The post Sean Pryor on ‘Ideal Poetry’ appeared first on Poetry and Poetics.

The argument of this paper is that world literature is an ideal concept that yet awaits realisation. The actuality of world literature could only be an established fact if, intuitively, the general (world literature) and the particular (literary works) were unified; which is to say that the totality would have achieved an empirical existence only if the literary acts encompassed by the term could be said cumulatively to produce ‘world literature’. The reason this has not come about is that literature is opposed that which presages world literature: the totalisation of exchange value. The opposition to the formation of commerce-led globalised literature, though, is shared by literary communities across the globe. Literary practice cannot help but to enact itself in relation to this notional space of world literature, binding disparate literary actors. This might be the basis for a paradoxical notion of world literature as: ‘that literature which negates globalised literature’ – something which finds expression in acts of the particular, or trenchant localism. The second part of the paper will be devoted to discussing the phenomenon of literary primitivism as an early (perhaps even inaugurating?) instance of world literature thought of in this paradoxical way, ending with a reading of two poems on ‘dwelling’ by the Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire.

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This paper examines Emily Dickinson’s growing ambivalence towards the afterlife in the light of her exposure to faiths and philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam) that emerged from obscurity in nineteenth-century America. Existing Dickinson scholarship credits the Congregational faith as the source of the poet’s pre-occupations with life, death and the afterlife. While it is true that Dickinson’s New England religious upbringing does not escape absorption into her writing and she never fully abandons her Congregational faith, when it comes to matters concerning life “in any other world” she concludes “My faith cannot reply” (Fr1587). Unable to cope with the death of family and friends, Dickinson re-imagined the afterlife in ways that sometimes countered, sometimes confirmed her faith. This faith and Dickinson’s notions of life, death and the afterlife were repeatedly tested through direct engagement with her social, literary, and intellectual culture. The periodicals and newspapers, to which the family subscribed – in particular The Atlantic Monthly and The Springfield Daily Republican – published essays, narratives and excerpts about Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Islam. Friends and literary influences (Samuel Bowles, R.W. Emerson and T.W. Higginson) she interacted or corresponded with regularly, partook in the growing cultural conversation of alternative faiths. Dickinson’s engagement with her culture would have undoubtedly introduced her to alternative world views or philosophies, which tested, but also compelled her to subsequently re-test her existing thoughts on life, death and the afterlife.

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This paper reflects on 28 in-depth interviews with celebrated Anglophone poets, including Rae Armantrout, Alison Croggon, Brook Emery, Kenneth Goldsmith, Medbh McGuckian, G.C. Waldrep, C.D. Wright and C.K. Williams. It focuses on responses to a question that split those poets into two opposed camps. The question concerned the function of spontaneity in poetic composition. The majority of poets interviewed said yes, often quite enthusiastically, to W. H. Auden’s proposition in Secondary Worlds (1968) that when we ‘genuinely speak’ we are unaware of what we are about to say; and many also seemed happy to affirm his intimation that such unpremeditated utterance constitutes a key source of poetic value. Those who rejected these ideas were often passionate on the matter as well. The paper attempts to account for the causes of their split.

Paul Magee is author of From Here to Tierra del Fuego (University of Illinois Press: 2000), Cube Root of Book (John Leonard Press: 2006), shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the Adelaide Festival Awards 2008, and Stone Postcard (2014), listed in Australian Book Review as one of the books of the year for 2014. Paul is CI on the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project Understanding Creative Excellence: A Case Study in Poetry, 2013-16. He teaches poetry and criticism at the University of Canberra, where he is Associate Professor.

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Esteemed American poet and critic Linda Gregerson discusses the craft of poetry with Writing & Society candidate Kate Middleton. Linda reads from her most recent poetry collection Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, followed by a Q&A.

Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry and two volumes of criticism.  Her second poetry collection, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize and The Poets Prize; her third, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; her fourth, Magnetic North, was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award; her most recent, Prodigal: New and Selected Poems, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2015 (reviewed in the New Yorker) . Gregerson’s essays on lyric poetry and Renaissance literature appear in leading journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Her study of Renaissance literature, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1995; Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry appeared from the University of Michigan Press in 2001.  Gregerson is also the editor, with Susan Juster, of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Gregerson’s is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Chair of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Developed over the course of two years for the Perth-based visual arts biennale Spaced2, The Quiet Slaveis an historically accurate fiction set in the Indian Ocean in the early 19th Century, describing the first years of settlement on the Cocos-Keeling Islands, an atoll between Perth and Sri Lanka, through the eyes of a female Malay slave belonging to the controversial Englishman Alexander Hare. While it is intended to uncover the origins of the Malay community of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, aiming to restore a sense of their place in the history of the South-East Asian slave-trade and the British Empire, it has its origins in Mateer’s research into the place of Islam in the region.

The Quiet Slave: an history in eight episodes presented as a book in its original English and in Malay translation, a re-inscription of part of the text in the Arabic-Malay script known as Jawi, and an audio-piece dramatising, in the younger voices of the Cocos-Malay community of Katanning, the crisis which led to the Malay slaves being abandoned by Alexander Hare on the islands nearly two centuries ago. It is currently in show as part of the Perth International Art Festival’s exhibition Spaced2 at the Western Australian Museum. The Quite Slave is a project that can reminds us that language, as much in the fading material of its script as in its quiet narrative, is the basis of history and community.

Bio: John Mateer is a poet, writer and curator. His work includes essays, books of poems and Semar’s Cave, a prose travelogue on Indonesia. For two decades he has published criticism on contemporary art. He was on the steering committee The South Project, a Melbourne-based venture which developed cultural links across the Southern Hemisphere. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program, supported by the Chicago Humanities Festival, and 2012 he was the Australia Council’s inaugural art writer-in-residence at ACME, London. He convened the 2013 symposium The Ambiguity of our Geography at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part In Confidence: Reorientations in Recent Art, the Indian Ocean-focused exhibition he curated for that institution.Among his books are Southern Barbarians, Emptiness: Asian Poems 1998-2012 and Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’. His most recent volume is Namban, the Portuguese-language translation of Southern Barbarians. Currently he is researching traces of the explorer William Dampier’s voyages in Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.

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This paper was presented as part of the symposium ‘Literature, Truth and Transitional Justice’ at the Writing and Society Research Centre .

Northern Irish poetry has long been renowned for the representation and interrogation of political violence. Throughout the 25 years of the troubles a number of writers used their craft as a way of making sense of much of the traumatic nature of Northern Irish experience.

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The word ‘habitat’ is associated most often with living matter. Habitats are places of linkage; environments that sustain, and are built by, living things. But what happens when we think about poems as habitats for all and any thing, whether sentient or not? Languages are ecologies in which ‘things’ are named as they do their ‘thinging’, thereby gaining provisional definition via acts of subjective apprehension. Contemporary Australian poets Astrid Lorange and Pam Brown both write thing-ly poetries. Both display an intense and tender regard for nouns as they verb. Both revel in arrays of lists. In Lorange’s super-charged works, objects and bodies impress upon and are arranged alongside others in teeming ecologies. Material and conceptual transformations occur as poems enable “an endless mixing of the properties of persons with the properties of things” (Frow 280) – as in the poem ‘Wolves are Swarms’: “I just said: I am a swarm of impressions / I just said: this is a suite of dirty little wolves // the simple, hidden swarm of events and actors […] / you, as a fennel bulb” (Lorange 21). In a related mode, Brown’s poems play with a sense of poetic texts themselves as other-than-human objects, even as they are written by (and gifted between) people. Via a series of conditional naming exercises, Brown meditates on poetry as a habitat in which others and things can exchange properties without being appropriated: “this poem – merely a hint / of the trove of things […] it’s nothing really” (Brown 35). This paper compares the object-fascinations of Lorange and Brown to suggest ways poetry can effect a thing-swarm – a mode of relational or collective aesthetics, or a ‘thinking with things’.

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