Poetic Sequence Research Articles

Freely Revised and Edited: Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems

Freely Revised and Edited:Anarchist Authorship in Jackson Mac Low’s The Stein Poems Dani Spinosa (bio) It might seem strange that in order to write about anarchism and authorship in the poetry of Jackson Mac Low, I write not about his early poems in which he pushes the limits of chance, spontaneity, improvisation, deterministic methods, and computer systems designed to produce diastic poems1 but, rather, about his often critically neglected poetic sequence, The Stein Poems, composed between 1998 and 2003, ending just a year before his death. Among some of the last poems he ever wrote, The Stein Poems serve as a kind of combination of a lifetime of experimentation with indeterminacy and chance. As he himself asserted in a cover letter sent [End Page 91] accompanying a submission of some of these poems for journal publication: “I returned to using a deterministic procedure in April 1998, when I began writing the poems in the Stein series, but now I always, to some extent, modify the results of the procedure, making personal decisions of different kinds. My writingways came together” (Thing of Beauty 376). In The Stein Poems, Mac Low returns to deterministic methods of writing, which he had more or less abandoned, only to adapt these chance-based procedures by making clear (and unapologetic) the moments in which his individual taste intervened in, or added on to, the deterministic process. In this article I argue that The Stein Poems bridge the gap between the anti-egoic poetics popularized throughout Mac Low’s career by the avantgarde (and especially by artists like John Cage, whom I will discuss further). Occupying a unique mediatory position, The Stein Poems showcase Mac Low’s anarchist poetics in that they produce texts that function not as utopian dreams or political tracts but, instead, as what Mac Low himself terms “analogies of free communities.” The poems encourage the reader to perform interventionary tactics in the production of meaning and to play a significant role in the meaning-making of the poems themselves. Ultimately, I use the unique position of The Stein Poems to argue that Mac Low’s anarchist poetics and politics are best understood not necessarily or exclusively in relation to aleatoric or nonintentional writing methods but primarily in relation to the role of the reader (who is thus performer and perceiver) in this quasi-intentional work. To do this I should first look to chance and the role of the ego in his work more generally and how his grappling with these issues led to the composition of The Stein Poems. It would seem from Mac Low’s publication history that his writings about and discussions of the chance-based work of John Cage is what sparked the decision to produce The Stein Poems in this fashion. Cage and Mac Low were friends and often colleagues, but it was not until after Cage’s death in 1992 that Mac Low started to write critically about his work. Published in Richard Kostelanetz’s Writings about John Cage (1993), Mac Low’s article “Something about the Writings of John Cage,” examined, specifically and critically, the role of taste and authorial intent in Cage’s chance-based work. He then revised and expanded the article as “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s” for inclusion in David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch’s Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, + Art. At the same time, he was engaged in the composition of 154 Forties, poems written in a more traditional compositional method, incorporating an emphasis on prosody and caesural spaces. In 1998, between the two Cage articles, Mac Low, as he stated in the quotation above, “returned” to deterministic [End Page 92] methods, but it was under the caveat that he no longer pretended that this was not, ultimately, an egoic process. This decision was clearly triggered, at least in part, by Mac Low’s work on Cage, in which he rails against those who misinterpreted or misunderstood Cage as having refused or eliminated the presence of the ego and its concomitant authorial intent via indeterminacy. For Cage, Mac Low writes, “chance was always constrained, to a greater or lesser extent, by...

‘Thus / Hides the’: Discrete Series and the spectre of Oppen's 1930s

This article reads the poetic technique of George Oppen's early Discrete Series for its reflection of the widespread socio-economic disruption of the early years of the Great Depression. Readdressing the significance of Heideggerian boredom to the mood of Oppen's poetic sequence, it suggests that, while sharing certain characteristics of Heidegger's vision of modernity, Oppen's poems are able to call into question the value of its more affirmative moments. Finally, it wonders how, in light of Heidegger's significance, not only for Oppen's later poetry, but also for the post-structuralist thought with which Oppen's poetic thinking is often taken to exhibit a certain kinship, such resistance might trouble the critical narratives of Oppen's poetic development and affinities.

