J.,
r , 101
ecopoetr 7
t What
y, 133, epic, 14
, is
158 ethnopoetics,
9 Poetry
electroni 10, 20, 1045,
1814 ?,
c media, 101
D 21415,
u Fagan,
2237
r Kate,
electroni
c 13,
c
a 20,
writing,
n 1214
5, 21,
, Retur
20814
P n to a
Eliot,
a New
T.S., 25,
u Physic
26, 27
Fried e
Finch, Annie, 14 lande r 1
Finch, Peter, 7, r, a 2
209, 21415 Benj t 3
R.S. Thomas amin i Ginsberg, Allen,
Information , 218 v 9, 10, 26, 101
Project, Frost e Howl, 26
215 , Prose
Words Robe Cont
t
beginnin rt, 63 ribut
e
g with Fujia ion
x
A ta- to
t
from Sato, Cuba
s
Govern Gayl n
,
ments e K., Revo
Welsh 33 lutio
Assembl 2
0 n,
y White Gahern, 11
Paper, 9
McCracken Gish
215 Kathleen, ,
fl neur, 224 112 Gaia g
Nanc
Flarf poetry, 21, theory, 135 e
y,
208, 21719 G n
179,
As I said to a o
180
my r -
Glaz
Spontaneous d s
ier,
ly Obese Rat n o
Loss
friend, I e n
Pequ
said, 218 r g
eo,
In , ,
209
finity
Glob
Revi 1
D , P.
sited 2
r V.,
, 218 3
e 68
Forc
w global, 18, 19,
h,
, g 156, 157, 159,
Carol
e 161, 162, 172
yn,
2 n globalisation,
61
1 o 1713
2, 82
8 t Glotfelt
Fouc
e y,
ault,
x Cheryll,
Mich g
t 134
el, e
, Goethe,
312 n
Johann Dropping Gas:
Wolfgan Massacios 16th March ,
1988, 81
g, 171 Expulsion, 45
Goodiso Pollock and Life for Us,
802 8
n, Canvas, 46, 2
47 The
Lorna,
Self-Portrait Penelopes of
20,
as Hurry and my
1567
Delay Homeland, W
Run
(Penelope at 81 The h
Greyhound
Run, 1567 her Loom), Spoils 1988, a
457 80, 81 t
Travelling
Still Life with
Mercies, 156
Window and
7 Fish, 45 T I
Gottlieb, h
The End of
Michael, 21718 e
Beauty, 457 w
Graham, Jorie, r
The a
19, 39, 437, 49 e
Lady n
Erosion, 45
and the t
Unicor w
n and a ,
Other s
Tapestr .
8
ies, .
1
45 .
Harjo, Joy, 20,
Two Paintings 182, 1834
by Gustave , Deer
Klimt, 45 Dancer,
Gregson, Ian, 8 1834
154 0 Harrison
Gregson v. , Tony,
Gilbert, 88 20,

Guan, Qin, 211 1736,
T
Gunn, Thom, 7 178
o
Gunning, Dave,
Bookends,
199200
174
K
From the
Habekost, u School of
Christian, 108 r Eloquence,
Hampson, 153 d 1734
Hardi, Choman, i
19, 802 s T
At the Border t h
1979, 812 a e
n m
d,
a L
n e
d e,
1
9,
[
3
u
0
z

]
1

African violets
,
for Pansy
1 Harwood,
7 301
3 Hass, Robert, 20,
13942, 143
4 At Stinson
Beach, 139
Black
v Mountain, Los
Altos, 139
.
Field Guide,

