Introducing Colin Harris

A long-time member of the group, and a former student of Edge Hill, other work by Colin may be seen in Great Works and Shadowtrain.



Neither Film nor True
stunning shorts
just keep them on
again he voiced his mother’s coastline
why the wry privatisation
could it be from actors
I couldn’t find a writer
came down from observation
spilt my coffee
it ran between floorboards
drenched carpets
rose up the walls
filled the television until it
turned to liquid
it didn’t begin this way
I had a different story in mind
it was supposed to start with an image
and end in a moment filled with fear
instead I am the destroyer of the human race
the purveyor of rare coffee beans



Calling for the Lawnmower
friend whose work subverts
I have shocked since the premiere
but my nightmares move into castles
myth is updating
I called love
glossed over the underworld
a reconciliation feast
but deceptively simple
the idea holds
the fight against cancer
is not romantic
I have become a target
for household tyrants
my old resurrection
obliterating the new one



The Photographer’s Heroine
fans stop waving

he is amused by you
hate temporarily dispelled
you know it could change again
but the moment is the stronger force

sounds outside disturb the wood
signifiers of people who don’t decide to laugh

what could you do

the spot at the corner of vision isn’t enough to grab your attention



The Vacancy Alter Ego
looking narrow
still lost
framing forced decision
a court
filling the emptiness
ambushed by inadequate models
creativity
when you get there die
investigation
evolutionary inevitability
idiots and liars
chased by their own creations
warm animals
shooting themselves
this planet rolls away
the false dreamer
will never know giants
in the hand
happiness in the confusion
the reality of suicide
on public transport
the truth
of humankind
every time

Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World

Celebrate the Centenary of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry at the Bluecoat in Liverpool.

Their celebration of Malcolm Lowry (1909 - 57) features a special centenary exhibition and a programme of performances and events.

His Under the Volcano, set in Mexico and written in Canada, is considered one of the most significant 20th century novels, and has influenced painters, filmmakers, choreographers, musicians as well as writers.

This exhibition brings together artists from Merseyside, the UK, Mexico and Chile, each relating to Lowry in different ways.


An illustrated book, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, published by Liverpool University Press in collaboration with the Bluecoat and edited by Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs, includes images from the exhibition and texts by Lowry's biographer Gordon Bowker and others, and was launched on Thursday. It includes two Edge Hill writing staff, Ailsa Cox and Robert Sheppard. Ailsa has written a short story. I've submitted an account of visiting Lowry's grave (in my native Sussex). See the image taken at the launch event at the Bluecoat on Thursday, above right, featuring Ailsa, Mark Goodall, another contributor to the book, and me holding up the specially-brewed Wapping Brewery Malcolm Lowry Golden Ale so that yet another contrubutor, Colin Dilnot, could snap it for his Lowry website, link below.


In 1979 I visited Lowry's grave in Ripe, Sussex, and wrote a long poem about the event, which I never published. Returning to the text thirty years later (it was part of my MA in Creative Writing at UEA) I have 'written through' it, commenting on the poem, and in particular on the unused notes left out of the piece (which seem to me more revealing). Adding to this, descriptions of photographs taken on the day, and several quotes on and about Lowry, it amounts to a celebration and critique of the 'clinker-built brilliance' of Lowry's writing, and a reflection upon writerly process, a poetics.

For further investigations of the local origins of Malcolm Lowry and its influence on his writings see Colin Dilnot's extensive blog Malcom Lowry At The Nineteenth Hole.

Iain Sinclair at Edge Hill

(Image (c) Tim Power). Tim Power's photograph of Iain Sinclair relaxing in the Buck i'th'Vine in Ormskirk was taken after Iain's reading at Edge Hill a year or so ago. Read previous postings:

Sinclair's long poem Patrick Hamilton.

And Robert Sheppard on the Social Poetics of Iain Sinclair which is accompanied by another photo of Iain, taken by Tim Power, at the reading itself, and is followed by Sheppard's writings on Sinclair's early poem Lud Heat.

Here is an account of Sinclair's later visit to Liverpool to help celebrate the work of Malcolm Lowry.

Introducing Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor reading at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool as part of an Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group group reading as a warm up to Allen Fisher (visible, seated left), at a Neon Highway event organised by editor and PPRG member Alice Lenkiewicz. photo: Andrew Taylor.

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor and founder of erbacce and erbacce press. He has had six collections of poetry published to-date. The latest, Make Some Noise is published by Original Plus. An e-book is forthcoming from Differentia Press. Recent poems have appeared in journals and e-zines such as Calliope Nerve, The Exuberant Ashtray, Willows Wept Review and Full of Crow. Poetics - ‘A Poetics of Absence – part one’ has appeared in Otoliths and is re-published in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt), which we are launching soon.He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University

He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University.

See his blog here.

A Poetics of Absence Part II

The Permission to Continue

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
to rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

A life's work? Writing after the fact

tasked to reflect from tower block
balconies

like an empty colour slide I'm black and white inside

Industrial heartland wasteland
regeneration the smell of the docks
college of further education
of higher education

university status university

poetics as exploration

poetics as continuance

When I sleep alone I hear the sound of your breathing

re-visitation evokes memories
If I stand here long enough will you appear?

Such diversions – they test Take Courage

Wars. It's the forgetting. The peril of loss.

Without trace
a red double-decker bus sits idle
in the middle of the street a blackbird hello blackbird
stands amongst the debris

A visit to Test Place
River now merely penthouse background
we consume much more nowadays
the boats carry shit
or sightseeing passengers

Bates Salve cures wounds & sores

Stops, station buffets, road links

to walk the river's edge at twilight
offers new perspective
watch the greyness fade

Poetics as memory
Poetics as provider

London's outmoded DNA –
workmen's cafés, dingy pubs –
disappears. If anything survives from
post-war newsreels of civic improvement, it is
heritaged, squeezed between commas.

Liverpool your public land too
is being sold to private developers

place [your] feet in the deep tracks they make

poetics for now

Because we love to look at them [the stars]
we hope maybe they love to look at us

across such landscapes fairy lights predict
the glow

poetics says: look back, look forward, look straight ahead and cross the page.

follow Mail Train lines
Queens Park and Kensal Green

company alters routine
morning making
matters better
resting after exercise

poetics as investigation
poetics as sound

such sweet piano chords
the melody weaves a quiet voice

poetics as consolidation

The recovery of a memory is a present day
activity. It's not the past. Memory occurs in the present.


It should all become clear

from Cumbrian mountains to York stone pavements

the letter K carved
an indication

I don't know why I am tied to the winter

exit from Bankside
point me towards Eros

All through the storm, the frost, and the snow,
Death on our black horizon pulses clear

off the route
and mast head of the evening paper

I idle the thoughts of Woking

Last night I dreamt that outside Melling Church
I told you that I still loved you

Poetry as lifesaver as life giver















To A Fox II
Autumn falls lanes
drop darkness
hedgerows trimmed
fields ploughed

in preparation

Roadside awareness
flash of white
twilight nocturne image
of a moment

nice moment actually, dusk was falling,

lovely watery sunset which was very enigmatic
amongst the overgrown runway strip......
also managed to locate abandoned buildings
that formed the old hospital site on the airfield
in amongst some woods......very, very scary though.
En-route accompanied
chatter of engine whistle
of rack scratched inside
journey reinterpretation

Sleek tell-tale signs

Unhexed through lanes
a darkened memory
trimmed hedgerows
ploughed fields an escape route


(With thanks to Antony Harding)













Signboards: old type of writing

Transparency adaptation
siren insight

intersection and sodium highlights
present a few streets away

Future plans

every so often
it all becomes clear

source a manipulation
an epic example

context over content
such tasteful digitized blurs





























Why Do You Come Here When You Know It Makes Things Hard For Me?

Ever presence followed
like the first star that guides
as night falls

across the hills and into
the bay the turbines stand
firm as that

day the wind ate my face
icily from the end of
the pier

These tracks that lead
to you lay cold while
steam rises

from railway station waiting
rooms this moment this
passing where

does it come from?

***

To here knows when
phased like worn tape
through patio

doors washed cars
stood path bound soap
pools gathered

capturing the light
through the orchard
where memories

are fixed as the day
you stood photographed
in the white

of your wedding dress

GOING PUBLIC Autumn 2009

(Cliff Yates and Angela Keaton waiting to record the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics group CD: Points of Reference) (Photo: Andrew Taylor)

Celebrating a decade of poetics at Edge Hill


1. Talks and Launch Series (in the Education Block)

Open Meetings of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group (free – all welcome) all at 6.30-8.30
The whole series will be launching the Salt poetics anthology Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (edited by Rupert Loydell) (four of the group are featured) http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/anth/9781844714711.htm

This is an eclectic and exciting gathering of poetry and prose-poems that try to understand what poetry is and who or what it might be for. It is also about what writers might want or demand from poetry, in either a general or personal way.