“Listen to the Leaves”: Derek Mahon's Evolving Ecologies

“Listen to the Leaves”:Derek Mahon’s Evolving Ecologies Eóin Flannery (bio) I “New York Time,” previously “The Hudson Letter” (1996), opens in “Winter,” and the poetic speaker is awoken amid snow and ice in New York City to the combined but competing strains of “the first bird and the first garbage truck.”1 These “garbage trucks,” which will later discharge their discarded cargoes onto the “refuse barges” (NCP, 167) of the fourth section, “Waterfront,” of the sequence, are twinned with the early-morning avian chorus outside the beleaguered speaker’s apartment window. The discordant sonority of the metropolis’s daybreak exposes the tonal ambiguity of the longer poetic sequence at the same time as it addresses, in cursory fashion, the dynamics of the human and nonhuman ecological crisis. Derek Mahon initiates his sequence, and this day, with an incongruous but all too frequent urban duet, which aggregates the natural and the fabricated, and the sentient and the inanimate, all of which are “a measure of his response to the crisis of industrial (or postindustrial) modernity, with useless rubbish, garbage, or waste functioning as a secular memento mori of the empire of the transient that is consumer culture.”2 In a concise ironic gesture, Mahon disallows the muse-like possibilities of the unseen birdsong by using the mechanical, utilitarian functions of the disposal vehicle. Not only does this reference, among many others across “New York Time,” partake of a preoccupation with waste, but it neatly holds in one line a matter of urgency within contemporary environmentalist criticism: the uneven, competing claims of the environment and of global capital. “New York Time,” then, abounds with the junked residues, the neon skylines, the clamorous streetscapes, and the informational gluttony of postmodernity: “News-time / in the global village—Ethiopian drought, / famine, [End Page 377] whole nations, races, evicted even yet . . . / the images forming which will be screened tonight / on CNN and The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour” (NCP, 165). All of these are symptoms of industrialism and indiscriminate urbanization that both repel and fascinate Mahon’s humanism and his aestheticism. This city is portrayed in terms of modern life as excess, as waste, as consisting of the leftovers of Western humanity’s appetites, yet poetic art is molded from its raw, remaindered materials. Mahon is both observer and participant in this historical pageant of consumerism but is chiefly concerned with tracking the velocity of ruination and dereliction in such a cultural economy. From an ecocritical perspective, then, hubristic modernity is worryingly devoid of a responsible historical consciousness; its forms and contents, conceived as unaging or ever-replaceable monuments of triumphant capital, are exposed as transient objects on a conveyor of junked consumables. The catholicity of Mahon’s cultural approach has, as we have already alluded to, always been an acknowledged facet of his work and, it seems, informs his broad ecological vision. And Hugh Haughton encapsulates the chafing dynamics of locality and internationalism, with reference to Mahon’s eco-conscientiousness, that condition his longer-term writing career: If he started out as a poet in resistance to his home place, he went on to become a uniquely compelling poet of other places without abandoning the notion of poetry as a form of resistance. . . . Though in love with the aesthetic, and gifted with an ear for intellectual cantabile, there is always an edge of political anger, and cultural critique in his work, born of a sense of damage that has become increasingly ecological.3 Haughton is unafraid to impress the political edges of Mahon’s poetry, which is a step that is not always taken in critical readings of his work. Yet, the ecological sensibility of his oeuvre, though expressed in different ways and with different landscapes and objects to the fore at various stages, cannot be figured in any other way than in political terms. Equally, Haughton’s suggestion that Mahon’s poetic, and biographical, peregrinations have taken Mahon beyond the bounds of Belfast and Ireland to international and cosmopolitan geographies, without blunting this political strain within his work, is crucial to appreciating the gravity of his assumption of ecological advocacy in his later work.4 Though, as we have said, and as...

The Christ of Velázquez and the Christ of Unamuno

Unamuno was unable to assent intellectually to Catholic doctrines, but the figure of the crucified Christ was, throughout his life, the object of sustained fascination, particularly in the long poetic sequence El Cristo de Velázquez. Yet Unamuno's Christology is characteristically sui generis. For him, Christ is primarily the symbolic representative of humanity and of human suffering, rather than someone entrusted by God with a special mission of salvation. Though Unamuno's Christ is not that of orthodox Christianity, his portayal in this poem restores the human to the centre of religious experience and re-instates a proper appreciation of the place of doubt, feeling, desire and suffering in the discussion of faith.

