All entries for Tuesday 26 September 2006

Oxford Poetry Conference: Edna Longley on Anthologies

Writing about web page http://www.poetryconference.org.uk/

Edna Longley’s talk on ‘Anthologising Contemporary Poetry: Traditions and Cults’ was something of a disappointment to me and I will explain why in a moment. Longley began her talk by citing Marjorie Perloff who states that the anthology is dead because poems have now become free on the web. Longley argues that this is not the case because anthologies till have the job of signalling tastes and positions.

Longley tells us that she is going to focus on two anthologies:
• Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (VP) ed. by Rod Megham and John Kinsella
• New British Poetry (NBP) ed. by Don Paterson and Charles Simic

Longley now begins to think about terminology, ‘contemporary’ for example. She notes how some ‘contemporary’ anthologies of the past have included dead poets. She notes how Yeats became an anthology staple in England in the thirties, but not until the sixties in Ireland. In NBP, Paterson is having dialogue with the English lyric and apparently, he is of the opinion that one cannot erase tradition. Kinsella traces a trajectory through Sydney onwards but his view, apparently, is not traditional but rather sees national, regional versions of poetry.

To suggest that an anthology is ‘international’ is suspect for Longley, because to her, it suggests a virtual space lacking in time. Longley believes that the phrase ‘international’ masks regional and national views of poetry. She wonders, for example, how Irish poetry can fit into the Anglo-American domination?

She also dislikes the label, ‘poetries’, since although it appeals to pluralism, it in fact, according to Longley, masks monism. The sectional or cult poetry in fact excludes the mainstream and works from negatives, exclusive doctrines, shunning, a sense of superiority and a sense of persecution. Longley picks out here Geoffrey Hill and J.H. Prynne who exist supposedly in ‘a desert of difficulty’. She also picks out Herd and Potts who favourably reviewedThe Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. The author, Andrew Duncan, apparently studies conceptual poetry. Longley is anxious that formal play is too linked to the academy and the theoretical basis of such poetry. She notes how in VP poems are linked to a body of concepts.

Longley moves on here to discuss the aspirational blurring of poetry and politics. Poetry is described as a weapon etc. Could the political term ‘poetries’ be of value? Longley states that a critique of essentialism and multiplicity of practice militate against its value. Is ‘poetries’ simply an excuse for including bad poetry? In VP, Longley thinks that Mengham has a dilemma between not wanting to produce rivalry, but also to show the special value of the poets included. Roberts thinks that there can be singular or multiple values, where as Paterson prefers American free-wheeling.

It is at this point that Longley starts to set out her own values particularly concerning work that she considers to be anti-poetry. In these poems, the form is visual and there is no rhyme, voice etc. Longley here compares Prynne and MacNeice who both present formal clashes and subvert grammar etc. to cross boundaries. However Longley suggests that the grammatical risk taken in Prynne happens for its own sake. For Longley, ordinary words are stranger and hence more effective in MacNeice than in Prynne’s ‘theoretically informed poetry. Longley turns to Hill’s blending of the lyric and criticism drawn from the world of knowledge. Longley asks, is it a poem or a raid on a zeitgeist? Longley sees it as writing prescribed by academic readings. Poets are recruited by the academy in a Faustian bargain.

At this point she compared two poems, one by Prynne and one by MacNeice and proceeded to use MacNeice as a stick to beat Prynne with. I found this extremely ironic as she seemed to be doing something of which she accuses factional poetry groups: being negative, having exclusive doctrines, shunning, keeping a sense of superiority and a sense of persecution.

Basically, in her paper, Longley tries to show that some of the terminologies used by anthologists (poetries, international, contemporary) mask assumptions that in her mind are wrong. She is probably right here to some extent. However she ruins her own argument through her own intolerance and the presentation that ensues is sometimes a rant about poets that she dislikes. I don’t understand the lack of tolerance for other factions and group in poetry. I can only think that it emerges from the difficulties of being published and poet’s insecurities.