8th October 2009: Scott Thurston will discuss his book Internal Rhyme to be published next year by Shearsman.

This will also be a chance to celebrate the new Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, co-edited by Sheppard and Thurston

15th October 2009:

Cliff Yates: on poetic, tba

Andrew Taylor: ‘The Poetics of Absence – part two’: a continuation and reflection upon the work in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.

29th October 2009:

Dee Mc Mahon: ‘Stories of the Line - Provocation, Process and Product’


Robert Sheppard: ‘Fictional Poems and Fictional Poetics: the double oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch’

5th November 2009:

Daniele Pantano:
'Living in Translation: A Discussion of Exile, Translingualism, and Writing Your Way Home.'


Michael Egan: poetics, tba.


2. Reading and Launch

11th November 7.30 in The Rose Theatre £3.50

Cliff Yates will be reading from Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (out from Salt now: www.saltpublishig.com/books/smp/9781844715039.htm)


Support act: members of the poetry and poetics research group


Official journals:

Pages online, here, of course!

And Erbacce will be publishing a print edition dedicated to the group (details online at http://www.erbacce.com/)

Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group members past and present include: Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates, Andrew Taylor, Scott Thurston, Neil Addison, Bill Drennan, Dee McMahon, Matt Fallaize, Daniele Pantano, Steve Van Hagen, Michael Egan, Colin Harris, Patricia Farrell, Angela Keaton and Alice Lenkiewicz.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

The first issue is out now, 112 pages in length and the contents are as follows:

EDITORIAL: Scott Thurston and Robert Sheppard

Dragging at the haemorrhage of uns : Maggie
O Sullivan s excavations of Irish history
Mandy Bloomfield

Democratic consensus in J. H. Prynne s Refuse Collection
Ian Davidson

Veronica Forrest-Thomson s Cordelia , tradition and
the Triumph of Artifice
Gareth Farmer

Expectant contexts : Corporeal and desiring spaces in
Denise Riley s poetry
Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy

BOOK REVIEWS
Tony Lopez, Meaning Performance
Reviewed by Robert Sheppard

John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch
Reviewed by Scott Thurston

Learn how to subscribe at http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

If you'd like to sneak a peak inside the issue and view article opening pages, abstracts and keywords then these have been uploaded to Scribd.com: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18479585/Journal-of-British-and-Irish-Innovative-Poetry-Abstracts

Anthony Levings, Managing Editor, Gylphi Limited

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 4: Some British Poetics

Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley, (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), and some of the anthologies referred to in the previous three postings on this subject, can be used to provide a limited guide to British poetics of the avant-garde. I have formed from them a representative cluster of texts, though with a number of important exclusions that result form this decision: for example, the poetics work of Allen Fisher, that of the apparently tight-lipped Tom Raworth, and that of the senior experimentalist Christopher Middleton. Indeed, I compare Allen Fisher’s Necessary Business (1985) to Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Artifice of Absorption’ (1986) elsewhere to assess both the contents and forms of the poetics of the North American and British avant-gardes. These two formally hybrid works constitute exemplary poetics and demonstrate its faculty of keeping its arguments open by its very disposition in form. Middleton's poetics I speak of in my inaugural leccture. Doubtless my method throws up other exclusions, but the effort is worth the risks.

A link with the North American tradition is immediately apparent in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Preface to New Poems’ (1920), which is quoted a great deal in American poetics, and was, in any case, the preface to the American edition of his poems; it compares the poetry of rigid finished thought, which he associated with metrical form, with the fluid poetry of the future, which Lawrence predicted would embody itself as a process in an organic free verse. (Cook 2004: 106-110) Mina Loy, though of British birth, thought of herself and of the subject of her essay ‘Modern Poetry’, as distinctly American by the time she wrote it (1925), despite her earlier close involvement with European futurism. Her review essay focuses upon rhythm as a metaphorical quality of attention and – less fashionably - as an imprint of the poet’s own nature (which is a constant of her various poetics). (Cook 2004: 131-34)

W.S. Graham – a Scottish poet who has a growing reputation as a precursor to recent innovative poetries – prefigures the imagery of his later poetry by figuring language as a beast (as well as material) in his ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946). Though a made thing, the poem is not static, as it is taken on board by the reader, again suggesting one of the later themes of his verse, which developed into a poetics-medium of its own, like Wallace Stevens’. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 117-121) Graham’s first mentor, Dylan Thomas, in his ‘Notes on the Art of Poetry’ (1951), actually an epistolary answer to questions from a student, covers a number of unrelated issues: from his early love of the sound of words to his decision as a craftsman to use any or every element of poetic artifice; from his denial of the non-rational method of the Surrealists to his refusal to define poetry (which, in poetics, is as common a theme as the attempt to define it). (Scully 1966: 195-204) Thomas’ fellow-Welshman, David Jones’ ‘The Preface to The Anathemata’ (1952) is an apologia for his great epic poem in terms of the author’s linguistic, cultural and religious inheritance, and his making of this into an artefact of signs. (Scully 1966: 205-236) Basil Bunting’s ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966) is loquacious by Bunting’s standards of self-commentary, which he normally kept to the acerbic minimum. He affirms the primacy of sound over sense, beauty over meaning, or rather his notion that meaning is in the sound of the poem read (well) out loud. This is a good example of where poetics is both a guide to the work, but it is best read against it. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 81-2) Pure sound, though, has been theorised well. Bob Cobbing’s ‘A Statement of Sound Poetry’ (1969) is one of his rare excursions into poetics, outlining the abandonment of lexical items in sound poetry (but reminding us that the uniqueness of his own work was that it was also visual). (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 426)

John James’ ‘A Theory of Poetry’ (1977) is an ironic poem that plays with the kinds of interpretations that entered Britain on the back of continental theory in the 1970s, as I show elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 249-252) Veronica Forrest-Thomson knew some of that theory well but abandoned it for the development of her own strategies of dealing with the processes of naturalisation and for a theory of reading that respected both meaningful and non-meaningful elements of poetic artifice in her book Poet Artifice. ‘From Poetic Artifice’ (1978) combines her theoretical introduction with a portion of the book where she uses her own poem as an exemplar of her poetics, which derives from her theory of artificial devicehood. (Riley 1992: 222-233; see another excerpt in Cook 2004: 456-463). By contrast, John Riley’s ‘What Are You Going to Call It?’ (1980) is an impressionistic narrative of creativity that resists critical thinking, or rather resists the embracing of those ideas by a true poet. He or she had better abandon bogus ideas in favour of immersion in the rhythms of the earth. Not surprisingly, the short piece deliberately turns into what appears to be a species of prose-poetry. (Riley 1992: 83-4) Michael Haslam’s ‘The Subject of Poems’ (1992) is an ‘outsider’ poetics that opens poetry to notions of truth and purity, and the transcendental ego which patterns itself into poems. (Riley 1992: 70-80) Peter Riley’s ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’ (1992) is an attempt – at some length – to grasp that moment and to reflect upon it. (Riley 1992: 92-113)

Ken Edwards’ ‘Grasping the Plural’ (1984/1992) is a text deriving from an American language poet-style ‘talk’ on the use of ‘we’ in poetry and elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 21-9) John Hall’s ‘Writing and Not Writing’ (1992) is a variety of non-poetics, since it concerns the act of renouncing writing poetry altogether; I examine Edwards’ and Hall’s contributions elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 41-9)

Nigel Wheale’s ‘A Curve of Reading’ (1992) is an impressionistic account of the growth of the poet’s sensibility, peppered with quotations from poems, popular songs, and sound-bites of poetics. (Riley 1992: 124-134) Geoffrey Ward’s ‘Objects That Come Alive at Night’ (1992) similarly traces influences but sees poetry, via the poetics of both Shelley and Bernstein, as a utopian critique created by alternative images. (Riley 1992: 135-39) John Welch’s ‘Two Poems’ (1992) is a text in poetry and prose that meditates upon, mediates between, the signs that appear in writing and those that appear in dreams. (Riley 1992: 151-3) John Wilkinson’s ‘Imperfect Pitch’ (1992) combines poetry and prose in the classic format of Dante’s La Vita Nouva, alternating poetry with ‘commentary’, though here the prose is as elliptical as the poems. At one point it theorises lyric poetry (the poetry between its prose, it implies) at once as a strict binding of representation to poetic presentation, as an excessive projection of a doomed pretentiousness, and as abundant exploding of space and a freeing of itself from nature. (Riley 1992: 154-172)