Preface

Preface Brian J. McAllister (bio) The essays in this special issue of Narrative offer a small sample of a growing field of study within narrative theory: narrative in poetic form. More precisely, the essays here investigate the potential intersections between the concerns of narrative theory and the concerns of poetry studies, using one to inform the other in a mutually productive discourse. Brian McHale’s essay “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry” offers perhaps the most explicit call for new work in this field. Though he acknowledges from the outset that this work stands on the shoulders of a “huge body of precedent” (11)—from Plato to Bakhtin to Genette—this earlier work avoids addressing poetic narratives’ differences from other kinds of narrative. As McHale makes plain, “We need to begin thinking about narrative in poetry … because we have not been doing so very much lately, and because, whenever we have done so, we have rarely thought about what differentiates narrative in poetry from narrative in other genres or media, namely its poetry component” (11; emphasis original). When considering narrative poetry through the lens of narrative theory, one cannot simply brush aside the poetic aspects of the text. That seemingly obvious consideration of [End Page 151] the poetic in concert and in communication with the narrative directs the critical work in the essays that follow. With this larger objective in mind, this collection includes critical approaches that attempt to answer these questions about poetry’s position in and as narrative, considering narrative theory and poetic studies through a variety of methodologies—from rhetorical narrative theory to reader response to deconstruction—and with a range of poetic texts—from modernist poetic sequence to Romantic verse narrative to visual poetry. Peter Hühn’s essay begins the collection by exploring lyric poetry in either fictional or factual modes. Hühn situates the genre within larger fields of literary form in order to recognize lyric poetry’s ambivalent position between the two categories, as exemplified in his argument by the sonnet. Jason M. Coats then turns to Chistopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden’s problematically structured travel book, Journey to a War, in order to refine rhetorical considerations of the lyric by expanding theories of progression in lyric poetry. This refinement allows Coats to reconcile lyric poetry’s inherently weak narrativity with rhetorical narrative theory’s attention to judgment and the ethical implications of narrative form. Further investigating the narrative potential of lyric poetry, Stefan Kjerkegaard explores the ways that poetic form influences and interacts with narrativity and lyricality, as well as fictionality and non-fictionality, within the autobiographical lyric poem. Kjerkegaard employs narratological approaches to voice and narrativity in an effort to illuminate this understudied poetic genre. Lasse Gammelgaard pays similar attention to the reader by situating poetic studies within the larger concerns of recent reader-oriented studies of narrative production. Building from early work in reader response theory, Gammelgaard investigates the characteristics of poetic and narrative tracks within narrative poetry and locates the reader at the point of interaction between these two tracks. Lewis S. Gleich considers the influence of sonic and visual elements on reader engagement with a textual narrative, refining discussions of the relationship between poeticity and narrativity by incorporating studies of phonetic and oculomotor functioning. While both Gammelgaard and Gleich employ works by John Keats in their essays and build from reader-response foundations, their poetic intersection at Keats reveals how these two approaches offer distinct methodologies that ultimately take narrative theory, reader response, and poetic studies in different directions. My contribution takes an intermedial approach, surveying narrative’s capacity within visual poetry. First teasing out the form’s visual and poetic affordances, I then explore the material on which poetry appears, considering the ways that textual layout and textual surface enrich an understanding of narrative intermediality. Steven Nardi’s deconstructivist approach sheds light on the disruptive tendencies of poetry. Nardi examines the ways that poetic disruptions enrich current narrative theory by troubling distinctions between fabula and sjuzhet. The collection concludes with a conversation between Bruce Heiden and Brian McHale that returns us to a foundational question of this collection: can narrative theory enrich and be enriched...

Creating an Audience for a British School: L. E. L.’s Poetical Catalogue of Pictures in The Literary Gazette