: 26 Sep 2006 13:30 |  Tags: Conferences |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Oxford Poetry Conference: Leontia Flynn on Reading Medbh McGuckian

Writing about web page http://www.poetryconference.org.uk/

Leontia Flynn here presents a talk that is mainly preoccupied with McGuckian’s intertextuality. She looks mainly at McGuckian’s collection, On Ballycastle Beach and she marvels at the amount of references in poems to writers such as Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. Flynn wonders if these are simply arbitrary and notes that such references are invisible to the general reader. Flynn notes that Thomas Docherty sees such references as a sign of McGuckian’s phenomenology, but she sees such references as offering a reflection of our own misguided search for hidden meaning. In this reading, McGuckian constructs an argument against literal readings. One cannot solve the crossword puzzle, since the poem does not present clues but simply the words themselves. As Roland Barthes states, intertextuality can become a hall of mirrors.

: 26 Sep 2006 12:47 |  Tags: Conferences |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Oxford Poetry Conference: Deryn Rees–Jones on Apparitionality

Writing about web page http://www.poetryconference.org.uk/

Rees-Jones’ talk is entitled ’ “Not a Ghost at All”: lineage and apparitionality in the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy and Colette Bryce’. Using Terry Castle’s model of apparitionality in The Apparitional Lesbian , Rees-Jones extends this and wants it to become a model of poetic lineage. In TAL, Castle states that, ‘the archetypal lesbian fiction decanonizes, so to speak, the canonical structure of desire itself’. Castle continues:

It is an assault on the banal: a retriangulation of triangles. As a consequence, it often looks odd, fantastical, implausible, ‘not there’ – utopian in aspiration if not design. It is, in a word, imaginary.

Castle’s book was, of course, first written to show the failure to recognize lesbian desire, but it could signify something further according to Rees-Jones: a poetic model of inclusivity.

Jessica Benjamin’s The Bonds of Love is useful for Rees-Jones here. Benjamin states: ‘The focus on pre-Oedipal life has created a growing awareness of the force and validity of another striving, that for unity, symbiosis, fusion, merging, identification’. Benjamin seeks an alternative to an Oedipal model of human relations and she wants to find ‘bodily continuity with an other’. Rees-Jones believes that without stepping beyond the Oedipal in one’s mental life, one cannot really care for an other.

Rees-Jones believes that certain poems are going beyond the Oedipal using apparitionality to communicate with others. She uses a number of examples: Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Steam’, Colette Bryce’s ‘Tense’ and another poem by Bryce, ‘The Negatives’.

: 26 Sep 2006 12:39 |  Tags: Deryn Rees-Jones |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Oxford Conference: Claire Crowther on The Resurrected Line

Writing about web page http://www.poetryconference.org.uk/

Claire Crowther gave a very interesting talk on ‘The Resurrected Line’ in poems about grandmothers. In poems where the figure of the grandmother is central to the poem’s intent, the grandmother stands in for the persona of writer. The grandmother can represent a desire for metrical inheritance and the rediscovery of work by women. Often grandmother pomes play with repetition. Peter Reading’s untitled poem below is repeated within different poems and different collections of poetry:

Grans are bewildered by post-Coronation disintegration -
offspring of offspring of their offspring infest and despoil.

Crowther looks at Geoffrey Hill’s ‘Mercian Hymns’ (XXV) in which the line is cut off regularly in the same place. She describes enjambment as the desire not to die at the end of the line and she notes how Watkin compares the horizontal nature of the line to a corpse or coffin. The flow of the line could then represent resurrection.

Hill also uses repetition in his grandmother poem and Crowther describes a certain kind of temporality in grandmother poems that is concerned with periodicity. Discontinuity in such poems represents the dying, dematerializing body of the grandmother. These poems represent disembodied being where the grandmother can be a matriarch or goddess. Here Crowther refers to Irigaray’s demand for a female divine that can present our perfection to us.

Crowther then analyses a number of illuminating example: Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Arraheids’. Ruth Fainlight’s ‘Divination by Hair’ and Lee Harwood’s ‘African Violets’.

: 26 Sep 2006 10:29 |  Tags: Conferences |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem