Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 2(1) - Contents and Abstracts

Volume 2 Number 1 March 2010ISSN 1758-2733

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry



Journal of British and Irish

CONTENTSISSN 1758-2733

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_01 | 2010 | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

Volume 2, Number 1, March 2010

EDITORIAL 3

Objects and How to Survive Them: Several Views of John Wilkinson’s ‘Saccades’ 7Matt ffytche

‘Ear Loads’: Neologisms and Sound Poetry in Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles 35Peter Middleton

‘Through open limits’: The Early Poetry of J. H. Prynne 61Josh Robinson

‘Untalkative, Out of Reach’: Philip Larkin, W. S. Graham and the Negotiation of Modernism 77Alex Latter

BOOK REVIEWS

Ian Brinton (ed.), Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry Since 1990 89Reviewed by Mary Hurst

Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000 92Reviewed by Mandy Bloomfield



Ian Brinton (ed.), A Matter of Utterance: The Poetry of J. H. Prynne 97Reviewed by Keith Jebb

Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (eds), A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry 101Reviewed by Alex Latter

Conference Report: Douglas Oliver, University of Essex 107Scott Thurston


EDITORIALVolume 2, Number 1

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry © Gylphi Limited, Canterbury, UK ISSN 1758-2733 | 02_01 | 2010 (3–6) | http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

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




ARTICLEVolume 2, Number 1


objects and how to Survive themSeveral Views of John Wilkinson’s ‘Saccades’

Matt ffytchEuniversity of Essex, uK

aBStRactThis 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?

KEyWoRdSaesthetic 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,






‘Ear Loads’Neologisms and Sound Poetry in Maggie o’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles

Peter Middletonuniversity of Southampton, uK

aBStRactThe 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.

KEyWoRdSMaggie O’Sullivan; • neologisms • poetics • sound poetry

EAR LOADS

- I SING –

THEY CAME TO ME –

OCCIPUTAL DISTENTIONS

LINGERED, CHISMERIC, CHISMIC,SCARCUMES,CON-CONDY-CREO-KAKA-CATE-CUA-COOT-E-



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 their guises – and what lies beyond them. The journal aims include: (1) questioning the meaning and significance of transgressive culture; (2) understanding more deeply how this reflects on contemporary cul-ture; and (3) offering an opportunity for transgressive culture to be more widely known through analysis of existing work and through generating new creative work. There are planned themed editions on addiction, sexual abuse, Hubert Selby Jr., Will Self, and J. G. Ballard.

The journal seeks to examine the boundaries of culture, both criti-cally and creatively. Analysis of culture in all forms, including literature, art, film, media, and music, is welcome, with a focus primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the transnational. In terms of creative work, poetry, prose, screenwriting and writing for perform-ance, non-fiction and, of course, work that transcends these boundaries is encouraged. Work needs to be informed by the ideas of key in-fluential theorists of transgression, but this is not prescriptive. We encourage all writing that challenges norms and subverts expecta-tions. Please send a 300-word outline of your work via email to Jason Lee ([email protected]).

Edited by Jason LeeUniversity of Derby

http://www.gylphi.co.uk

Editorial BoardFeona Attwood (Sheffield Hallam)Charlie Blake (Liverpool Hope)Ken Gelder (Melbourne)Paul Hegarty (Cork)Mark Jancovich (UEA)James Kincaid (Southern California)Xavier Mendik (Brunel)David Punter (Bristol)[More to be confirmed ... ]




‘through open limits’the Early Poetry of J. h. Prynne

JoSh RoBINSoNQueens’ college cambridge, uK

aBStRactThe 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.

KEyWoRdSenjambement • 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





‘untalkative, out of Reach’Philip Larkin, W. S. Graham and the Negotiation of Modernism

aLEx LattERBirkbeck, university of London, uK

aBStRactThis 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.

KEyWoRdSanti-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 REVIEWVolume 2, Number 1


Ian Brinton (ed.), Contemporary Poetry: Poets and Poetry Since 1990 (cam-bridge: cambridge university Press, 2009), 6 + 128 pp.

The necessity for students to be on their analytical toes is the dynamic of this book.