Art! my worship is for thee-- The heart's entire devotion. When I look Upon thy radiant wonders, every pulse Is thrill'd as in the presence of divinity. (1) These opening lines of Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Poetical Catalogue of Pictures-nine poems published in The Literary Gazette between March and August 1823--convey the rapture of a connoisseur who perceives in Art transcendent genius. (2) One might expect that the poem's subject is an Old Master painting or a Greco-Roman sculpture, for the speaker's language of devotion reflects the enthusiasm of Hazlitt for the landscapes of Claude Lorraine or Byron for the Belvedere Apollo. (3) But Landon's subject is not the art of the past but of the present. These four lines comprise the first part of a nine-line epigraph that prefaces a poem called Vandyke consulting his Mistress on a Picture in Cooke's Exhibition. The title indicates that the picture appeared in William Cooke's Exhibition of Engravings by Living British Artists, an event that took place at Cooke's 9 Soho Square print shop and home. (4) Landon's poem suggests a wider and more controversial definition of Beautiful Art, which includes not only a genre scene by a living British artist but also the reproductive art of engraving. Whether the Literary Gazette editor William Jerdan commissioned the poems or Landon conceived of the series herself is uncertain; nonetheless, the sequence of nine poems form a cohesive group, documenting paintings and at least one engraving that appeared in London between 1822 and 1823. The Poetical Catalogue is strikingly original in the periodical literature of this decade in its attempt to create an audience for British artists, including printmakers, and while Landon's participation in giftbook and annual culture has received critical attention, her role as a writer for the Literary Gazette has not been fully explored. (5) Landon's serialized poems not only versify different aspects of art writing in this period, particularly the exhibition catalogue entry and the generalist art review, but also anticipate the rise of written exclusively for literary annual illustrations. I Landon knew William Jerdan and his family from childhood, and her involvement in the Literary Gazette originates in their close working relationship and secret love affair. (6) Landon grew tip across the street from Jerdan and his family in Brompton, and, admiring her literary ambition and talent, he published her first poem in the Literary Gazette in March 1820. (7) Jerdan's tutelage, as his biographer Susan Matoff characterizes their relationship, launched Landon's career as an author. At this time Jerdan took Landon to exhibitions of paintings, an art form he especially enjoyed, and one which was a direct inspiration for her poetry (Matoff, p. 127). It is in this period that Landon began writing unsigned reviews for Jerdan, who credits her with doing little less for the Gazette than I did myself' (cited in Matoff, p. 129). In the summer of 1822, Jerdan introduced Landon to his friend the artist Richard Dagley for whom she wrote three poems entitled Sketches from designs by Mr. Dagley, published in July and August issues of the Literary Gazette. Matoff notes that it was quite an achievement for Landon to produce about pictures in a magazine which did not print the illustrations from which the poems derived (p. 131.) It is likely that Landon saw the pictures either in an exhibition or in print reproduction and wrote the Literary Gazette's art notices. Landon's choice of title asserts the relevance of her poetic sequence in public art discourse: Poetical Catalogue of Pictures is--as the second word of the title announces--a kind of exhibition catalogue within the pages of a periodical. The role of the exhibition catalogue by the 1820s was both to document the pictures in an exhibition and contribute to the experience of looking at a picture by including literary quotations. …

Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons by Jon J Muth (review)

Reviewed by: Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons by Jon J Muth Deborah Stevenson Muth, Jon J. Hi, Koo!: A Year of Seasons; written and illus. by Jon J Muth. Scholastic, 2014. [32p]. ISBN 978-0-545-16668-3 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4. This creative poetic sequence follows the seasons through twenty-six haiku, partnered with illustrations that feature Muth’s familiar anthropomorphized panda as he explores the joys of fall, winter, spring, and summer along with his child friends. The poems are deftly aimed at kid experiences (“Eating warm cookies/ on a cold day/ is easy”), and the phrasing is often evocative; additionally, the alphabet threads through the sequence, with each poem containing a capitalized word beginning with its relevant letter. Muth’s delicate watercolors are triumphant, setting tender washes of sky and grass against the very kidlike poses of Koo the panda as he cranes his neck skyward or peers intently at ground-level action; their clarity is a particularly fine partner for Muth’s easygoing, freeform haiku (an introduction states his reasons for eschewing the conventional syllabic rules). This has potential for both reading alone and aloud, since the poems are accessible enough to serve as youthful writing prompts but are also crisp and vivid as oral verse. [End Page 369] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Wedgwood’s Glazes: A Poetic Sequence Derived from Glaze Chemistry with Contextual Essay

The Wedgwoodian heritage of Stoke-on-Trent’s pottery industry is examined from the perspective of an ‘outsider’ and through the double-lens of glaze chemistry and poetics. These glazes, in their acrobatic language and hieroglyphic formulae, formulate a new perception of Stoke. New expressions and perspectives are described that emerge free of a mythologized past and interrupt the narrative of this creative heritage. The poems are as much about demythologized approaches to heritage as they are about identification with a foreign place; a re-psychogeography.

