Political Poetics Research Articles

Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics

is impossible for the truly generous mind to understand the small envyings that surround the daily path of an author, particularly a female one. Mary Hutton, Preface to Cottage Tales and Poems (1836) What do we know about the working-class women who wrote poetry the Victorian period? As so often happens in the study of non-canonical writers, their biographies exist in fragments, a miscellany of facts with very little cohesion. We may know that a writer was a factory girl or a domestic servant; however, we often know little of the circumstances in which she wrote, her family history, or the particularities of her work. It seems that the lack of extant working-class women's poetry lies in the historical (de)valuations surrounding their lives; the difficulties in recovering their texts is, in part, linked to the unavailability of biographical information. Perhaps deemed too unimportant by the establishment for a record of their lives to be kept, nineteenth-century working-class women poets all but disappeared from historical record, and we are only now in the process of rediscovering them. While male working-class poets have enjoyed a rebirth with the work of Michael Sanders, Ian Haywood, and Roy Vickers, (1) the study of working-class women writers is still in its nascent stages. Mary Hutton is one such writer who has been neglected until now in scholarship on working-class poetry. Hutton's rediscovery was first recorded in Ian Haywood's The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction, in which Haywood names Hutton the only author of Chartist Fiction. (2) Recently, John Goodridge's Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1800-1900 (3) collected five of Hutton's poems, and Patricia Johnson gives a passing nod to Hutton in her study of the development of Ethel Carnie's Feminist Vision. (4) Florence Boos, whose work has reinvigorated the study of working-class verse, mentions Hutton in Class and Victorian Poetics and has done much to illuminate the possibilities within working-class women's writing. In her study of the resonances of working-class women writers, she works to belie critical assumptions that Victorian women's preoccupations with religion vitiated their verse. (5) Following the recuperative momentum of Boos's paper, I argue for Hutton's important role in the formation of a working-class political discourse in Victorian poetry. This study of Hutton's poetical negotiations of politics and class seeks to enrich the present initial discussion of a new discourse of poetic politics: that of the working-class woman of the 1830s and 1840s. In order to understand the politics underpinning Mary Hutton's poetry, we must attend to the ways in which her poems enter into the political discourses of the early 1830s--namely, issues surrounding the New Poor Law, poverty, and slavery. Boos has pointed out that most Victorian working-class women poets had little direct access to the Chartist movement and its cultural institutions (Boos, 'Nurs'd Up,' p. 153). Despite this fact, Hutton's poems on the Poor Law and poverty are strikingly aligned with the poetry of the Chartist movement in both her appropriations of images of slavery and her use of discourses on human rights and freedom. (6) In this paper I wish to show how Hutton engages with nineteenth-century class politics and how her use of simple diction and her engagement with themes that resonate with Chartist poetry earns her a place as a de facto Chartist poet in the canon of nineteenth-century working-class literature. What little we know of Hutton's life and work, we learn from two contemporary middle-class male sources. The first is William Cartright Newsam's The Poets of Yorkshire: Comprising Sketches of the Lives, and Specimens of the Writings of those 'Children of Song' who have been Natives of, or otherwise connected with the County of York (1845), and the second is the preface to Hutton's first work, Sheffield Manor and Other Poems (1831), written by John Holland. …

Performing New Orleans: Toward a Political Poetics

This essay documents an embodied model for doing scholarship in and about post-Katrina New Orleans. It suggests lived experience as human capital that provides a public good for rebuilding communities. Specifically, a research-based performance (“Performance and New Orleans: Citizenship, Identity and Housing”) serves as a case study for situating scholarship between theory and practice as a “political poetics.” The essay draws on performance theory and the values of public scholarship to negotiate the challenges of authenticity and motive that confront scholars working in New Orleans. The essay also argues for performance as a means of reaffirming human value and exposing the complexity that surrounds the problems of African American citizenship, identity, and housing in New Orleans 5 years after the storm.

Graffiti and the Poetics of Politics in Rosas's Argentina (1829-1852)

This article considers the function of writing in Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century by examining graffiti, a scriptural practice that occupies the margins of what Ángel Rama termed the "lettered city." Against the grain of the durable myth that dissident letrados of the Rosas regime wrote in a cultural void, an interrogation of this corpus demonstrates how an array of social actors struggled to establish and define the operative terms of shared political and aesthetic discourses. The inscriptions of political adversaries, despite claims to the contrary, similarly appealed to the emotions of their audiences in order to imagine the nation as an organic, preexisting social field sharply divided between a "we" and an internal other: civilization versus barbarism, or federalists versus unitarians. In other words, graffiti demonstrates how competing models for hegemony were debated through a common aesthetics and a mutually intelligible, modern political language.