Kelvin Corcoran’s ‘Sometimes a Word will Start it’ (1992) demonstrates these titular words about poetic genesis that Corcoran has borrowed from John Ashbery; a prose passage dwells on three ‘favourite’ letters and then seems to segue into a resulting poem about his father. (Riley 1992: 173-77) Ralph Hawkins’ ‘A Period of Gestation’ (1992) opens up his poet’s notebook to the way randomly interesting quotations trigger poems. (Riley 1992: 253-259) Roy Fisher’s ‘Poet on Writing’ (1992), also sees the notebook experience as primary to the development of poetic ideas. Indeed, it argues that the multitude of notebooks he keeps sometimes seems to be his major occupation. (Riley 1992: 272-75) Carlyle Reedy’s ‘Working Processes of a Woman Poet’ (1992) also spells out a number of writerly methods in a practical poetics. (Riley 1992: 260-271) Tom Lowenstein’s ‘About Filibustering in Samsāra’ (1992), on the other hand, is a direct statement on his poem (printed alongside it in the anthology Poets on Writing) and its ethnographic sources and borrowings from native Inuit poetics (Riley 1992: 207-8). Douglas Oliver’s ‘Three Lilies’ (1982/1992) is an offshoot of his study Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989), about prosody in action. Prosody is the life beat of poetry, and his account of it is combined with a personal consideration of the thematics of his work, including the implications of real-life emotions becoming transfigured in poetry.

Edwin Morgan, on the verge of his eightieth year, reflects on his long career in ‘Roof of Fireflies’ (1999). He considers the poems he did not write (another species of non-poetics), but also justifies his own extraordinary stylistic range as a kind of poetic diversity modelled on the necessity of its ecological cousin, bio-diversity. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 190-194) Elaine Feinstein’s ‘A Question of Voice’ (2000) also looks back on a long career, and on her turn towards the tradition of American poetry described above. (Indeed as a student her enquiry had provoked Olson to write his statement of poetics ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 158-161)) Perhaps under the influence of her work on Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, she confirms her position as a lyric poet, and poetry’s function in making us feel alive. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 188-9) As against this earnestness one may pitch Scottish poet Robert Crawford’s ‘Cosmopolibackofbeyondism’ (2000), which argues for a regional internationalism, a parodic manifesto in typical postmodernist style, (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 262-4) as is John Hartley Williams’ ‘A Manifesto’ (2000) which argues for ‘extilism’, a neologism compounded of the words, ‘Exile, extricate, extrapolate, inexplicable and ectoplasm’, whose tenets amount to a poetry of denial and a vanishing of the poet! (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 287-8)


Even allowing for the relative sizes of the countries involved, poetics as a conscious practice flourishes (often under that name) in the USA and Canada, while it only appears intermittently, and with some resistance, in Britain and (on the evidence I have gathered) hardly at all in Irish avant garde poetry (although the poetics of a poet of trenchantly Irish ancestry, Maggie O’Sullivan, are fulsome and worthy of comment elsewhere). One exception is Randolph Healy’s ‘Uncertain Questions’, collected in 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium, an issue of the journal Boundary 2, which confessedly caricatures the stultifying nationalistic consciousness that Irish people – and poets – felt obliged to indwell, but shows its gradual undermining by the progressive epistemologies of the twentieth century, particularly in science and mathematics, to provide new models of the world, capable of countering the simplicities of identity politics and poetics. This very essay perhaps suggests the difficult conditions that Irish alternative poetries have in articulating themselves. Of course, one of the influences on the avant-garde writers of the British Isles is precisely the poetics of this American verse, so the inheritances are not clear-cut in national terms (and, on occasions, run the other way, a precedent set by D.H. Lawrence in 1920).


Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work. This is also true of its coverage of British and Irish poetics, my account of which makes use of this anthology and the essential Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley. The pages on British and Irish poetics also call on Scully and Rothenberg and Joris and 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium.

The recent anthology, edited by Rupert Loydell, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (Salt, 2009), may also widen the potential list of anthologised poetics. The use of anthologies, as in my other accounts of poetics, necessarily omits certain texts, but it heightens a cumulative sense of poetics as a discourse of contrasts.

A Note on these poetics posts.

These lists – partly because they are lists – have been excluded from the study of poetics I have bveen working on. Reference to the use of poetics in creative writing may be seen in my piece The Necessity of Poetics which can be read in one version on Pores: www.bbk.ac.uk/pores. It is this sense of poetics that is explored by the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group and what will are celebrating this autumn. Four of our members or ex-members are included in Troubles Swapped for Something Else - and we shall be celebrating this fact.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Robert Sheppard: North American Poetics: A Sample

Jerome Rothenberg states rightly that a characteristic of poets ‘has been the push … to self-define their workings, often in a language that makes a continuity with how they speak within their poems’, and I shall be making some play of the variety of forms in the poetics discussed. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 405) Each of these North American poets, in the interests of economy, is represented by one work only, using the list of publications established in an earlier post, and I will comment only a little on each.

Amy Lowell’s ‘Poetry as a Spoken Art’ (1917) emphasises the audible qualities of poetry and offers an apologia for free verse as rhythmical utterance. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Ezra Pound’s ‘A Retrospect’ (1918) has been reprinted often, thus reinforcing my earlier contention that Pound operates, in this limited field only, as a kind of specific rather than a universal founder of discursivity. Pound, like Lowell, offers a justification of free verse or for particular rhythmical contours as analogues for certain emotions, but he adds his famous ‘Don’ts’, which additionally emphasise imagistic clarity and verbal economy. (Cook 2004: 83-90; Scully 1966: 30-43; Herbert and Hollis 2000: 17-25) T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), is a poetics for the writing that became The Waste Land, stressing how tradition impacts upon the present act of writing, and how modernist ‘impersonality’ is an escape from personality and false emotion, almost an escape into tradition, as the poem attempted to prove. (Cook 2004: 97-105) Hart Crane’s ‘General Aims and Theories’ (1925) suggests ways for the modern poet to incorporate the industrial and urban energies of the modern world into the creation of a new poetry of impersonal consciousness and spiritual illumination. (Cook 2004: 135-38) Wallace Stevens takes on the form of the aphorism in ‘Adagia’ (1934-40) to articulate a nuanced sense of a similar impersonality, testing out various metaphors for poetry as the supreme fiction. His contention that ‘The theory of poetry is the life of poetry’ expresses a commitment to poetics, a commitment felt throughout his poetry itself. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 56-66; 66) Gertrude Stein likewise was given to ‘explanation’ of a peculiarly indirect kind. ‘Poetry and Grammar’ (1935) is one of her famous lectures which justifies her work to the baffled audience created by her unlikely celebrity; in her repetitive, apparently simple prose (not unlike the texture of the creative work itself) she presents the history of her writing as the struggle to find the difference between poetry and prose, only to find that nouns and an experimental mode of minimal naming are the constituents of her poetry. (Cook 2004: 208-214) William Carlos Williams’ ‘Introduction to The Wedge’ (1944) is a short passionate modernist definition of the poem as a machine, whose parts must all function. However, he rejects formal poetic artifice for this machine, while reminding his readership of the fact that poets make such machines rather than deliver utterances. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 137-139) Langston Hughes’ ‘How to Be a Bad Writer (in ten easy lessons)’ (1949/50) is a parody of the Creative Writing ‘how to’ book: an ironical list of mistakes aimed specifically at African American writers. One offence is to refuse to write about everyday experience; another is to use archaic diction. Slapdash work and bohemian dissipation are likewise satirised. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 127-8)

Like Pound’s poetics, Charles Olson’s much anthologised essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) is often cited as a source of others’ poetics and, just as importantly, as a much imitated model for its writing, with its abrupt, demotic, fiercely intelligent but trenchantly non-academic tone. It presents a poetics of perceptual and scriptural kinetics, theorising the poem as a field of verbal energy, whose moments of creation gather the poem’s subject matter in an improvisatory sweep. (Cook 2004: 288-295; (Scully 1966: 271-282) (Allen and Tallman 1973: 147-158 (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 92-99) Louis Zukofsky’s already discussed Objectivist ‘A Statement for Poetry’ (1950), recasts Pound’s three types of poetry into the simpler categories of image, sound and concept, as components of a poem whose form will develop prosody during its composition, though not in the improvisatory manner of projective verse. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 143-6)

e.e. cummings’ preface ‘An Introduction’ (c. 1955) oddly works to delimit the impact of the poems they introduce: by denying their possible universality and their social engagement, for example, in favour of a private communion with the reader in the name of beauty. (Scully 1966: 124-125) The first half of Marianne Moore’s essay ‘Idiosyncrasy and Technique’ (c. 1956) opts for the efficacy of the technique of straight writing, that is, without obfuscatory diction or elaborate ornament; the second half, on ‘Idiosyncrasy’, concerns subject matter, particularly the elusive materials one can garner from literature (she quotes one of her allusive poems) and from life. (Scully 1966: 107-122)