Midwinter Spring, The Still Point and Dante. The Aspiration to the Eternal Present in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets

The imagery of Four Quartets makes T. S. Eliot’s indebtedness to Dante’s poetic imagination evident. Among the images of Dantean inspiration, the “still point” and “midwinter spring” effectively express the concept of an eternal present, central to Eliot’s poetic sequence. In the Quartets, opposites are reconciled and “past and future are gathered” at “the still point”. This still point can be related to the image associated with God in canto XXVIII of Dante’s Paradiso: a point of dazzling light. Midwinter spring, on the other hand, represents a state of spiritual fulfilment, out of time and space, and its depiction can be assumed to echo St Benedict’s words in canto XXII of Paradiso. Both the still point and midwinter spring hint at the same referent (eternal present, or the timeless) and show that Eliot’s fascination with the philosophical concept of time combines with his admiration for Dante’s powerful imagination.

Imagining Space and Time in Kenneth Slessor’s “Dutch Seacoast” and Joan Blaeu’s Town Atlas of The Netherlands: Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part Three

“Dutch Seacoast” by the acclaimed Australian poet Kenneth Slessor (1901–1971) is thecenterpiece of The Atlas the five-poem sequence opening his 1932 collection Cuckooz Contrey. Like the other four poems, “Dutch Seacoast” pays tribute to cartography’s “Golden Age,” Toonneel der Steden van de vereenighde Nederlanden being the poem’s epigraph and the title that Joan Blaeu gave to one of two volumes comprising his Town Atlas of the Netherlands (1649). While focusing on Blaeu’s exquisitely ordered map of Amsterdam, Slessor suggests that he is gazing at the map described by his poem and invites us to consider how poets and cartographers represent space and time.An intensely visual poet, Slessor was also attracted to lyrical descriptions of objects: his inspiration for “Dutch Seacoast” was a particularly poetic, but sparsely illustrated, catalogue of maps and atlases. After reprinting the poem and describing its reception, my paper traces the birth of “Dutch Seacoast” (and The Atlas generally) in Slessor’s poetry notebook, the evolution of the poem’s placement within the sequence, and the complex relationships between the poem, the catalogue, and Blaeu’s spectacular atlas. Comparing Blaeu’s idealistic view of Amsterdam with that city’s dominance during the Dutch“Golden Century,” Slessor’s darker obsessions with the poem’s ending, and his “other countries of the mind” with his native Australia, we come to understand why “Dutch Seacoast” remained for the self-deprecating poet one of his eight “least unsuccessful” poems.

Erkkila, Betsy. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: "Live Oak, with Moss" and "Calamus" [review

Betsy erkkila, ed. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love: Live Oak, with Moss and Calamus. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. xiii + 147 pp.In this provocative, timely, and useful book, Betsy Erkkila provides readers with the opportunity to trace the development of what eventually became the Cala- mus poems through their various stages of drafting, revision, and rearrangement. Walt Whitman's Songs of Male Intimacy and Love presents facsimile and tran- scription of the little-known 1859 manuscript Live Oak, with Moss alongside facsimiles of the Calamus clusters of 1860 and 1881. Erkkila's Afterword seeks to revise the biographically orientated critical stance put forward by Alan Helms and Hershel Parker, who, in Erkkila's view, read Whitman's revisions of Calamus as the product of guilt-ridden homosexual poet [who] was engaged in persistent and lifelong process of self-censorship, cover-up, and disguise after he had single isolated love affair or 'homosexual crisis' in the late 1850s. Erkkila complicates any easy correlation between the biographical Whitman and Whitman's persona(s) on the page, arguing that Live Oak, with Moss may be multiple, poetic, and not simple or single narrative at all. She contends that while the force of the poet's passion 'for love whom love' and 'my life-long lover' is clear, it is unclear whether the poet refers to man, men, past or current lover or lovers, or some future fantasy lover. Erkkila's argument is most convincing when she says that 'Live Oak, with Moss' might be read as daring poetic sequence of scenes, or tableaux, in which Whitman gives voice to full range of fluid and ever-shifting states of body, mind and feeling. It is with these sensible caveats in mind that she provides number of spirited close-readings and observations about the possibilities, but also, crucially think, irresolutions of the texts presented. She also asks us emphatically to find out for ourselves-this book empowers readers to make their own minds up about Whitman's presentation of erotic, physical, social, and spiritual love between men.One of the most thrilling aspects of this book is also potentially one of its prin- ciple weaknesses. Erkkila writes with conviction that Whitman's songs reveal poet newly articulate about public role as the evangel-poet of those sexual offenders and social outsiders who were-and still are-among the least visible and most oppressed within the putatively liberating but in fact heteronormatizing structures of the liberal state. It is certainly exciting that the Calamus poems should be reissued at this time of renewed hope-in the wake of the Perry v Schwar- zenegger federal decision, and just as Obama comes out in favor of gay marriage; indeed Erkkila's presentation of these works, along with her Afterword, have an urgency and vitality reminiscent of the pamphlet or manifesto form. And yet at times, the poems feel as though they are being cajoled into an evangelism and political radicalism that Whitman so frequently resists. For Erkkila, these poems are revolutionary; they constitute a radical departure in Whitman's work and in literary, sexual, and social history; they are also his most public and politically engaged. But these estimations are not always convincing: when the line I what am from Live Oak VIII is explicitly compared to Shakespeare's Sonnet 121-I that am-does this not point to the fact that Whitman engages with tradition of homosocial poetry that stretches back at least to the sixteenth century? …

