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Journal of British and Irish
CONTENTS
ISSN 1758-2733
EDITORIAL 3
BOOK REVIEWS
EDITORIAL
Volume 2, Number 1
Editorial
While employed as teachers and learners, deployed as exemplars, or ex-
ploited as raw material by the academy, poets have maintained a healthy
hostility towards academic life. From Jack Spicer’s invocation of the
English Department, with its supposed gutless deficiency of affect
(‘Sometimes our feelings are so mild they seem like mere extensions of
the English Department’) through to Sean Bonney’s recent charge of
fearful complicity: ‘we know that contemporary poetry is gentrified …
for a bunch of shit-scared academics’, we are left in no doubt that aca-
demic deliberation endangers some ineffable but energetic wildness at
the heart of the poetic enterprise. In certain moods it is possible to sym-
pathize with this view.
In a poem probably written in the early 1970s, Tom Raworth ex-
pressed his doubts about academic study in the short poem ‘University
Days’; it consists of a rectangle resembling those notices sometimes seen
on gallery walls where a painting has been loaned to another gallery
or taken away for restoration: ‘this poem has been removed for further
study’ it says. Study, even the intention of study, the mere suggestion of
it, is enough to erase the poem altogether and replace it with the state-
ment of removal; the text is not even replaced by an interpretation. The
frame within which these words appear suggests the rational limits of
academic discourse; the word ‘further’ hints at the recurrence and in-
tensity of this scrutiny, its relentless betrayal of the poem which would
otherwise glow unmolested on the gallery wall, or upon the book’s page.
It is, of course, a comic poem, and my exposition here is an example of
how interpretation can drain the vigour from artifice: like Freud on jokes
what we are saying here is not funny. Any poem in paraphrase is not the
poem, and academic discourse can destroy that. But it can also defend
that resistance. Read again; the statement ‘Any poem in paraphrase is not
the poem’ – supported by footnotes to Veronica Forrest-Thomson and
Charles Bernstein, where the thought is formalized – is also a warning
that however much we believe that an unexamined poem is not worth
reading, its very distance can assert the value of that distance. Critical
engagement may be a hands-on way of saying hands-off.
The irony about Raworth’s poem is that – in 2003 – when Nate Dor-
ward (anonymously) edited a special edition of The Gig magazine on
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK
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Journal of British and Irish
ARTICLE
Volume 2, Number 1
Matt ffyTche
University of Essex, UK
Abstract
This article concentrates on one of Wilkinson’s longer projects from
the 1990s, ‘Saccades’, which is also one of his most complex structural
arrangements of material. His writing has often been described in
terms of its fleeting and kinetic qualities. This article tests the longer
work to see what possibilities of formal development, argument or
ideology emerge within it. In particular it investigates references to
the psychoanalytic theory of object relations in Wilkinson’s work,
including Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott and Christopher Bollas. What
light do such theorists shed on Wilkinson’s explorations of psycho-
somatic processes in the poetry? What is the view of subjective life
which the poetry develops at the interface between psychology, ethics
and aesthetics?
Keywords
aesthetic theory • Klein • object relations • poetics • psychoanalysis •
Wilkinson
All the time, as we amble about in our worlds, we come across objects .
(Bollas, 2009: 80)
The way we use objects will determine our survival . (Wilkinson, 2007: 2)
Introduction
This article originated as a paper on John Wilkinson’s poem ‘Saccades’
for a conference on ‘The Long Poem’ in which the emphasis fell on its
problematization of structure (ffytche, 2008a). It was then revised and
extended as a paper given at the University of Essex, concentrating
more closely on the psychoanalytic dimensions of the poem (ffytche,
Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK
ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_01 | 2010 (7–34) | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry
Journal of British and Irish
ARTICLE
Volume 2, Number 1
‘Ear Loads’
Neologisms and Sound Poetry in Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of
Reptiles
Peter Middleton
University of Southampton, UK
Abstract
The poet Maggie O’Sullivan uses rare and invented words for their
sonic virtues in many of her texts. This article concentrates on her 2003
collection, Palace of Reptiles, in order to explore the signifying effects
of her verbal inventions. By discussing the history of neologizing, and
considering both positive and negative judgements on the sources and
effects of neologisms, this essay suggests that the semantic instability
of these sonic words on the edge of intelligibility makes an important
contribution to O’Sullivan’s highly original poetics.
Keywords
Maggie O’Sullivan; • neologisms • poetics • sound poetry
EAR LOADS
- I SING –
THEY CAME TO ME –
OCCIPUTAL DISTENTIONS
LINGERED, CHISMERIC, CHISMIC,
SCAR
CUMES,
CON-
CONDY-
CREO-
KAKA-
CATE-
CUA-
COOT-
E-
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Call for Submissions
Transgressive Culture (ISSN 2043-7102) is a new international jour-
nal to be published by Gylphi Limited. It concerns the limits – in all of
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ARTICLE
Volume 2, Number 1
Josh Robinson
Queens’ College Cambridge, UK
Abstract
The earliest work collected in J.H. Prynne’s Poems exhibits striking
differences from his 1962 collection Force of Circumstance, and Other
Poems, differences that are perhaps exacerbated by the exclusion of this
collection from all three editions of Poems. In this article, I investigate the
transition between Force of Circumstance and the poems later collected in
Kitchen Poems and The White Stones in relation to Prynne’s 1961 essay
on phenomenology, ‘Resistance and Difficulty’, focusing both on the
changes in prosodic and poetic concerns and on their consequences
for the ways in which we might attend to the task of interpreting the
poems, considering some of the relationships between meaning, stress
and prosody.
