Unworked and unavowable: Communities of practice in twenty-first century transatlantic poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACTJean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1986) and subsequent critical responses to it [Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1998; Esposito, Roberto. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998; Miller, Joseph Hillis. The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011; Miller, Joseph Hillis. Communities in Fiction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014] create a philosophical framework which can be applied to unearth communities of culture which go beyond geographical, physical or temporal contact. This paper defends this cultural framework’s usefulness to ascertain points of contact for contemporary poetry in English on both sides of the Atlantic, thus responding to Nancy’s denunciation of the “dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of the community” in modern thought. The fate of poetic production across the Atlantic seems to be divergent; while in Europe poetry is a liminal activity, it remains a vibrant activity both in the USA and Canada. Younger British poets continue to write lyrical and experiential poems, often within received forms. It contrasts with the overabundance of new, radical ideas about poetry put forward by American and Canadian poets: from experimental, technology mediated or intermedial poetry to conceptualism, poets beyond the Atlantic try to self-impose limits to poetic diction in order to supersede Romantic poetics. Comparing both poetics proves most fruitful when they are analysed against an unworked (Nancy’s désoeuvrée, often also translated as inoperative) transatlantic community of practice: there are formal influences between European movements such as French Oulipo in the 1960s or Fluxus in the 1970s with current poetry in the States and Canada; conversely, poetry in Europe has been permeable to high Modernism and post-modern aesthetics from across the Atlantic. As the paper demonstrates, this comparative approach provides a more inclusive vantage point that insists on the fluidity of our contemporary global culture and allows for the establishment of connections hitherto unnoticed in current poetry, thus countering claims of its stagnancy, commoditisation and complacency.