Francis Webb and the 1960s

After seven years in England, Francis Webb (1925- 1973) flew back to Australia in November 1960. While his English experience was a chequered one character- ized by various experiences of institutionalization, his final four years in the Norfolk region permitted him some freedom of movement and creative inspiration through the area's medieval roots, which for the poet were also ancestral, his great-grandfa- ther hailing from Yarmouth. In Francis Webb, Poet and Brother: Some of his Letters and Poetry (2001), his final letter from England prior to his yearned-for departure paints an idyllic scene:a traipse along empty amusement piers and sea-front, meeting only the few indomitable lovers and fishermen and seagulls; then fish and chips; and then, in an exqui- site, very old Catholic church, by accident a lovely Bene- diction-first time for over a year that I'd participated in this glorious ceremony. Up among the kids, my horrible voice sang lustily; a darling Sister smiled and handed me a hymn-book. It was heaven, (qtd. in Meere and Meere 148)Webb's return, while physically reconnecting him with his sup- port network of family and friends, played out in stark con- trast to the day-releases he enjoyed in Norfolk. This article traces Webb's physical and poetic return to Australia through biographical sources, including newly published accounts by his friend Sr. Pauline Fitz-Walter and his direct influence on two Generation of 68 luminaries, Bruce Beaver (1928-2004) and Robert Adamson (1943-). Though, as with most genera- tional nomenclature, this term (used here interchangeably with 68er) is amorphous and overtly Sydney-centric, it perfectly fits the amorphous and Sydney-centered nexus between Webb and the younger poets of the 1960s over whom he exerted the most immediate influence.Webb's account of his return in Francis Webb, Poet and Brother contains his trademark concern for others' affairs more than his own and self-depreciating humour about being locked up for the public good (Meere and Meere 152). Yet as his biographer Michael Griffith reconstructs it from the letters of strong Webb supporters David Campbell (1915-1979) and Vincent Buckley (1925-1988), the situation was a far more sobering one:After being picked up from the airport by Campbell him- self and one of the secretaries from the Prime Minister's Department (the Prime Minister [Robert Menzies] himself having written to the State Minister for Health requesting information on Webb's case), Webb was taken to St. John of God Hospital, Burwood, from where it was hoped he would go on to the hospital's country farm. Within a week, however, Webb had to be heavily tranquilized and taken off to Parramatta Psychiatric Hospital, that prison horror as Vincent Buckley was to refer to it. Webb was admitted on 10 November 1960. His admission papers describe him as WEBB: Francis Charles. Aet 35. Single. Labourer. R.C. So much for the poet who sang the historical epics of this country and who dedicated his songs to God [...] as Webb's letters over the next few years indicate, he was deeply morti- fied at this need for being hospitalised and the repeated rebuttal of his requests for freedom. (Griffith 254-55).Webb's time in Parramatta would lead to his celebrated Ward Two, possibly the first poetic sequence to feature an insider's view of mental illness in Australian literary history. Preceding Ward Two in his final collection The Ghost of the Cock (1964) is the shorter sequence Clouds, which juxtaposes Sydney department stores, pubs, teahouses and other images of 1960s modernity with his own sense of colonial imprisonment:As we bank into it, and all the giant sad pastClutches at me swimming through it: hereIs faith crumbling-here the engines of warIn sleek word and sad fresco of print,Landscapes broken apart; and here at lastIs home all undulant, banners hanging drearOr collapsing into chaos, burnt. …