Robert Duncan’s ‘Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus’ (1956) recapitulates and reaffirms the axioms of post-Poundian poetics. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 187-195) Olson’s ex-student, Edward Dorn, in his similarly entitled ‘What I See in The Maximus Poems’ (1961) looks not to history, but to geography, and finds in Olson’s work an investigation of the particularity of place, with which Dorn elsewhere makes his own poetic continuity. (Cook 2004: 361-366)

John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1959) is a performance text that constitutes its own poetics (or vice versa) arranged in strict columns, across which a text about the making of itself (as poetry, as form) may be recited in fragments with unnatural silences to defamiliarise it for the contemplating audience. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 413-15)

Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ (1959) parodies the manifesto form to argue for a pragmatics of formal description and an ironical intimacy of address in the poetic exchange. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 353-355) Allen Ginsberg’s ‘When the Mode of the Music Changes the Walls of the City Shake’ (1961) begins with an attack on conventional forms for their inability to register the complexities of perception and consciousness (specifically Ginsberg’s own!) and ends by hailing a revolution in American letters. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 324-330) John Weiners’ ‘The Address of the Watchman to the Night’ (1963) rejects his earlier bohemianism of depraved excess in favour of a poetics of perpetual alertness to that which is close to hand. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 351-2) Amiri Baraka’s ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ (1964) (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 420-22) is a more public act of renunciation and realignment: a manifesto poem for black consciousness poetry, arguing the recognition of the symbolic power of black history and the actual power of black revolt. The appearance of this poem on disk, set to aggressive free jazz by The New York Art Quartet in 1965, propels poetics into a strictly performative context. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading’ (1964) was a publicly uttered renunciation of her former poetics, as her work became more militantly feminist. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 141-2)

Denise Levertov’s ‘Notes on Organic Form’ (1965) melds her post-Olsonian inheritance with an older Romanticism, perhaps owing to her English poetic origins in the 1940s, so that Hopkins’ concept of the instress is re-functioned as the shape of an experience as that is negotiated by the shaping of the poem. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 312-317) In contrast, Jackson MacLow’s short ‘Statement’ (c. 1965) outlines his anarchist poetics of procedural technique, allowing minimal intentional interruptions by the authorial ego. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 384-5)

Jack Spicer’s ‘Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures’ (1965) are transcriptions of extemporised remarks made at a poetry conference, and range from the mystical idea of writing as ‘dictation’ to the identification of the serial poem as way of structuring intermittent consciousness. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 227-234) As academic interest in the New American Poetry grew, the lecture room increasingly became a site for poetics. Both Robert Creeley’s lecture, ‘I’m Given to Write Poems’ (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263-273) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s account of the writing of a poem in his ‘Genesis of After the Cries of the Birds’ were delivered at the same conference in Berlin in 1967, thus also reminding us of both the public and the inter-authorial communication at such events at which poetics is disseminated. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 445-449) Creeley’s title recognises the pressure to write and the feeling that a poem is ‘being permitted to continue’ in its improvisatory unpredictable coming into being (to use his description that has been recast into a definition of poetics itself, in the hands of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She calls poetics 'permission to continue'.). (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263)

Gary Snyder’s heady mix of Buddhism and ecology, ‘Poetry and the Primitive’ (1967), sees poetry as an essential ‘ecological survival technique’, a view that has recently become popular again, thus demonstrating that repressed poetics have the possibility of return in new situations. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 395-406; 395) John Ashbery’s ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’ (1968) is a lecture to the Yale Art School on the concept of the avant-garde (the irony of the venue is not lost on Ashbery) in which he reflects upon a polito-poetical situation that he has surely experienced; when his or her avant-garde practice is assimilated to cultural taste, a truly vanguard artist must learn to escape this automatic acceptance. (Cook 2004: 393-398) This is ironical, given that as Ashbery was writing, a new avant-garde was just around the corner, ready to take up that challenge. Robert Grenier’s ‘On Speech’ (1971) is arguably the founding document of the poetics of the Language Poets, with its anti-Olsonian admonition ‘I HATE SPEECH’ that emphasises a primarily scriptural context for writing. (Silliman 1986: 496-7)

Ishmael Reed’s ‘Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto’ (c. 1972) is as playful as Reed’s novels in presenting a tricksterish pan-African diasporic energy manifesting in what he calls the ‘Now Locomotive’ of the moment. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 440-41)

Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Letter to Miss Pierson’ (1975) takes the form of an answer to specific questions from a correspondent; Bishop advocates a course of exhaustive reading (but not reading ‘too much about poetry’) and balances the necessity of hard work (as is evident in her own case) against the mysterious and surprising aspects of writerly process. (Herbert and Hollis 2000:104-5; 101)

Between 1971-5, Bernadette Mayer and the Members of her St Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop assembled their ‘Experiments’ (1978), a series of creative writing exercises that has proved authoritative and has been subsequently supplemented by Charles Bernstein and others. (Silliman 1986: 557-560) Clark Coolidge’s ‘from Arrangement’ (1978), an excerpt from a public class at the Naropa Institute, is a lesson in the practical reading of non-referential writing, such as his own. (Silliman 1986: 553-4)

Jerome Rothenberg’s ‘New Models, New Visions: Some Notes Toward a Poetics of Performance’ (1977) argues for the centrality of a paradigm-breaking poetic practice that combines ethnopoetics and the avant-garde, and combines performance strategies with those for the page alone. (Hoover 1994: 640-44) Likewise concerned with performance, but in a specific context, Steve McCaffery’s ‘Text-Sound, Energy and Performance’ (1978) praises the somatic excesses of sound poetry which arguably release repressed energies and (non-)meanings ordinarily latent in language. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427) On the other hand, Edward Sanders’ ‘Investigative Poetry’ (1976) argues for a new genre of writing as radical historical recovery through a documentarist poetics. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 430-32)

Rae Armantrout’s ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ (1978) deals with the sexual political question it asks, but also defines a poetry that is not ‘language-oriented’ at all, but one that, in her characteristic way of cutting to the chase, ‘sees itself as well as the world’, and brushes to one side a binary between text and experience that has both sustained and vitiated American poetry . (Silliman 1986: 544-546; 546) (Coincidentylally, it's a formulation I've recently reversed; let's see the world as well as the poem!) It is almost ironical, therefore, that this short piece, like many that follow from that rising avant-garde, appeared in the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in this case, in its founding issue. Ron Silliman’s ‘From The New Sentence’ (1979) furnishes the poetics of a collagist mode of poets’ prose influential with that grouping. (Silliman 1986: 561-575)

‘My Poetry’ (c. 1980), by David Bromige - a wonderful man, whose recent death was a great sadness - is a typically teasing and hyperbolic account of his past works, a parody of pseudo-poetics as an explanatory gesture, but he intermittently reveals an underlying yearning for authenticity. (Silliman 1986: 216-226)

