Contemporary and Innovative Poetry

This article develops what I call 'prac crip' as an innovative methodology to perform on the page the scholarly realities of working, living and writing with the disability of repetitive strain injury. Prac crip is a prac crit of crips that complicates liberatory crip criticism. It shows how repetitive strain injury changes an approach to practical criticism, but also, by association with 'crit' , how practices of practical criticism with repetitive strain injury shift some key uses of the 'crip'. Critical of this mode of cripping as well as cripical, prac crip demonstrates the emancipatory limits of practising crip criticism for those crips the work also hurts in the act. Peter Larkin's fascination with gleaning runs parallel to the rise of lean. To glean and its derivatives have a 'distinctive presence' in his lexis from Pastoral Advert (1988) to Seven Leaf Sermons (2018), a thirty-year period during which lean management has become increasingly global. The article traces through Larkin the eco-politically crucial relationships between the common right of gathering after harvest known as gleaning, historically, a practice for disabled people; the gesture of leaning; and the genealogy of global lean management technologies in the packing of lean meat. The essay explores how disability is an integral part of how its readings are produced, as well as addressing the predicament that work-related upper limb disorders, which are driven by lean managed environments, continue to be driven by writing against lean managed environments.

The paper, written in the spirit of Badiouian comparatisme quand même (Apter 2006), concentrates on establishing a detailed comparative basis between the poetry of a uk-based poet, Maggie O’Sullivan, and a Slovak author Nóra Ružičková, written at approximately the same time. Despite belonging to different generations and being part of different culturally and geopolitically  literary landscapes, the two poets treat the language and other media  in an uncannily similar fashion. Their poetries come together not only in images of writing through the wounded body, but also in the way they carve the language to make it voice what it had been suppressing as well as in their explorations of the relationship between the text and textile.

This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, to nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland’s precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry’s inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh; major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study.

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-counterpoetics-of-modernity.html

Thomas A. Clark (1944-) is a poet and visual artist born in Greenock, Scotland. Influenced by the 1960s Concrete movement, Zen Buddhism and minimalism, Clark’s work spans installations, book-objects, ringtones and sound works, and has a focus on the natural world.

Robert Macfarlane has declared Clark’s work ‘a magnificent, quiet defence of the pastoral’. Clark’s work does not so much defend the pastoral, however, as refigure it. Through formal innovation and a focus on the materiality of the text, Clark creates artist’s books and poem-objects that transform the relationship between text, image, and poem.

Through this program of innovation, Clark is able to reanimate the pastoral, moving it away from what Joshua Corey calls ‘a nostalgic stance of yearning for a past as vivid as it is imaginary’ and toward a poetics of personal and environmental recuperation. 

This paper seeks to understand trace the techniques by which Clark’s formally innovative poetry dismantles and rebuilds our understanding of the pastoral. Of particular interest are his engagement with open field poetics; his attention to the space of the page; his interest in exploring and delineating new forms, and his meticulous adoption and refiguring of received poetic forms. It will engage particularly with the idea of poem-as-object and they way it can alter the spaces into which it is placed. In this way, we can come to understand new ways of engaging with pastoral literature and its tropes eschews mimeticism, sentimentalism, and the occlusion of social and ecological realities.

Art thinks via sensation; this, of course, includes poetry. To an extent, this means that the differences between thought and feeling are imperceptible. So: how does contemporary innovative poetry present thought about ethics? Contemporary conservative poetry presents the illusion of representation via an image of a classic lyric subject whose ‘voice’ presents a moral lesson for its readers from a vantage point of assumed wisdom. This has been a primary feature of Movement Orthodox poetry since Larkin. Contemporary innovative poetry, on the other hand, such as that by Jennifer Cooke, tends to eschew or at least problematize the image of the lyric subject and, along with it, the vantage point of moral wisdom. Instead, innovative poetry is ethical in a sense derived from the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari. This means that the poetry does not offer moralistic meanings but will rather explore ethical significance; and, more significantly in itself, it will do so primarily through sensation. A reader is placed in proximity with events; is compelled to experience the ethical significance of specific encounters, rather than generalized moral abstractions. Not only this, but the poetry itself, in its innovative play, compels an ethical encounter as its performance by a reader (silent or otherwise) necessitates movements of becoming through a thrilling and perplexing beauty that is productive of a species of joy: a yea-saying that is ethically ‘good’ in itself for Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari.