Who’s “The King of Cuckooz”? Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part I

“The King of Cuckooz” by the acclaimed Australian poet Kenneth Slessor opensthe five-poem sequence The Atlas as well as Cuckooz Contrey (1932), the collection in which it debuted. Like each of The Atlas poems, “The King of Cuckooz” begins with a quote from a prominent seventeenth-century map-maker; in this case, Robert Norton (d. 1635)—the English engineer, gunner, writer, and surveyor. Slessor not only alludes to Norton’s 1620 plan of Algiers throughout the poem, but imagines his narrator assuming Norton’s (highly fictionalized) persona. This article, part of the first full-scale examination of Slessor’s ambitious but poorly understood sequence, begins by considering what critics have said about “The King of Cuckooz,” traces its development in Slessor’s poetry notebook, and details the complex relationships between his poem, Norton’s map, and a particularly lyrical description of that map in an ephemeral catalogue of atlases and maps. Slessor modeled his King of Cuckooz on Barbarossa/Kheir-ed-din (ca. 1478–1546), Algiers’ most charismatic corsair and pasha. But what Norton meant by “The Kingof Cuckooz Contrey” eluded Slessor. By focusing on Norton’s participation in the British expedition against Algiers (1620–1621), tracking down memoirs of foreign officials and former captives in Ottoman Algiers, scouring old maps for “Cuckooz,”and cobbling together the astonishing exploits of the Berber Kingdom of Koukou/Cucco through Norton’s day and beyond—my paper will make the “unknown” known in its strangely poetic reality.

Featured Poet: Jane Downs

Jane Downs is a sensualist. In her poetic sequence “Adirondack Dream,” Downs mixes vivid colors, sounds, tastes, touch, smell, emotions, and sudden bursts of a child's “aha” moments to create a lus...

Wordsworthian Vision, Moving Picture Shows, and the Ethics of the Moving Image in Maria Jane Jewsbury's The Oceanides

The essay traces Maria Jane Jewsbury's attempt to undermine embodied viewing practices (especially those related to affect and domesticity) for the purposes of questioning the colonial gaze and its control over gendered and racial bodies. In her ambitious poetic sequence, The Oceanides, Jewsbury wields both a version of the Wordsworthian imagination and a phantasmagoric aesthetics culled from the moving picture shows to create moving images that resist preconceptions of South Asia residing in reified language or landscape views. For example, she composes a double vision of landscape beauties such as cocoa trees to unmask their commodity status. At the sequence's end, Jewsbury conjures the image of a heedless, careless infant, which allegorizes a type of vision that cannot be fixed and is always partially occluded from view. In doing so, she proffers a poetics resisting the legacy of sensibility to delve into questions about perception, visuality, and epistemology. Even more, she presents an aesthetics of kinesis that insists on the traveler's inability to capture pictures as an ethical response to colonial terrain.

An Interruptive Gesture: J. M. Coetzee’s Landscape with Rowers (2004)

In Landscape with Rowers: Poetry From the Netherlands, J. M. has collected his own translations of poetic cycles and sequences by six poets: Gerrit Achterberg, Sybren Polet, Hugo Claus, Cees Nooteboom, Hans Faverey, and Rutger Kopland. I argue that with this rather anachronistic collection of poems, all predating the 1990s and to a greater or lesser extent associated with the artistic drive during the third and part of the fourth quarter of the twentieth century toward exploring more ‘objective’ compositional methods and in several instances also the ‘hyperreal’, Coetzee has not attempted to introduce the world to a representative set of modern Dutch poems — much rather, he has utilized a very specific selection of poems from a small continental literature to produce, in Peircean terms, a higher translation or, to borrow St-Pierre’s (2007: 6) formulation in In Translation — Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, ‘a new reading, a new writing’. Drawing on, amongst others, Amit Pinchevski’s (2005) By Way of Interruption and Slavoj Z ˇizˇek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, I show that Landscape with Rowers can be seen as a conscious and conscientious interruption tailor made for the decade(s) following the historic interruption that 9/11 constituted.