13940
,
1
7
4

6
H
ar
v
e
y,
D
a
vi
d,
1
4
5
H
ar
w
o
o
index 259
Meditation at Lagunitas, 1401, identity politics, 33

143 ideolects / idiolect, 5, 173, 1957,
On the Coast near Sausalito, 139 199200
Palo Alto: The Marshes, 139 immigration, 1892
Praise, 1401 inauguration poetry, 19, 637
Time and Materials: Poems indigenous cultures, 1834
19972005, 1412 indigenous languages, 1812
Haussman, Georges, 224 installation video, 209
Hayles, Katherine N., 209 interactive fiction, 209
Heaney, Seamus, 19, 60, 6770, 72 interlingual, 20, 1925
Exposure, 70 Internet, 21, 2078, 21719, 2202,
North, 67, 6870 2257
Punishment, 69 Irigaray, Luce, 119
The Cure at Troy, 67
The Grauballe Man, 689 Jameson, Frederic, 145
Tollund Man, 68 Jamie, Kathleen, 20, 146, 14950
Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead,
6970 14950
Wintering Out, 68 jazz poetics, 20, 1047
Hejinian, Lyn, 2, 5, 6, 13, 20, 26, 100, Jennings, Elizabeth, 7
11621, 191 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 13, 18, 20,
My Life, 13, 11721 1078, 11011
The Rejection of Closure, 5, 118 Di Great Insohreckshan, 11011
Herschel, Caroline, 12 Jones, Gayl, 106
heteroglossia, 77 Jones, Meta DuEwa Jones, 105
Hill, Geoffrey, 8, 13, 20, 1379 Jordan, June, 66, 67
Mercian Hymns, 1379 jouissance, 124
Holloway, John, 7 Joyce, Trevor, 21617
Holocaust, The, 61 Data Shadows, 217
Homer, 14 Offsets, 216
Iliad, 14 Syzygy, 216
Odyssey, 14
Horace, 4 Kahlo, Frida, 434
Howe, Susan, 12 Fulang Chang and I, 44
Hoy, Dan, 21819 Kay, Jackie, 20, 17981
Hughes, Langston, 101 In My Country, 179
Hughes, Ted, 8 Life Mask, 17980
Huk, Romana, 67, 1712 Old Tongue, 17980
Hulse, Michael, 3 Other Lovers, 17981
Hussein, Saddam, 77, 80 Sign, 1801
hypertext, 209 Keenaghan, Eric, 164
Kennedy, David, 3 Lochhead, Liz, 178
Kennedy, J. F., 63, 64 Lady Writer Talkin Blues, 178
Kerouac, Jack, 9 Longley, Edna, 70, 72
Kidd, Helen, 178 Longley, Michael, 68
kinetics, 13 Lorde, Audre, 901
Kinsella, John, 6, 13, 20, 15961 Lowell, Robert, 8, 101
The Ocean Forests: An Elegy and Lovelock, James, 1356, 161
Lament, 1601 lyric, 19, 2733, 502, 122
Koch, Kenneth, 9 analytic, 489
Komunyakaa, Yusef, 19, 825 discursive, 28
Camouflaging the Chimera, 83 elegy, 2831
Dien Cai Dau, 835 epistle, 28, 301
Facing It, 845 expressive, 19, 278, 39
Hanoi Hanah, 84 self-reflexive, 19, 3947
You and I are Disappearing, 84 lyric I, 478, 50, 513, 85
Kristeva, Julia, 123
McCooey, David, 1212
Lacan, Jacques, 186 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 147
language poetry/ writing, 723 Glasgow 1960, 147
Lee, Li Young, 21, 185, 18992 McGann, Jerome, 45
Indigo, 185 McGuinness, Martin, 67
Persimmons, 1902 McHugh, Heather, 211
The Winged Seed, 18990 McKay, Claude, 18
Lefebvre, Henry, 134, 137, 1445, 148 Mahon, Derek, 19, 67, 68, 701, 72
The Production of Space, 143, 145 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,
Lejeune, Philip, 32 701
Leonard, Tom, 20, 1768, 197 The Snow Party, 67
A Scream, 177 Markham, E. A., 108
Six Glasgow Poems, 177 Marsh, Nicky, 125
The 6 OClock News, 1767 Martiny, Erik, 11314
The Miracle of the Burd and the media technologies, 208
Fishes, 177 Meehan, Paula, 20, 146, 149
Levertov, Denise, 9 Six Sycamores, 149, 1501
Lewis, Gwyneth, 6, 13, 21, 1859 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 40
Oxford Bootlicker, 188 Phenomenology of Perception, 40
Parables & Faxes, 1869 Mills, Billy, 216
Pentecost, 1867 Milne, Drew, 126
Welsh Espionage, 1878 Minhinnick, Robert, 20, 1546
Lin, Maya, 84 An Isotope, Dreaming, 1546
linguistic indeterminacy, 48, 53 Badlands, 154
local, 157, 161, 162 King Driftwood, 154
index 261
King of the Natives, 154 nation language, 5, 378, 39, 109, 195
Return of the Natives, 154 nature poetry, 133
The Fairground Scholar, 156 New Criticism, 32, 33
To Babel and Back, 154 New York School, The, 9
Watching the Fire Eater, 154 Nichols, Grace, 19, 369
minority languages, 180 Be a Butterfly, 39
Mohammad, Silem, 216 Beauty, 367
Monk, Geraldine, 16 Fat Black Woman Goes Shopping,
Ghost & Other Sonnets, 16 37
monologic, 77 Fat Black Womans Poems, 369
Moraga, Cherrie, 192 Skanking Englishman Between
Morgan, Edwin, 20, 1468 Trains, 38
Glasgow Sonnets, 1468 Two Old Black Men on a Leicester
The Poet and the City, 146 Square Bench, 37
Morley, David, 3 Nielsen, Jakob, 209
Motion, Andrew, 19, 2830, 31, 58 NourbeSe-Philip, M., 5, 19, 8791
Anniversaries, 2830 Zong!, 5, 8791
Movement, The, 9 Nowak, Mark, 5, 21, 208, 21923
Moxley, Jennifer, 19, 513 Coal Mountain Elementary,
Grain of the Cutaway Insight, 53 21923
Imagination Verses, 513 Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist
Ode on the Particle, 52 Poetics II, 219
Ode on the Son, 52
Ten Prolegomena to Heartbreak, 52 Obama, Barack, 63, 64, 65
The Cover Up, 52 OBrien, Conor Cruise, 69
The Line, 52 OHara, Frank, 9, 10
The Sense Record, 53 Personism, 10
Muldoon, Paul, 19, 68, 712 OKeeffe, Georgia, 345
Gathering Mushrooms, 71 Olson, Charles, 5, 9, 13, 53, 98, 99100,
Quoof, 68, 712 103
multimedia, 20, 21, 208 open field poetics, 156
Mutabaruka, 20, 107, 108, 10910, 111 Projective Verse, 5, 13, 20, 99100,
Dis Poem, 10910, 111 121
open text, 118
Nagra, Daljit, 21, 199201 Orr, David, 76
Look We have Coming to Dover, Ortiz, Simon, 20, 1813, 184
199201 Telling about Coyote, 1823,
The Man Who Would be English, 184
200
The Speaking of Bagwinder Singh Paglen, Trevor, 134, 165
Sagoo, 2001 Paisley, Ian, 67, 68
Palmer, Michael, 13, 19, 4751, 62 Rees-Jones, Deryn, 188