Susan Howe’s ‘P. INMAN, Platin’ (1980) takes the form of a book review, but through it Howe presents her poetics of fractured and discontinuous surface. (Silliman 1986: 555-6) Similarly, Bruce Andrews’ ‘Misrepresentation’ (1980), subtitled ‘A text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery’, is also a reflection on a book, this time the early (and often rejected) avant-garde work Ashbery published in 1962. It is an effusive endorsement of the kinds of textual exuberance we find in Andrews’ own work (and in his poetics, of which he is a continual practitioner). (Silliman 1986: 520-529) The serial poetics statements of Language Poets Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, ‘for Change’ (1982) are terse position-statements sent from one avant-garde to the central magazine of another, French, avant-garde, a mode of poetics exchange not common. (Silliman 1986: 484-490) Carla Harryman’s ‘Foreword’ (1980) is a piece of poet’s prose that resembles her ‘creative’ work, in a refusal of the division between discourses. (Silliman 1986: 483) Stephen Rodefer’s ‘Preface to Four Lectures’ (1981) stands back to explain how the collagist nature of urban experience determined the fractured surface of his serial poem: a musical and painterly structure resembling both a museum and reality beyond. (Silliman 1986: 515- 1981) Charles Bernstein, to whom reference is made throughout this work for his commitment to poetics, and who is the subject of my next chapter, is well represented by the essay ‘Writing and Method’ (1981) which hovers around its central axiom that creative work is itself already a kind of poetics: ‘All writing is a demonstration of method; it can assume a method or investigate it.’ (Silliman 1986: 590) This, in turn, might be thought of the central poetics statement of Bernstein as a poet. (Silliman 1986: 583-598) Barrett Watten’s ‘Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ (1984) is part of Watten’s critical journey through several volumes to define the operational social contexts for the writings of the language group, in this case its central journal, and thus of himself; he often alarmingly uses his own works as exemplars, in a way that transgresses pure poetics. (Silliman 1986: 599-612) Lyn Hejinian’s 'The Rejection of Closure' (1984) argues for the ‘open text’ as against the closed, not metrically as in earlier poetics, but in terms of interpretive choices deliberately offered to the reader. (Hoover 1994: 653-658)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ‘Otherhow, Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the Avant-Garde’ (1985) is an extract from her book The Pink Guitar, from which I have above quoted one of the most useful definitions of poetics; she theorises avant-garde practice as an investigation (jointly) of genre and gender. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 433-435) Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’ (1993) consists of a statement and a commentary that elaborates her list of ‘wants’ and ‘wishes’. Her desire for a ‘poetics of historical responsibility’ is fuelled by a need to haunt the interstices and absurdities of history. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 21-26; 26)

Dick Higgins’ ‘Intermedia Chart’ (1995) is a multiple Venn diagram showing the overlapping of intermedia experiments between elements such as concrete poetry and Fluxus; the gesture of poetics is enacted by the inclusion of circles marked simply with question-marks, reminding us that poetics is a self-generating activity oriented towards the future. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 428)

Harryette Mullen’s ‘Poetry and Identity’ (1996) considers her early work, immediately identified as ‘black’ writing, and her later identity as an avant-gardist, which challenges those (and other) identities. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 27-31) Kristin Prevallet’s ‘Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source’ (2002) deals with the inheritance from earlier forms of documentarist poetics like Sanders’, to outline a processual practice she has made her own. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 115-129) Mark Wallace’s ‘Towards a Free Multiplicity of Form’ sees a similar, though wider, inheritance of forms for a post-Language poetry avant-garde, though it sees pitfalls in both automatically declaring some forms (politically) liberating and by delimiting the possibilities of ‘the lyric’, for example. (1996/2002) (Wallace and Marks 2002: 191-203) Elizabeth Willis’ ‘The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric’ (2002), offers more narrow evidence, around the late 1990s, of a return to lyric in experimental American writing. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 225-35)

A number of recent writers have adopted disconnected forms for poetics which make continuity with their modes of creative writing itself, but possibly reveal a limitation of these poetics. Reading these documents, I feel a need for a more definitive statement, a feeling that the discourse might risk becoming an evasion of poetics as a mode, perhaps has developed conventions and paradigms that – in the true spirit of poetics – need breaking. Andrew Levy’s ‘An Indispensable Coefficient of Esthetic Order’ (1996/2002) is a free and speculative meditation upon what the author’s relationship to (his) poetry might become, which he characterises as a form of silence in which (what he does not want to call) subject matter forms. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 381-394) Tan Lin’s ‘ambient stylistics’ (2002) is a sprawling piece of autobiographical poetics, dealing with the conditions of truth-telling in poetry and with poetry as a deliberate imprecise measure of that which cannot be measured (the world). (Wallace and Marks 2002: 339-365) Sianne Ngai’s ‘Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust’ (1998/2002), on the other hand, is anything but impressionistic. A traditional essay, owing to Bataille and other theorists, this piece rejects the ritualistic declarations of ‘desire’ as aesthetic aim or motivation in earlier poetics and replaces this with more negative excesses. But it does not turn to the lyric or any other repressed mode, but sees language itself as abjection: ‘A poetics of disgust, one that accommodates the subject’s negative potentiality in impotence or lack, can only emerge from poetry built from linguistic raw material.’ (Wallace and Marks 2002: 161-190; 180) Whatever one thinks of such abjection, the essay’s focus brings this history of (ongoing) American poetics to a convenient pause and reminds us that poetics is primarily about such ‘building’.

An obvious complementary source of poetics (and much else) is the literary interview. While the Paris Review interviews from the 1950s onwards are perhaps the best known and set the standard for its development, this type of recorded exchange is virtually an art form in its own right, with thousands of examples. Barbara Tomlinson’s Authors on Writing (2005), an analysis of metaphors used by writers to describe their processes, is drawn from such interviews; her representative corpus consists of 42 pages of references in small print. To focus on one writer alone, American poet Robert Creeley was a willing interviewee and, much to the delight of his interviewers (including myself) a garrulous and focussed talker. It is no wonder that there exist two volumes of some of these interviews with him, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971 (1973) and Tales Out of School: Selected Interviews (1993). One example, ‘Linda Wagner: An Interview with Robert Creeley 1965’, appears in both books in differing versions (and in yet another version, in the canonical Paris Review series in 1968). In this mutating text, among other things, Creeley characteristically ‘speak(s) personally’ of his method of writing as the articulation in language of a moment’s improvisatory occasion. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 273-292; 281)

The poetic colonising of cyberspace began early and Creeley was one of the earliest pioneers as his Day Book of a Virtual Poet evinces (Creeley 1998). As poet in (virtual) residence he muses on poets, poetry and poetics, such as Williams’ famous poetics sound-bites, ‘Only the imagination is real’ and its qualifying ‘No ideas but in things’, ironically refunctioned by Creeley with reference to contemporary property rights. (Creeley 1998: 24) The internet, with its email lists, websites, and blogs is in a state of constant technological and phenomenological development. Perhaps the most extraordinary blog is Ron Silliman’s www.ronsilliman.com, which has attracted over a million hits, and which is almost daily concerned afresh with poetry and poetics. Slightly more ephemeral, though archived, are the discussion lists, such the British & Irish Poets email list. The danger of online debate is that ‘spats over terminology sputter out into mutual frustration or continue into areas very remote from poetry and poetics’, as Kit Fryatt reminds us in his ‘“Norms and Forms”: 10 Years of the British & Irish Poets e-mail list’. I can confirm this, having been a ‘lurker’ since its inception; the quality of posts in 1996 was higher than it was a decade later. (Fryatt 2007: 88) Fryatt remarks: ‘It is the nature of online communities to mutate, and sometimes to die off altogether, but long before they do, they generate complaints of a nostalgic nature.’ (93) It seems that the poetics discussion list, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in cyberspace, has not lived up to its optimistic beginnings as a forum for discussing poetics as a speculative discourse.



The anthologies used to compile this U.S. and Canadian corpus are Jonathan Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, which offers other kinds of writing as well; James Scully’s pioneering Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966; Allen and Tallman’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973, which is an invaluable source; Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the Millennium. Berkeley: The University of California Press, two volumes, 1995 and 1998, which contains a selection of avant-garde poetics; Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986, which was a major poetry anthology of the Language school, and which included sizeable poetics statements; Paul Hoover’s teaching anthology Postmodern American Poetry. New York and London: Norton, 1994, proved useful; Wallace and Marks’ Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: The Univerity of Alabama Press, 2002, was invaluable for tracking post-Language Poetry poetics; Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work.

For poetics reaching into the 21st century I recommend ed. Craig Dworkin’s The Consequence of Innovation: 21st century poetics (New York: Roof, 2008), particularly for Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics. This would have featured in the above if it had been to hand at the time I composed the above.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 2

Poetics through and after Modernism: Some TextsGiven the range of forms and functions, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of post-1900 world poetics (even limiting itself to poetry), but such a survey might include some of the following documents (arranged here mostly in chronological order and excluding those from the North Atlantic Anglophone world, to be touched on in the next posting on this subject). They are drawn from four representative anthologies containing poetics amongst other kinds of writing; I attempt to describe the form as well as the function of each. (footnote 1) (I mostly limit myself to one item per writer for the sake of economy and they may not be the most famous examples of his or her poetics. For example, the letters of Rilke referred to next do not come from Rilke’s celebrated Letters to a Young Poet (written 1903-08) but from disparate sources.)