Beyond the Pale: “Poesía Postpoética” in Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Joan Fontaine Odisea

In a recent article defining his concept of “poesía postpoética,” Agustín Fernández Mallo chides and challenges his contemporaries for being behind the times. While not completely eschewing more traditional techniques of intertextuality and imagery, Fernández Mallo does stress the need to incorporate scientific and mathematical imagery. His book-length poem, Joan Fontaine Odisea (mi deconstrucción) (2005), exemplifies his “poesía postpoética” in its use of allusions to high and popular culture, and scientific concepts, along different types of discourse, to disrupt the commonplace perception of a unified poetic voice. This article will focus on Joan Fontaine Odisea as a modern poetic sequence that includes paratextual elements, framing devices, and images such as Dirac’s Delta function in particular, to provide readers with some preliminary strategies for reading and appreciating this work and Fernández Mallo’s “poesía postpoética.” The theoretical basis will rely on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and on a recent book by Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art.

John Ogilby, Post-Roads, and the “Unmapped Savanna of Dumb Shades”: Maps and Mapping in Kenneth Slessor’s Poetic Sequence The Atlas, Part Two

Written by the acclaimed Australian poet Kenneth Slessor, “Post-roads” is the second poem of his sequence The Atlas and of his collection Cuckooz Contrey (1932), in which it debuted. Like the other four Atlas poems, “Post-roads” begins with a quote from a prominent seventeenth-century map-maker; in this case, John Ogilby (1600–1676)—the celebrated British publisher, surveyor, and cartographer. Slessor not only transformed Ogilby’s work (and portrait) into poetic images, but made Ogilby’s “tireless ghost” the central character of his poem. This article, part of the first full-scale examination of Slessor’s ambitious but poorly understood sequence, begins by reproducing the poem and tracing the poem’s development in Slessor’s poetry notebook. To reconstruct his creative process, it details the poet’s debt to the ephemeral catalogue of atlases and maps in which he discovered his title, epigraph, central character, and a possible source for the colorfully named coaches and carriages that conveyed passengers not only throughout London and Britain beginning in the early seventeenth century, but also throughout Australia from around 1800 to 1920. After comparing poet and cartographer, we consider the poem’s relationship to two of Ogilby’s atlases: the monumental Britannia (1675) and the posthumous, if far more accessible Traveller’s Guide (1699, 1712). Both reveal how Ogilby—even from the grave—helped passengers like the poem’s “yawning Fares” trace their routes. Finally, after offering reasons for Slessor’s choice of “Guildford” out of all the place-names along the roads through England and Wales, and proposing literary inspirations for “Post-roads,” the paper returns to Slessor’s hero/artist.

LA MAISON MORALISÉE IN W. H. AUDEN'S ‘THANKSGIVING FOR A HABITAT’

In an encomiac poetic sequence about his house in Austria entitled ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden described it as a space that simultaneously fosters intimacy and secures a sacrosanct privacy. Auden shifts in ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’ from writing various forms of paysage moralisé – psychological, symbolic, or allegorical landscapes – to composing a maison moralisée. What the house symbolizes and allows is the civilizing act of creating a common world. This is the domestic ethos that the sequence presents as an over-determined alternative to several ‘problems’: the loneliness of the middle-aged Auden; the sentimentalized Freudian family romance; and the apocalyptic fears of the twentieth century.

Refraining Songs: The Dynamics of Form in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella

"Refraining Songs" reappraises the role of the songs in Sidney's Astrophil and Stella as they reveal Sidney's own theoretical views on narrative in lyric and strengthen the case for the 1598 ordering of the poems. These formally diverse lyrics interspersed among the sonnets both narrate the more important events of Astrophil and Stella's affair while also acting as interruptions or extended articulations of Astrophil's overburdened emotional state. This essay reconciles these divergent capacities of the songs, arguing that Sidney uses the songs to create an opposition between narrative and lyric in order to explore narrative's effects upon poetic sequence. Complicated by shifts within and juxtapositions of poetic form in the sequence, narrative itself becomes a lyric refrain as events are written and rewritten, creating a recursive narrativity that Sidney exploits for innovative possibilities of genre.