Baudelaire Series, 4950, 51 Retort group, 226
If Not, Not, 501 Rexroth, Kenneth, 9
Memory, Autobiography and Reznikoff, Charles, 222
Mechanisms of Concealment, 49 Holocaust, 222
Promises of Glass, 501 Rich, Adrienne, 1113
Sun, 4950, 51 Blood Bread and Poetry, 1112, 13
The Danish Notebook, 50 Leaflets, 12
Paramigianino, Francesco, 401, 42 Planetarium, 12
Paterson, Don, 20, 11516 The Will to Change, 12
The Last Waltz, 11516 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 49, 155
performance poetry, 98, 113 Orpheus and Eurydice, 49
performance writing, 5, 20, 98, 1245 Rivera, Louis Reyes, 194
performativity, 20, 98, 11617, 118, 119, Robbins, Bruce, 1819
121 Roberts, Neil, 173, 174, 176
periphrasis, 40, 43, 49 Rothenberg, Jerome, 61, 1045, 182
personal poetry, 19, 33, 62 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 76
pheno-song, 123 Rukeyser, Muriel, 2223
pheno-text, 123 The Book of the Dead, 2223
Pinsky, Robert, 28, 29
Plath, Sylvia, 8 San Francisco Renaissance, 9
The Applicant, 8 Sapnar, Megan, 209, 213
Lady Lazarus, 8 Satris, Marthine, 216
Pliny, 44 Scanlon, Mara, 37
poetics, 2, 46 Scargill, Arthur, 175
poet laureate, 28, 58 Schmidt, Michael, 3, 14, 15, 21
poetry as witness, 612, 70 New Poetries, 3
pastoral, 159 Schultz, Susan, M., 14, 39
poisoned (radical) pastoral, 6, 159 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 74
Pollock, Jackson, 46, 47 Scully, Maurice, 16
polyphony, 40 Sonata, 16
Pound, Ezra, 2, 10 self-portraiture, 3947
postcolonial, 36 Sewell, Lisa, 3
psychoanalysis, 89 Sexton, Anne, 8
psychogeography, 1513 Shakespeare, William, 148
King Lear, 148, 151
Ramazani, Jahan, 1718, 157, 171, 172, Shelley, P. B., 51, 59
197 A Defence of Poetry, 59
Ramsey, Jarold, 183 Shklovsky, Victor, 2
Rankine, Claudia, 3, 208, 223, 2245 Silliman, Ron, 3
Please Dont let Me Be Lonely, 2245 Simmons, James, 68
index 263
Sinclair, Iain, 20, 1513 Stillinger, Jack, 32

