Clipart Pastorals: Image and the Labour of Lyric Selfhood in Contemporary British Poetry (original) (raw)
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The political space of poetry, 2001
Sweet friends. I did not come here/With the claim to conquer your hearts. I am no speaker, like Cassola seems to be/ but I am everybody knows compromised/ for my passion, for that massacred style of mine. Pier Paolo Pasolini, "In Memoriam of Realism! The aim of this magazine is to reflect on the role of poetry in our cultural community and in those of other people and nations to encourage a critical analysis on the foundation of our bourgeois values. We will discuss the political space of poetry and test the utopia of its function in a more humanitarian world. One part of me believes that a writer should not make these points the exclusive centre of his/her commitment to the arts; at the same time, writers should be equally aware of the fact their words might and will produce an effect on the readers. Indeed, it could happen that a writer's discourse is wrongly assumed as normative by the audience. An example of this could be the conduct of Meursault, the main character in Camus's The Stranger, whose disengagement from society seems to add meaninglessness to the life of us all. Yet-Lev Braun claims-this is quite the other way round, since, as Camus asserts, 'man is the only creature in the absurd universe that has meaning because he alone demands that there be meaning.' (Witness of Decline, 1974, p. 249). The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions, and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the "divine irresponsibility" of the condemned man. (from Sartre analysis of Meursault, the protagonist of The Stranger, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, 1943). The artist seeks meaning. He/she seeks it in the sphere of his/her public and domestic relationships. Therefore, once entered those spheres, his/her discourse will be solicited to accept the charge of ethical responsibilities. The public's request of engagement is often proportionate to the gravity of historical circumstances. In those times, authors, especially when dissidents, are expected to respond with exactness and honesty to global crisis and formulate clear themes and ideas. In other words. he/she will be expected to take sides. Thus, theoretical action is as indispensable as pure creativity: it is this suggestion that makes the other half of me believes that the role of the artist, in a moment of global tension and worry such as the one we are experiencing, should seek spaces of intervention. Artists should not feel too worried about issues concerning political commitment: their themes are the referential messages about the world behind those abstractions and they will guarantee the primacy of the artist discourse over the
THE INSTITUTIONAL DEFINITION OF POETRY: SOME HERETICAL THOUGHTS
A few contemporary theories of poetry (e.g., claim that texts do not have any poetic qualities prior to, and independently of, the institutional context in which they are presented. When a text, any text, is printed in verse form, in a book whose subtitle is "Poems," then we start looking for poetic qualities. And what we look for, we are bound to find. In order to challenge this approach, and to argue for a more objective, textoriented approach to the categorization of texts , I have conducted a test. My test was based on two types of questionnaires, the one in prose form, the other in verse, in which students were asked to identify those texts that were "originally" poems or prose. The results obtained corroborate the assumption that readers have quite definite intuitions about the poetic qualities of texts prior to and independently of the way they are institutionally presented.
‘Bad influence’ and ‘willful subjects’: the gender politics of The Life of Poetry
Textual Practice
In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser writes that the resistance to poetry comes not just from its being viewed as 'intellectual and obscure and confused' but also because it is considered 'sexually suspect.' In bringing together these questions about gender and genre from the outset, it is clear that one of Rukeyser's central projects in the text is to unveil and confront the gender norms of Cold-War containment culture, norms that positioned the queer body and the communist body as dangerous, the male body as antagonistic to the female body, and that underscored the policing of literary and disciplinary categories. The gender politics of the text, however, only become fully legible when read along with 'The Usable Truth'-the lectures delivered through the 1940s that would become the 1949 book-and in context of her unpublished essay about women poets, Many Keys-commissioned but rejected by The Nation in the 1957-that expands on underdeveloped ideas in The Life of Poetry. While Rukeyser was deeply engaged in thinking about the place of the woman writer, this essay considers the repressive conditions that contributed to the absence of an overt gender analysis in the final version of The Life of Poetry, while exploring Rukeyser's wilful persistence in pursing radical textual and sexual theories of multiplicity.
Out of the Ordinary: On Poetry and the World, Canberra University, 5-7 December, 2022
If poetry proceeds from the world, it also lives in the world – a world permeated by structured mechanisms of quality assessment, publication, praise, approval and awards. If poetry is the first verbal art it is also – still – considered the highest written art, even though its audiences are few and its publishers even fewer. And yet the urge to write and the desire to express in poetic form persists among a great number of people who do not dare to name themselves writers or poets. I’m interested in these ordinary, quotidian, unedited, unpolished forms of expression and the value they might have in the world; the very expressions that are edited out of sight by the methods of triage that editors and publishers use to ensure quality, readability, sales and critical attention. I’m interested in the embarrassment, shame and denial that these efforts produce in their writers. I’m also interested in what these kinds of scribblings might teach us about failure and incompleteness and what their value might be against a publishing milieu hitched to the racing horse of rarity, brilliance and extraordinariness. I’m also interested in the depth of need to make that seems to inspire this failed writing that will go nowhere else but have a brief life here, now. It strikes me that the word out of which ‘poetry’ comes is poiesis – a making. So, another question arises: why do we devalue messy making (such a necessary human activity) for perfect product? What do these two have to do with each other?
The limits of lyric: contemporary poetry and the "postcritical turn"
“This paper focuses on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) and the recent "Postcritical Turn" towards questions of affect, address, and readerly subjectivity. It argues figures of address in lyric theory are more useful tools for Rankine's poem and that her work represents a sustained move away from the model in avant-garde poetics in the US that considers literary practice as a cultural critique. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), has galvanised literary discourse to aim beyond 20th Century critical paradigms. By isolating ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’ - as identified by Paul Ricœur - Felski suggests this stance is an outmoded artefact of literary criticism that can be overcome. Critics intentionally ignore what the text really tells us and instead “read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text fails - or wilfully refuses - to see.” As such, critique considers exegesis a politically active process of identifying texts as symptomatic of ideological falsehood. This overdeveloped sense of the radicalism of interpretation, Felski contends, is a deluded narcissistic practice and critics, “thrive in the rarefied air of metacommentary, honing their ability to complicate and problematize, to turn statements about the world into statements about the forms of discourse in which they are made.” While the ‘heroic critic’ is recognisable in some criticism, the suggested alternatives have not found professional consensus. The term ‘post-critical turn’ remains in question, generating as much metacommentary as it set out to banish. To avoid this, I argue, we should be expanding our sample field. Turning to the contemporary novel to find a model for ‘postcritique’ (see Bewes, Fleissner and Anker) has overvalued fiction so that it dominates contemporary literary studies. When Felski refutes the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ with sensibility of “inspiration, invention, solace, recognition, reparation, or passion”, this is based on a privileging of the innovative narrative text. What’s more, novels are found to be innovative for possessing the very formal indicators of linguistic materiality, authorial undecidability and audience-oriented affect that poetic form has always been defined by. The contemporary lyric, I argue in this paper with its cultivated vocabulary of semantic indeterminacy, connotation and ambiguity, offers fertile ground for the critical reorientations underway in the profession. Making reference to Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), I show how the genre continues to realign the reading subject in an affective, ‘generous,’ or non-hierarchical relation to their object. I conclude with a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), inclusive of facsimile, photograph, and prose narrative, shows how vital the lyric genre can be for questions of identity and linguistic artifice and reaffirms how all language carries ideological meaning and subjective orientation. Literary practice of this vibrancy requires an extensive and deepened critical stance, not an emptied out one.