Keywords
enjambement • J. H. Prynne • phenomenology • prosody • stress
Perhaps the most noticeable and significant ‘turn’ in Prynne’s poetic œu-
vre takes place between the publication of Force of Circumstance in 1962
and the appearance in The English Intelligencer of the poems later col-
lected in Kitchen Poems (1968) and The White Stones (1969). The greater
range of prosodic innovation in the latter poems and their publication
by a small press led one critic to claim that the sequences published after
Force of Circumstance broke ‘the literary and economic mould into which
the previous book had been poured’ (Trotter, 1984: 221). The poems of
Force of Circumstance ‘make sense’ in a manner quite different to the se-
mantic density found in much of Prynne’s later poetry. They are mostly
descriptive, a feature which, as Keston Sutherland points out, bears some
resemblance to the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, in which Prynne recog-
nised ‘an openness … to certain narrowly specific features of the known
world, and a tautness in the resulting precision which is not to be had
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ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_01 | 2010 (61–76) | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry
Journal of British and Irish
ARTICLE
Volume 2, Number 1
Alex Latter
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Abstract
This article examines the relationship between post-war British poetry
and modernism through close readings of the poetry of Philip Larkin
and W. S. Graham. It argues against claims that Larkin’s imagery was
meaningfully engaged with the example of his modernist precursors,
contending that his images are predicated on a set of assumptions that
mark the limits of his poetry. It contrasts this with a reading of W. S.
Graham’s The Nightfishing (published in the same year as Larkin’s The
Less Deceived ) and argues that Graham’s complex interrogation of these
assumptions is evidence of a sustained modernist practice in British
poetry after the war.
Keywords
anti-modernism • late modernism • Philip Larkin • post-war British
poetry • W. S. Graham
[T]he term modern, when applied to art, has a more than chronological
meaning: it denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this
century … [T]he artist has become over-concerned with his material (hence
an age of technical experiment), and, in isolation, has busied himself
with the two principal themes of modernism, mystification and outrage.
(Larkin, 1982: 287)
Despite its wry undercurrents, Philip Larkin’s contention that modern-
ism has engendered an irresponsibility that, among other things, has
manifested itself as an abnegation of the artist’s responsibility to their
audience, describes an idea that pervades discussions of the trajectory
of post-war British poetry. As such, the negotiation of the modernist
experiments of the first half of the twentieth century represents an im-
portant point of departure for considerations of both Larkin’s own poetic
BOOK REVIEW
Volume 2, Number 1
Ian Brinton (ed.), Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry Since 1990 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 6 + 128 pp.
BOOK REVIEW
Volume 2, Number 1
Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents,
1950–2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 274 pp.
BOOK REVIEW
Volume 2, Number 1
Ian Brinton (ed.) A Matter of Utterance: The Poetry of J.H. Prynne (Exeter:
Shearsman Books, 2009), 188 pp.
This is a curious book. Some of its contributors – the editor Ian Brin-
ton himself, Rod Mengham, David Caddy and Keston Sutherland – make
real attempts to contextualize Prynne’s work in relation to precursors
like Charles Olson, and contemporaries like Ed Dorn and Tom Raworth.
At other times we are presented with that enigmatic Prynne the poetic
establishment loves to hate (perhaps because they invented him): the
Cambridge hierophant, standing at his Cambridge altar, alone, compel-
ling and singular in the cathedral of the English lyric.
The worst offender in this latter category is the Chinese scholar Li
Zhimin. In attempting to explicate links between Prynne and Chinese
poetry (interestingly, Mengham is more convincing on what he calls
Prynne’s ‘kind of reverse orientatlism’ [p. 80]) he comes up with: ‘In a
poetical sense, it is not exaggerated to say that Prynne’s poetry is of an
independent and unique poetical language’ (p. 57). Less exaggerated than
it is tautological. What a ‘poetical language’ might be – and despite an
Oxbridge education supplied by teachers who were full of such nonsense
– I have no idea. As to his language being ‘unique’, Prynne’s detractors
have rather a lot to say about it in relation to communication.
The most challenging and interesting essays in the volume, for me,
are Mengham’s and Sutherland’s. From these we get a very real sense
of Prynne’s struggle to prise a radical play-space from within the en-
velope of global corporate capitalism. Sutherland’s subtle discussion of
Prynne’s poetical politics emphasizes that the poetry is not radical in
any ‘conventional’ sense. Not at all: ‘ … in several respects it appears to
be plainly anti-radical. The later poetry is split up with mockery of in-
distinct, hollow figures miming out a ventriloquism of the revolution-
ary phrase … ’ (p. 111). He identifies the break with Olson as being very
much a rejection of the kind of imperialism implied by the ‘factive’ figure
of Maximus, the kind of meta-position that can comprehend, or encom-
pass, history, politics and economics.
Mengham reads Prynne’s 1989 poem Word Order through French so-
ciologist Marcel Mauss’s The Gift, a book about economic practice in
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Journal of British and Irish
BOOK REVIEW
Volume 2, Number 1
Reviews Editor
CONFERENCE REPORT
Volume 2, Number 1