Downriver, 152 Strasser, Rainer, 21314
hence like foxes, 1523 ii in the white darkness, 21314
London Orbital, 152 Strong, Christina, 218
Lud Heat, 152 Sullivan, Gary, 218
scraps and green heaps, 153 Swift, Tod, 226
Suicide Bridge, 152 100 Poets Against the War, 20826
Skinner, Jonathan, 133, 1589, 162 Szumigalski, Anne, 20, 1425
Smith, Hazel, 223 A Celebration, 1423
Smith, Michael, 109 Hanner Hwch Henner HobThe
Smith, Rod, 218 Flitch, 143
Snyder, Gary, 9, 10, 20, 1347, 182 Heroines, 144
A Place in Space, 135 I2=-I, 1434
Little Songs for Gaia, 135, 1367 Rapture of the Deep, 143
Rip Rap, 135 The Doctrine of Signatures, 143
The Practice of the Wild, 135 The Musicologist, 143
Song, Cathy, 19, 336
Lost Sister, 356 Tafari, Levi, 109
Picture Bride, 336 Teh, Ian, 219
The Seamstress, 334 terza rima, 14, 11516
The Youngest Daughter, 34, 35 Thomas, R. S., 21516
sonnet, 14, 1517, 147, 150, 151 Thompson, E. P., 173
sound poetry, 209 The Making of the English Working
Spahr, Juliana, 1, 6, 13, 16, 20, 133, 1615, Class, 173
208 Todorov, Tzvetan, 1889
Leave the Manifesto Alone: A transcultural writing, 36
Manifesto, 6 translation, 20, 173, 1848, 1902
Poem Written after September 11, transnational literature, 1718, 157, 172,
2001, 1623 197
Poem Written from November 30, travelogue, 1547
2002 to March 27, 2003, 162, 1635 trickster mythology, 1823, 184
Power Sonnets, 16 Troubles, The, 60, 67, 68
The Transformation, 164 Trujillo, Rafael, 86
this connection of everyone with lungs,
1615 unheimlich, 215
Spicer, Jack, 9 Urista, Alberto Baltazar (Alurista), 192
Stefans, Brian, 20910, 211 El Plan Espiritual de Aztln, 192
Stein, Gertrude, 3
Stein, Kevin, 83 Vasari, Giorgio, 41
Composition as Explanation, 3 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Stevens, Wallace, 101 Sculptors and Architects, 41
Venuti, Lawrence, 1845 Williams, Miller, 63