It is an introduction to contemporary poetry set out in six parts, which examine the following areas: (1) approaching contemporary poetry, (2) approaching the text, (3) texts and extracts, (4) critical approaches, (5) how to write about contemporary poetry, and (6) resources. It is aimed at ‘advanced’ students and is written in an easily accessible idiom. It begins by presenting bullet-pointed questions that Brinton sets out to answer un-der carefully structured sub-headings. These sub-headings – and Brinton uses this format throughout – present some of the elemental requisites of close reading, ‘precise language’, ‘closed and open form’, ‘tone’, etc. These are useful pointers for today’s students approaching contemporary poetry at an early stage of their degree programme.

This important first part of the book includes Brinton’s analysis of contemporary poetry’s connection with Dante’s ‘searing self-analysis’ (p. 11) developed through the work of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, et al. Eliot’s modernist debt to Dante is one of the precision and ‘functional[ity]’ of the word through an ‘austere style’ (p. 12). Characteristics of Dante’s Commedia, ‘dramatic immediacy’, ‘circularity and danger’ (p. 12) and their influence on the work of more contemporary poets, such as Heaney, Steve Ellis and Sean O’Brien, introduce the necessity of students be-ing alert not only to the technical elements of close reading, but also to poetic resonances from the past, as extant in the innovative poetry of the present. To help with this Brinton provides brief cultural and social contextual information – a useful adjunct for students who may not have had exposure to this type of history.

Part two, ‘Approaching the Texts’, both informs and raises thought-ful discussion questions on meaning in contemporary poetry, modern women’s poetry, poetry in translation, war, and black poetry. This sec-tion points us onward and outward to other critics and writers and en-gages with their work and criticism with a blend of clarity and pedagogi-





Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000 (Liverpool: Liverpool university Press, 2005), 274 pp.

The Poetry of Saying offers both a history of experimental British poetry and a theorization of its cultural, social and ethical importance. Written by a prominent practitioner and critic of linguistically innovative poetry, it is all at once one of the most wide-ranging, detailed, theoretically-astute and eloquent monographs in its field. Part of its value lies in its mapping out of a history of poetry that ‘has hardly begun to be told’ (p. 1), having been eclipsed by a dominant ‘orthodoxy’ with its roots in the Movement poetry of the post-war period. From the outset, then, Sheppard’s argument unfolds around a fairly clear distinction between ‘innovative’ and ‘orthodox’ poetic techniques and traditions. He devotes two summary chapters to a discussion of the ‘orthodox’ tradition of the 1950s and 1960s and its outgrowths in the 1980s and 1990s, surveying a range of poets from Philip Larkin to Sylvia Plath to Seamus Heaney, mostly through key anthologies. This ‘mainstream’ work forms a broader context and counterpoint for the alternative innovative tradition focused upon in two further summary chapters. These usefully posit two broad phases – the British Poetry Revival 1960–1978, and Linguistically In-novative Poetry 1978–2000 – hinged around the innovative tradition’s break with the Poetry Society and loss of Arts Council funding in the late 1970s. These two sets of juxtaposed survey chapters are inter-spersed with chapters offering careful and illuminating close readings of the work of individual poets, including Lee Harwood, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke, Ulli Freer, Bob Cobbing and Mag-gie O’Sullivan.

However, it is this book’s theoretical endeavour, its development of a poetics of saying, which perhaps constitutes its most important contribu-tion to wider discussions of experimental poetry. Sheppard proposes that the work he examines needs to be analysed on three interwoven ‘levels’: ‘the technical, the social, and the ethical’ (p. 1). To each of these he brings useful theoretical frameworks. On the technical level, Sheppard proposes a formal poetics based on notions of artifice proposed by Veronica For-






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






Nigel alderman and c.d. Blanton (eds), A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 298 pp.

Andrew Duncan’s description of the territory of postwar British and Irish poetry as ‘balkanized’ captures something of the divisions and resentments that characterize the poetry in this period. The received history is well-rehearsed: the rise of the Movement poets in the 1950s established a poetic hegemony that valued conservatism and orthodoxy above experiment and innovation, and pushed innovative practice into an underground of little magazines and small presses. Sometimes, this he-gemony exercised itself tacitly, through Arts Council grants and prizes; sometimes, as was the case when Eric Mottram was removed as the edi-tor of Poetry Review, it was more explicit.