The high modernist period offers a rich range of poetics. Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Three Letters’ (1903, 1907, 1925) meditate on lessons he learnt from Rodin, the role of imagery in his verse, and on his particular modernity. (Cook 2004: 35-40) On the other hand, with manifestic ferocity, Filippo Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) offers a vectoral and energised poetics adequate to the coming century of total war. (Cook 2004: 56-60) Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’ (1917) similarly bristles with confidence for a modernity that would embrace technology. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Tristan Tzara’s ‘Note on Poetry’ (1919) mimes, in its non-rational style, in its jumps from polemic to poetry, the irrational poetics that is gestured towards in the ‘note’ itself, in favour of unbridled, non-academic creative imaginative force. (Cook 2004: 91-3) Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Toward Explaining Heteronymy’ (1915-1935) is a composite text of manuscript fragments and an abandoned ‘preface’, which explains not only his use of heteronyms – a word he coined to account for his invention of authors – but his sense of essential selflessness that enabled him to single-handedly concoct a modernist Portuguese literature. (Gibbons 1989: 5-15)

In Russia, Velimir Klebnikov’s ‘On Poetry’ and ‘On Contemporary Poetry’ (1919, 1920) offer accounts of the symbolic sonic qualities possible in non-semantic poetry (Cook 2004: 94-6), while Vladimir Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) sketches the poetics of the industrialised post-Revolutionary free verse poetry that he was exploring. (Cook 2004: 144-151) Against this, Osip Mandelstam, in ‘The Word & Culture’ (1921), specifically rejects the ‘invention’ of a poetics, recognising instead the radicality of classical and Christian tradition, while paradoxically taking the unlikely model of Verlaine as the modern synthetic poet. (Gibbons 2004: 16-22) Boris Pasternak’s blandly entitled ‘Some Statements’ (1922) is a collection of seven autonomous vignettes, ranging from reflections on art as an absorptive sponge not as an effusive fountain, through to thoughts on the miraculous trans-historical transference of experience effected via literary translation. (Gibbons: 23-27) Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’ (1935) compares lyric poets who evolve and those who do not. (Cook 2004: 215-222)

Away from its famous ‘loud’ manifestos - manifestos may contain poetics but there are not in themselves poetics - Surrealism’s poets were still vocal about their practice. Paul Éluard’s ‘Poetry’s Evidence’ (1932) argues for Surrealist imagery as evidence of an irrational imagination; André Breton’s ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933) is more polemical and attempts to define the central Surrealist technique of automatic writing. (Cook 2004: 182-191) Federico García Lorca’s ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ (1933) is his famous account of the indefinable quality and performative attitude found in spirited flamenco song and dance which is not one of technique but of primal creativity, not to be feigned or counterfeited, taught or learned. (Cook 2004: 201-7) Antonio Machado’s ‘Notes on Poetry’, is an assemblage of notes, probably made in 1924, to which he appends an introduction that confirms their conjectural and tentative nature, before he considers issues such as his distrust of the use of metaphor and the deceptions and illuminations of ‘images’ in poetry to define a poet’s inner state, as well as arguments for the abolition of the anecdotal in favour of the necessary inter-subjectivity of lyric. (Gibbons 1989: 161-9) Luis Cernuda’s public pronouncement, ‘Words Before a Reading’ (1935) sees poetry as fixing the ephemerality of beauty but this does not preclude the exercise of the daemonic, the very power that called Lorca called ‘duende’. (Gibbons 1989: 42-7)

Paul Valéry, late in his career, was elected a Professor of Poetics; his misleadingly entitled ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939) actually contrasts poetic language and ordinary language, the pedestrian qualities of prose, the Terpsichorean qualities of verse. (Cook 2004: 237-243) Fellow Frenchman, René Char’s ‘The Formal Share’ (1943-4) is a series of elliptical numbered paragraphs that it is not possible to paraphrase, since they (deliberately) approach the condition of poetry, perhaps even reach the condition of prose poetry, although it is clear that writing is an anxious activity that nevertheless causes joy. (Gibbons 1989: 59-64)

Post war stirrings in the Francophone West Indies produced not only Aimé Césaire’s ‘Poetry and Knowledge’ (1945), which exceeded his earlier apologia for the poetry of ‘negritude’, and argues for poetry as a particular form of knowledge in contrast to scientific knowledge, but whose vocabulary is still tinged with the vocabulary of surrealism (Cook 2004: 275-287), but also Edouard Glissant’s ‘Earth’ (late 1950s), which argues for an oppositional post-negritude poetry. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 416-17) However, Derek Walcott’s ‘The Muse of History’ (1974) rejects the oppositional stance of earlier Caribbean writers, in favour of using the literary resources of the great traditions of the colonisers. (Cook 2004: 420-436)

Eugenio Montale’s ‘Intentions’ (1946) is an ‘Imaginary Interview’, a form that risks insincerity, but is actually a free-ranging enquiry into the development of this Italian poet, which he sees as an escape from a ‘bell-jar’ into a poetry of contingency, with a restrained, even inelegant, diction, a quest precisely to find what the subject of poetry might be. (Gibbons 1989: 65-70) Written in the shadow of the Second World War, as was Montale’s piece, the Greek poet George Seferis’ ‘A Poet’s Journal’, written in 1946 and 47, traces his resurgence, after long wartime silence, to re-engage the contract between the human body and nature. In part a recounting of the writing of his poem ‘Thrush’, he emphasises what he calls leaving the poem to dry, a strategy to avoid over-editing. (Gibbons 1989: 71-81) Paul Celan’s ‘The Meridian Speech’ (1960) considers the spectral human presence that there might be in a difficult Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, i.e., Celan’s own, as a lonely turning of the breath of utterance towards otherness and newness, as Celan effected within his adopted language German. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 408-9; Celan 1999: 37-55) Nicanor Parra’s ‘Test’ (c.1964-66) considers the anti-poem written by the revolutionary anti-poet. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 423-24)

French poet Henri Chopin’s ‘Poésie Sonore’ (1969) is an appropriately slender statement about sound poetry, predicting the triumph of a non-semantic poetry of pure sound, (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427), while Denis Roche’s ‘Le Mécrit’ (1972) articulates the experimentalism of the Tel Quel group in an obscene contention of the world of convention. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 429-430)

The East German poet Günter Kunert wrote a short piece ‘Why Write’ (1972) which answered its own question (although the title lacks a question mark): ‘to bear the world as it steadily crumbles into nothingness’. (Gibbons 1989: 136-8; 138) West German Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Modest Proposal for the Protection of Young People from the Products of Poetry’ (1976) is a Swiftian attack upon the standardised school and university curricula that teach correct interpretations of poetry to the young. (Cook 2004: 447-455) Czeslaw Milosz’ ‘On Hope’ (1983) builds out of an apocalyptic literary history an unfashionable theory about the possibility of poetry as part of a developing positive human consciousness. (Cook 2004: 494-502)

Recent non-European perspectives are evinced in Jeremy Cronin’s ‘“Even under the Rine of Terror…”: Insurgent South African Poetry’ (1988) which is a study of oral poetics under South African apartied. (Cook 2004: 523-532) Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Search for My Tongue’ (1988) is a bilingual poem about inter-linguistic identity. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 443-446) On the other hand, Adonis’ ‘Preface’ (1992) expounds his sense of exile within his own language, Arabic, but nevertheless argues for an Arabic modernism. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 441-443) If these examples are supplemented by the fin-de-siècle statements collected in 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium, a special issue of Boundary 2, edited by Charles Bernstein, which features poets domiciled variously at locations ranging from Martinique to China, Finland to Argentina, Croatia to Morocco, one can acquire a general sense of the international impact of poetics since modernism. It includes one of the documents of Pierre Joris’ millennial ‘nomadic’ poetics.

However, the prolific Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘Almost a Dialogue with Lyn Hejinian: Quotations and Phantom Limbs…’ (2000), while drawn from another source, serves as a reminder of the limitations even of inclusive but straightforward multi-nationalism and of the advantages of a trans-nationalist approach, which is to be expected of a poet who divides his time between Australia, Britain and the USA (a nomadic poetics in its own right). This hybrid prose document quotes a poem he sent to American poet Lyn Hejinian which he describes as ‘a kind of poetics’ itself, a re-membering of Hejinian’s account of her visit to an autopsy. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 204) Kinsella’s obsession with the corporeal and the psychosomatic is textual (‘I know that the field of the page is the map of my body, of our bodies’) but the lasting impression is of his commitment to dialogic hybridity, exemplified by the ‘almost dialogue’ of his title, his various ‘quotations’ throughout, his excerpts from email discussion lists and statements, and of his instigating and collecting collaborative post-national creative writing over the world wide web: a perspective that leads from body to world, but by-passes the boundaries of both genre and geo-political territories. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 206) This recent example of deterritorialised transnational cyberpoetics demonstrates how poetics as a mode of speculative thought is moving into new kinds of territory in the twenty-first century. Kinsella’s fascinating MUP volume of 2007, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism is a book-length collection of Kinsella’s poetics.