versets, 137 Williams, William Carlos, 10
villanelle, 14, 86 womens biography, 19, 39
Woods, Tim, 79
Wain, John, 7 Wordsworth, William, 26
Walcott, Derek, 1415, 195 Lyrical Ballads, 26
Omeros, 1415, 195 world literature, 7, 1712
war poetry, 19, 7685, 1546, 1625, 208,
226 Xiaojing, Zhou, 190
Weight, Jenny, 209, 21113
Rice, 21113 Zephaniah, Benjamin, 20,
Weinberger, Eliot, 19, 769 11112
What I Heard About Iraq, 779 City Psalms, 11112
Whitman, Walt, 10, 64 Dis Poetry, 111, 112
Song of Myself, 64 Rapid Rapping, 112

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CONTEMPORARY

Forthcoming Titles in the Series:

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in 11.5/13 Monotype Ehrhardt

ISBN 978 0 7486 3884 0 (hardback)

The right of Nerys Williams

Chapter 1 Lyric Subjects 25

Chapter 2 Politics and Poetics 58

Chapter 3 Performance and the Poem 98

Chapter 4 Environment and Space 133

Chapter 5 Dialects, Idiolects and Multilingual Poetries 171

Student Resources 231

The study of English literature in the early twenty-first century is host

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

1962 A Russian missile site is identified in Al Alvarez, The New

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

1975 NBCs long running game show Seamus Heaney, North;

Date Historical Events Literary Events

1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla Tony Harrison, From the

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

1991 The Gulf War, militarily codenamed Anne Szumigalski, Rapture

Date Historical Events Literary Events

1998 President Bill Clinton is impeached Lee Harwood, Morning

Date Historical Events Literary Events

Date Historical Events Literary Events

I love reading all those optimistic things that people say

Juliana Spahrs statement, taken from an anthology American Poets

NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST POETRY

The production of novelty, of art objects that could not

Remarking particularly on the evolution of form in American

Jerome McGann in a recent collection of his essays on poetry The

Toward the work itself (objective or formalist theories),

My discussion of essays, manifestos and reflections on poetry in

BEFORE THE 1970S: POETIC PRECEDENTS

In their collaborative essay Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto,

NEW LINES, THE NEW POETRY, THE NEW AMERICAN

Different approaches to developing a new poetry are evident in

When during the celebration of his seventieth birthday, one of

Similarly, psychoanalysis in the confessional school acts as a

Increasingly literary and cultural historians have come to

Allen is keen to characterise the poems he selected under the

Respond to the limits of industrialisms, and high technology

Turning to the essays of this anthology, compiled as The Poetics of

Meanwhile for a sense of the rightness of life I trusted people

Allens anthology presents a compendium of influential

BLOOD, BREAD AND POETRY: GENDER AND POETICS

In her cornerstone essay on gender and poetry Blood, Bread and

The idea of freedom so much invoked during World War II

MULTIFORMALISMS: FORM AND CONTEMPORARY

Charles Olson in his celebrated essay Projective Verse (1950)

It is important to note, however, that contemporary poets use

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Jahan Ramazani highlights The spread of English worldwide to its

Ramazanis study moves the contemporary critic away from

Because poetic compression demands that discrepant