The radical political thrust of Sean Bonney’s poetry is well known and broadly understood, but it is not always clear in what way it is specifically communist, or even what communist poetry is beyond the utilization of slogans. For a poem to be genuinely communist it is arguably necessary for it to be a minor poetry, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka, otherwise it will be recuperable by a bourgeois mainstream that might be characterized as ‘majoritarian’. Bonney’s poem The Commons is examined through the three characteristics of minor literature elucidated by Deleuze and Guattari and at the same time a concept of a minor, communist poetry is developed – it will be proletarian, experimental, always necessarily political because of its cramped conditions of existence and composition, and essentially collective. The Commons fulfils these conditions and at the same time offers, both potentially and simultaneously realized, a transformation of existing conditions at once angry and joyful, a new geography of delight.

Click on the URL above to access the paper.

This paper was presented at the 2016 South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in Durham, NC. It explores Nathaniel Mackey's writings and interviews on seriality and performance. By considering these in the context of avant-garde approaches to jazz improvisation, a clearer, "post-bop" understanding of his poetics emerges.

Alec Finlay, Scottish poet and artist, was commissioned to design the Organ Donor Memorial in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh in 2013. His work, Taigh: a wilding garden, draws inspiration from the taigh in Glenlyon, and from the idea of organ donation as an act between death and living.

Thomas A. Clark, poet and visual artist, was similarly commissioned to create a series of works for New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow. Clark’s work is text based, concerned with naming aspects of the natural world, and bringing them taxonomically into the clinical space.

This article is an enquiry into what innovative poetry and installation on a natural theme might bring to medical spaces. It seeks to link ways of reading, ways of interacting with the natural world, and ideas of solace.

The radical political thrust of Sean Bonney’s poetry is well known and broadly understood, but it is not always clear in what way it is specifically communist, or even what communist poetry is beyond the utilization of slogans. For a poem to be genuinely communist it is arguably necessary for it to be a minor poetry, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in their book on Kafka, otherwise it will be recuperable by a bourgeois mainstream that might be characterized as ‘majoritarian’. Bonney’s poem The Commons is examined through the three characteristics of minor literature elucidated by Deleuze and Guattari and at the same time a concept of a minor, communist poetry is developed – it will be proletarian, experimental, always necessarily political because of its cramped conditions of existence and composition, and essentially collective. The Commons fulfils these conditions and at the same time offers, both potentially and simultaneously realized, a transformation of existing conditions ...

Uma Novena de Saques is a poetic experiment in tragicomic language reverberating the ancestral poverty of the State of Brazil. This set connects colonial huts to contemporary shacks. On the one hand, I update the past ruin; on the other, I make the current disease something anachronistic. Nine plunders from sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century oratory texts, all under the protection of the King, the Faith, and the Law.

This paper examines the work of visual poet Thomas A. Clark (1944 – ) in relation innovative landscape poetry and its representational strategies.  In particular, it examines the extent to which Clark circumvents or reframes the idea of landscape poetry as being ‘locodescriptive’. Through close reading and the application of Mandy Bloomfield’s theory of ‘landscaping the page’, this article attempts to trace a ‘grammar of representation’ throughout Clark’s work, whereby large-scale, site-specific representation is bypassed in favour of close observation of minute natural phenomena, allowing for a new kind of mimesis.

"A. J. Carruthers’ Axis promises to be a long poem, perhaps a very long poem. This “projected life-long” work belongs to the tradition of the “life-poem” which has emerged in late twentieth-century American (and, with Carruthers, Australian) avant-garde writing. Perhaps its most accomplished practitioner is the American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis, whose five-volume poem Drafts, which ended with ‘Draft 114’ in 2014, in many ways defined the genre. Charles Olson’s Maximus and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the most obvious precedents in American literary modernism, are both archaic not only in their subject matter but in their attitude. Wrestling as they do with the writer’s responsibility to continue a tradition and be its next instantiation, they are poetic monuments attesting to great histories. DuPlessis, over more than two decades, took it upon herself to produce a living edifice which is constantly re-writing, re-drafting itself, and that dynamism is possibly her strongest mark on Carruthers in this first volume."