1. The anthologies used for this post are: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’ Poems from the Millennium, Volume Two: Post-War to Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, which contains a short section called ‘The Art of the Manifesto’; Jon Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; Reginald Gibbons’ The Poet’s Work. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, a useful book of writerly descriptions of poetics and process, and I'd like to thank my colleague Daniele Pantano for introducing it to me (and to our students), and W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis’ Strong Words. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, which is also one of my core books for my third poetics posting. The emphasis upon representative anthologies necessarily means the exclusion of important works of poetics, such as Vicente Huidobro’s collection of statements and essays, Manifesto Manifest. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999, or Jacques Roubaud’s playful Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006, but I felt it important to concentrate not only on readily-available volumes, but upon volumes which collect a range of poetics and demonstrate thereby its many forms in one collegiate publication.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 1: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

Poetics and Proto-Poetics from Aristophanes to Yeats
The habit of reading the discourses of the past in the light of present practices and pressures is perhaps a part of identifying a discourse in the first place. The use of a term like ‘classical literary criticism’ for certain ancient texts is an anachronism that D.A. Russell, for one, regards as both ‘convenient’ and ‘inaccurate’ (Russell 1981: 169). The simple re-definition of many of these – and later – historical documents as ‘poetics’ risks the danger of the same ambivalent construction, in whatever way the perspectival constellation is assembled. However, poetics’ very impulse, the need to discuss how writing is (to be) made, may be found articulated intermittently among some of the same past ‘literary critical’ documents, and others. Therefore it is necessary to read them differently, with a different focus, and the emphasis is at times entirely at variance with what a survey of literary criticism would find of interest in their strictures. To sketch a loose adventure for what I am proposing cautiously to call proto-poetics is worth attempting, to show the historical continuity of its impulse, along with the discontinuity of its self-awareness as a discourse, although I have no claims to be comprehensive in this account. I am not attempting to develop universals by my selective paraphrasing of the often lesser-read parts of these great treatises and texts. I limit myself to the poetics of poetry, though in the earliest examples current divisions of literary genre do not apply, and my sense of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse - in my work as a teacher of creative writing, for example - extends to all genres and sub-genres.

In the ancient world, Aristotle, though the author of the first text called ‘Poetics’, was neither the founder of a discourse upon writing nor the first person to discuss how writing is made. For example, the plays of Aristophanes (c.450-385 B.C.), bristle with asides on the art of Euripides, and in the fragment Poetry, Aristophanes emphasises the difficulties of writing both tragedy and epic. (1981: 10.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) wrote his Poetics to define the role of mimesis more thoroughly, and to offer to posterity influential concepts on the evocation of fear and pity in tragic writing, but it is worth stressing that the text is addressed to those wishing to write creatively. (It is not clear that Aristotle was a creative writer, thus making him a possible exception to my rule about writerly poetics.) (Aristotle et al. 1965: 31-75) Certainly, a poet such as Philodemus (110-30 B.C.) wrote his treatise On Poetry from experience, and promulgated a surprisingly formalist doctrine arguing the indivisibility of good content from good form. (Russell 1981: 43). Horace (65-8 B.C.) wrote Ars Poetica as a verse-epistle (poem-essay we might say) to a young Roman writer, offering practical advice (recommending iambics as the best metre for a dramatic poet to make sure his words are heard over a noisy crowd) but promising much toil, as well as offering his better-known exhortation to instruct through delight. (Aristotle et al. 1965: 79-95) (A non-Western viewpoint may be found in the Chinese ‘rhyming prose’ of Lui Chi (261-303), whose ‘On Literature’ gives a vivid account of creative struggle, wisely contrasting occasional serendipitous spontaneity with the wilful forcing of effect. (Birch 1967: 221-232))

For a glimpse of the medieval world shaking off classical models established by Aristotle and Horace, amongst others, Dante (1265-1321), in La Vita Nuova, offers paraphrases between arrangements of his early poems, descriptions of their novel forms (like the sonnet), along with a plea for the vernacular as an appropriate vehicle for amatory verse. (Dante 1969) This is one (late) version of the razo, a form invented by the Troubadours, a series of widely read prose expositions of their verses.

Turning to the proto-poetics of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but limiting ourselves to English-speaking poetics, the contrast between the two earliest volumes we find is instructive of alternative foci. George Puttenham’s digressive The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is addressed to the decorous writer (and courtier) and concentrates on formal descriptions of figures of speech and upon varieties of poetic form, including one of the earliest considerations of visual poetics (for which he is often derided). (Puttenham 1936) On the other hand, the more focussed essay of Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), is a defence of fiction as a mode of knowledge, even of poetry as an autonomous discourse, against the claims of history and philosophy. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 3-49)

Poet and composer Thomas Campion’s comprehensively entitled Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein it is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English toong will receive eight severall kinds of numbers, proper to it selfe, which are all in this booke set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted (1602) argues for the use of classical quantitative metres and for the abandonment of rhyme in English. (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-43, first numbering) The title of Samuel Daniel’s reply indicates that he took the opposite view. It advanced A Defence of Rhyme: Against a Pamphlet entitled: Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein is demonstratively proved, that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language. (1603) (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-45, second numbering). Robert Lloyd’s poem ‘On Rhyme’ (1762) reminds us that this was a still a live issue in the following century. (Hopkins 1990: 46-7) Amid the pages of Ben Jonson’s Timber: or, Discoveries (1641), one finds a practitioner’s notebook reflections upon his writing, ranging from his insistence upon ‘right imitation’ of classical models to his cutting criticisms of Shakespeare’s prolixity and unintentional comic passages. (extracts in Mahl 1968: 113-130; Hopkins 1990: 26-7).

Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare himself did not commit an act of poetics, formally speaking, beyond the sense that his body of creative work is an inimitable model (or series of models) for itself. At once both a pragmatic man of the theatre (in which he acted and which he part owned) and an enigmatic poet possessed of protean ‘negative capability’, he seems not to have had time to publicly reflect on his practice. In the plays there are numerous references to writers and writing – the love-struck inept rhetorical sonneteers of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the two hapless and ineffectual poets of Julius Caesar, the sycophantic bard of Timon of Athens - but these present deliberately negative views of the craft. Pistol’s satirical spouting of quotations from earlier, out of date plays, as well as Shakespeare’s own intertextual debt to both his sources and his rivals, like Marlowe, hardly amount to poetics; neither does the meta-poetry of the Sonnets.

John Milton’s ‘The Verse’, the preface to Paradise Lost (1668), justifies his use of blank verse, its avoidance of ‘the jingling sound of like endings’ suitable for a poem of ‘ancient liberty’, liberated itself ‘from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ as both following classical precedent and (near) contemporary dramatic blank verse. (Milton 1969: 211) John Dryden was a prolific critic, produced a body of theory that nonetheless derives from practice, as when he justifies his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in his ‘Account’ (1667), particularly of his choice of quatrains at the dawn of the age of the heroic couplet. (Dryden 1970: 7-15) His ‘Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay’ (1668) derives from his experience as the foremost writer for the stage, and is a fictional symposium focussed upon historical and contemporary drama, including a positive discussion of rhyme in dramatic verse. (Dryden 1970: 16-76; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 50-110) When his modern editor, George Parfitt, notes, ‘Dryden is a critic in the tradition of Horace, a figure whose energies and interests are balanced between creation and criticism, not a critic like Arnold who became more critic than creator, or like Leavis whose creation is his criticism’, he is situating Dryden as one of the first poet-critics, and acknowledging a pre-figuration of the future divergence of writerly poetics and professional criticism. (Dryden 1970: xiv)

A number of feminist proto-poetics are to be found in the writings of women around this time. Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Prologue’ (1652?) argues – in verse – for the specificity of women’s writing, and her own. (Pritchard 1990: 51-3) Anne Killigrew’s ‘Upon the saying that my verses were made by another’ (1686) (Pritchard 1990: 97-8) and the similarly entitled ‘To one who persuades me to leave the Muses’ (1739?) by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, argue against, firstly, the common incredulity at women’s poetry, and then against attempts to stop women writing altogether. (Pritchard 1990: 116-117) There is an invocation to the Muses in Mary Collier’s harsh The Womans Labour: an epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck, in answer to his late poem, called ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (1739), which passionately pleads for the work and poetry of female labourers to be acknowledged. (Pritchard 1990: 129-136) At the other end of the social scale, certain of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) offer a charming account of a child’s education, which includes lessons on the writing of Latin and English verse, and the encouragement of sensitivity towards poetic artifice. (Stanhope 1774:134-167)

