Contemporary Poetry
Contemporary Poetry
Contemporary Poetry
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
www.euppublishing.com
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
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
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
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
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
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
xxiii
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:
POETICS?
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.
Lyric Subjects
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:
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
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:
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:
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
So be a girly man
& sing this gurly
song Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war. (p. 181)
Things are
solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine.
* **
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
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)
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
subsequent references to this edition are given in the text.
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
University Press, 2003), p. 435.
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.
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:
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:
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
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).
Lovelock has been seeking over the decades to dispel the belief
that humans are somehow the owners, managers, commissars or
136 contemporary poetry
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
138 contemporary poetry
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:
Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description.
Again, almost with yearning
I see the malice of her ancient eyes (p. 27)
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.
* **
when All Souls came we lighted
23
eighty of them for holy candles.
environment and space 143
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:
144 contemporary poetry
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.
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):
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
150 contemporary poetry
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
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.
154 contemporary poetry
Resurrection
is in the reactor.
Its the atom thats
reborn The soul perishes
but matter can never be destroyed. (p. 9)
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)
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:
NOTES
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)
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 am voracious
for the Word a lexicon is wine
to me and wafer, so that home, at
night, I ruminate on all thats mine
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Procedure (cont):
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
DISSEMINATING POETRY
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
NOTES
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
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 Argotist
www.argotistonline.co.uk
Publishes non-mainstream contemporary poetry. Also offers
inter-views, reviews and critical works.
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.
234 contemporary poetry
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,
student resources 235
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.
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.
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.
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.
student resources 237
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
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.
student resources 241
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.
242 contemporary poetry
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.
student resources 243
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.
244 contemporary poetry
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.
student resources 245
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.
246 contemporary poetry
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.
student resources 247
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
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).
250 contemporary poetry
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
262 contemporary poetry