There has been little, if any, effort at a rapprochement from either side, and there are still strong feelings on both sides of the divide (vide Don Paterson’s introduction to New British Poetry and Andrea Brady’s em-phatic response in Chicago Review (49[3]). The Movement hegemony is still visible too: at the end of 2009, Fiona Sampson (2009) completely omitted work from Robert Potts and David Herd’s editorship of Poetry Review from her anthology marking 100 years of that publication, and James Campbell felt obliged to greet the appearance of the Cambridge Literary Review with a patrician put-down in The Times Literary Supple-ment (‘NB’, 7 October 2009).

Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton’s A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry is an important contribution to the development of this history. Its intended audience is ‘those beginning to read and teach this material, or merely hoping to re-read it critically’. The editors’ introduction insists that it does not seek:

to chart [the history of British and Irish postwar poetry] exhaustively, still less to anthologize and account all the works and figures that define it, but rather to suggest ways in which the field might productively be encountered.

The extremely useful lists of ‘Further Reading’ encourage this sense of productive encounter and reiterate the editors’ intention for the book




call for Submissions

The journal aims to provide a home for critical articles on the history, context, close reading and poetics of what has been termed ‘innovative poetry’. Articles of up to 10,000 words, and short reviews (up to 2000 words) can be submitted electronically using the online submission sys-tem (http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry).

Contributors are also welcome to contact the editors directly and send articles and reviews to them but please make contact before send-ing email attachments.

Robert Sheppard, Department of English and History, EDGE HILL UNIVERSITY, St Helens Road, Ormskirk, Lancashire L39 4QP, UK ([email protected])

Scott Thurston, School of English, Sociology, Politics & Contemporary History, UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD, Crescent House, Room 307, The Crescent, Salford M5 4WT, UK ([email protected])

Reviews Editor

Stephen Mooney, Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, BIRKBECK, University of London, 30 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DT, UK ([email protected])



CONFERENCE REPORTVolume 2, Number 1


Variations on the theme of harm: a one-day confer-ence on the work of douglas oliveruniversity of Essex, department of Literature, film and theatre Studies and the centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, Saturday 5 december 2009

The poetry of Douglas Oliver (1937–2000) is full of the disjunctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary – searching for an elusive but untrappable instant at the heart of the rhythm of life, experience and memory. That the opening of this, the first conference devoted to Oliver’s work, was delayed due to signal failure on the trains between London and Colchester caused by the theft of copper cables – trapping its co-organizer Matt ffytche and myself en route – seemed to uncannily combine the, albeit more dramatic, transport disaster of derailment in Oliver’s novel The Harmless Building and the patterns of civil unrest and ambush in his The Diagram Poems. As it was, the delay led to us meeting up with Jonathan White and sharing a taxi to the university – during which time, White spoke firsthand of Oliver’s brilliant career as a mature student in the English Department at Essex in the 1970s.

Gordon Brotherstone (University of Essex) opened the conference with a talk entitled ‘Ossian’s Grave and Derbyshire Cave: A Surface Reading of Doug Oliver, Poet and Critic’. Resting in the nimbus of many years of accumulated reading of and around Oliver’s poetry (like White, Brotherstone knew Oliver as a student at Essex), Brotherstone read and re-read selections of the work to the audience, probing for insight, mak-ing connections and thinking aloud. The literary connections of Winnats Pass in Derbyshire, the setting for Oliver’s In the Cave of Suicession, were laid out and links between Oliver’s poem ‘Twilight Flowers’ and Heine, Celan, Heidegger and autobiography were explored.

Simon Perril (De Montfort University) delivered a paper entitled ‘Treasure Islands: Douglas Oliver, Hannah Arendt and Pathos of Nov-elty’, which began by reflecting on the motif of the treasure island in Oliver’s long poem ‘Regender’ and noting its role in Oliver’s ‘exercises in political thought’. Drawing parallels with Hannah Arendt’s reading of



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Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 2(1) - Contents and Abstracts

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