Alexander Pope’s ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711) offers a full-blown Augustan poetics of satire, including brilliant couplets on versification that mime the effects of the writing described. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 111-130; Pope 1970: 45-67; excerpts on versification in Hopkins 1990: 38-9) Written in 1733, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace’, that is, to Pope himself, posit a cruel antithesis to Pope’s poise, and attempt to define literary qualities not found in its addressee. (Fairer and Gerrard 1999: 188-191) Samuel Johnson describes the poet’s task in his novel Rasselas (1759) as being to dwell not on particular details but on generalities. The poet should be equal to this task by acquiring knowledge and judgement, but also by ‘incessant practice’, to become a subtle and adaptable stylist. (Hopkins 1990: 42-3). George Crabbe, in a passage of The Village (1783), that David Hopkins calls ‘Crabbe’s dissatisfaction with pastoral’, recognises the socio-poetical revolution of Duck (and possibly Collier) in the invention of an ‘authentic’ mode of realism that he could use, in contrast to the prevailing and increasingly hackneyed artifice of eighteenth century poetics. (Hopkins 2000: 204)

The poetics of the Romantic and Victorian periods continue that dissatisfaction, of course, and we enter a period when many of the documents, although still primarily thought of as works of literary criticism, are read as kinds of poetics, to the limited extent that they are recognised as manifestic position-statements by poets, but are perhaps not read with enough sensitivity towards the exploratory, conjectural and provocative nature of the discourse in its developing forms. What perhaps masks this aspect, is the growth of the role of the critic, so that, although Coleridge and Arnold are both poets, their criticism extends well beyond the literary, or even merely the cultural, into the social and political realms, and while the scope of their speculations ambitiously expand (for good or ill), the possibility of thinking of their work – a part of it – as proto-poetics or poetics becomes difficult, or looks like a mean reduction of their catholic thought. The separation of critic and poet (particularly without the development of anything like a Coleridgean clerisy to hold these professions together within a purposeful national structure) also accelerated the development of literary criticism as an autonomous discourse, out of the bodies of philology and philosophy, that has in turn tended to mute the conjectural and mercurial tones of poetics that still can be detected in these great works.

William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) offers revolutionary reflections upon his experiments in poetic diction and form, as well as a commitment to the faculty of imagination. (Wordsworth 1969: 734-743, with ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815). 743-751. Enright and De Chickera 1962: 162-186.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s suggestively unsystematic Biographia Literaria (1817) opens a whole poet’s writerly life to inspection; reflections arising out of Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ rub shoulders with scraps of autobiography and accounts of publishing ventures, advice to young writers and considerations of poetic metre. Most influential have proved his theorising of, and discrimination between, the shaping faculty of the imagination and the lesser faculty of fancy, which also domesticated advanced continental aesthetics. (Coleridge 2000: 155-482; Chapters XIV, XVII and part of XVIII (on Wordsworth and metre) in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 190-224.)

By contrast, John Keats, in passages of certain letters written between 1817-1820, defines a poet’s ‘negative capability’ against Coleridge’s synthetic philosophising, preferring an image of the poet as essentially selfless and disinterested in his reception of the world. (excerpts in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 256-259; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 61 and 114.) William Blake likewise was not given to extended prose, but his ‘Of the measure in which the following poem is written’, which is a preface to Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1818-20?), is an argument for further loosening of the Miltonic blank verse line, one which promulgates a politics of poetic form: ‘Poetry fetter’d fetters the human race.’ (Blake 1971: 629; Allen and Tallman 1973: vii) No less political is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry (1821), which concludes hyperbolically that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but also saw poetry as effecting a defamiliarisation of ordinary perception. His analogy for the mind in the creative act, as a rapidly fading coal, balances the philosophical with his intimate knowledge of creative process. (Shelley 1970: 164-197; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 225-255; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 56-60.)

The creative coals were long faded when Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) since it offers an unconvincing retrospective account of the writing of his poem ‘The Raven’. While I use his essay’s authoritative title as a synonym for poetics, the essay itself is best thought of as one more exemplar to demonstrate that writers cannot ‘read’ (in the sense of ‘explaining’) their own work. The fragmentary ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850) is more successful, conjecturally questioning Poe’s poetic practice, and speculating, for example, that all long poems break down into smaller ones. (Poe 1967: 480-492 and 499-513) Walt Whitman’s ‘To Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (1856), with which he opened the first edition of Leaves of Grass, is an impassioned credo for his free verse American epic. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 3-12. Murphy 1969: 46-55.) Gerard Manley Hopkins was another writer, like Whitman, who felt the need to outline his perceptual and metrical experiments. In his Journal for December 12, 1870 he defined the qualities of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, God’s presence in nature imprinted on the observant human (poetic) mind (Hopkins 1953: 129); in his ‘Author’s Preface’, he details the flexible but complex metrical principles of sprung rhythm. (Hopkins 1953: 7-11; Scully 1966: 75-79) Due to the conservatism of Robert Bridges, Hopkins’ executor, these innovations and their poetics remained a guarded secret until the twentieth century. Equally neglected until this century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse Aurora Leigh (1857) contains many passages where its author speculates about the role of the (woman) poet. (Browning 1978). (Particularly excerpts in Pritchard 1990: 202 and Hopkins 2000: 63)

Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Austerity of Poetry’ (1867) paves the way for his critical pronouncements. In the poem, poetic artifice is seen as deceptively beguiling; the Muse is figured as outwardly gaudy but secretly wearing the hair shirt of moral penitence. In famously calling poetry ‘a criticism of life’ in his essay ‘Wordsworth’ (1879), he may not just be wearing the hair shirt of anti-aestheticism, but inflating the function of criticism so that it is ripe to tear itself free of creative writing. (Hopkins 2000: 65-66) ‘Austerity of Poetry’ is concerned with moral judgement in relation to text; it is difficult to see either Arnold’s poetry or prose as poetics; it is literary criticism. By the early twentieth century, literary criticism became a confident autonomous discourse, aiming at scientific exactitude in the hands of I.A. Richards and at a moralistic anti-Technologico-Benthamitism in the work of F.R. Leavis. Ironically, poetics would be free, not only of criticism, which was increasingly becoming the legitimate discourse of literary discussion, but also dissociated from possible institutions to ground and define it as a discourse, in contradiction to literary criticism, which found a home in the early twentieth century academy of the new English schools at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere.

At the turn of the century, W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900) tries to wed past and present, by aligning his traditional Irish mysticism with the progressive continental school of Symbolism. (Cook 2004: 29-34) To borrow a term of Mary Ann Caws, Yeats’ synthesis indicates that the ‘century of Isms’ had dawned.


A bibliography of books used to compile this list

Bibliography for this instalment and the next (on Poetics After Modernism)

Aristotle, (trans. Else, G.F.), 1970, Poetics: Michigan: The University of Michigan.
Aristotle, Horace, Longinus. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. Classical Literary Criticism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Bate, Jonathan. 1997. The Genius of Shakespeare. London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador.
Birch, Cyril. Ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Blake, William. The Complete Poems. London and New York: Longman and Norton, 1971.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: The Women’s Press, 1978.
Caws, Many Ann. Ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001
Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet, 1999.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Cook, Jon. Ed. Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Daniel, Samuel, and Campion, Thomas. A Defence of Rhyme and Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
Dante. La Vita Nuova. Trans. Reynolds, Barbara, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Dryden, John. Selected Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Dudley, D.R., and Lang, D.M. The Penguin Companion to Literature 4: Classical and Byzantine, Oriental and African Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Eliot, T.S., 1975, Selected Prose, London: Faber and Faber.
Enright, D.J., and De Chickera, E. Eds. English Critical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Fairer, David, and Gerrard, Christine. Eds. Eighteenth Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. A Selection of his Poems and Prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
Hopkins. David. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets. London: Routledge, 1990.
MacGann, J, 1983, The Romantic Ideology, Chicago:University of Chicago Press
Mahl, Mary R. Ed. Seventeenth Century Prose. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1968.
Milton, John. Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Murphy, Francis. Ed. Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Plato, The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Airmount Classic, 1968.
Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry. New York: Signet Classic, 1970.
Pritchard, R.E. Ed. Poetry by English Women. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Russell, D.A. Criticism in Antiquity. London, Duckworth, 1981.
Scully, James. Ed. Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Political Writings. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.
Stanhope, Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. Letters Written by …to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1774.
Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html