Outside the republic: a visionary political poetics

Outside the republic: a visionary political poetics

Irish Neutrality: Louis MacNeice’s Poetic Politics at the Outset of “The Emergency”

This article builds upon previous scholarship attuned to Ireland’s complex position as a neutral state during the Second World War (“The Emergency”), and which points out Louis MacNeice’s hostility towards the Irish government’s official stance. It does so by looking at “The Closing Album” as a political lyric critiquing Irish neutrality’s isolation0 ist and damaging effects and shows how the poem – in the act of critiquing neutrality – asserts the modern poet’s position as an emotionally invested political spokesman. I argue that the nation’s political goals were irreconcilable with postcolonial artistic aims: Irish writers were intent on constructing an image of Irishness that was not dictated by British coloring and was exportable through the medium of their art, while the government aimed at becoming a self-sufficient, sovereign nation. This split between politician and artist during The Emergency ushers in a modern Irish poetry that is at once political and aesthetic.

A Political Poetics: George Oppen and the Essential Life of the Poem

A Political Poetics: George Oppen and the Essential Life of the Poem Tom Fisher (bio) ‘At No Time not a Poet’ Shortly after the publication of his first collection of poems, Discrete Series, in 1934, George Oppen joined the Communist Party and stopped writing poetry. Oppen’s departure from poetry was to last some twenty-five years until the late fifties when he began work on “Blood from a Stone” and the poems which were to become his second volume of poetry, The Materials, published in 1962. That same year he explains his decision to stop writing in a letter to Max and Anita Pepper: “There are situations which cannot be honorably met by art, and surely no one need fiddle precisely at the moment that the house next door is burning. If one goes on to imagine a direct call for help, then surely to refuse would be a kind of treason to one’s neighbor” (Letters 65).1 Oppen here foregrounds the fundamentally moral and political dimension of his refusal of poetry’s “fiddling” in the face of crisis. As he elaborates in a 1969 interview with L. S. Dembo: “If you decide to do something politically, you do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. That was the dilemma of the ‘thirties’” (“A Discussion” 174). Here, as in many passages from his letters, interviews and “daybooks,” Oppen decisively frames his earlier silence as a refusal of poetry as a politically or morally inadequate expression or response.2 Poetry, that is, cannot directly intervene on “human suffering” nor respond to the “direct call for help” that Oppen heard so clearly in the thirties. [End Page 83] Oppen’s silence has attracted much attention and fascination; indeed, to the point of, as Rachel Blau DuPlessis comments, “the mystification of that silence, an obsessive return to it . . . almost as if it and not the oeuvre which follows it (and the vital ‘prologue’ of Discrete Series which precedes it) is the paradoxical artifact of Oppen’s poetic career” (“The familiar” 18). Certainly, however, the fascination is understandable since the story of Oppen’s “not writing” in dramatic ways engages several compelling narratives: the pathos of the thirties; activism, military service, and exile; refusal (or negotiation) of class privilege; parenthood; the fraught relationship between the aesthetic and the political; to name a few. Still, DuPlessis’s “‘The familiar/ becomes extreme’: George Oppen and Silence” remains exemplary in its attempt, as she has it, “to think about that silence speaking”; to explore the ways in which Oppen’s poetry is continuously coming into contact with and being shaped by the “silent double—the Doppelganger—of writing” (19, 28). Offering a way to read Oppen’s silence inside his writing, DuPlessis bypasses that “mystification” she indicates, identifying instead the “use [of] silence and space as a main prosodic element” in Oppen’s poetry (28). Silence, in DuPlessis’s reading, is not the antithesis to poetry but one of its generative forces.3 Yet Oppen’s own framing of his twenty-five years as a response to the explicit limitations of poetry is not easily absorbed into his renewed poetic commitment and practice. Norman Finkelstein’s succinct summarization—“There comes a point when poetry is no longer serviceable; it becomes a luxury” (26)4—distills nicely the predominant character of Oppen’s own account of his silence. Poetry, and all art, is a “luxury” in the face of crisis, an inconsequential, even indulgent act that, like any other extravagance, is incumbent on the good conscience to renounce. Oppen’s decision to stop writing, in this reading, follows the good sense of W. H. Auden’s frequently quoted remark that “poetry makes nothing happen” and sharply draws, or relies upon, that line between the ephemeral nothings of the aesthetic and the solid somethings that make up and are demanded by the political and social real. Peter Nicholls’ gloss of Oppen’s silence gets at a similar point: “There are, in short, emergencies which demonstrate the incommensurability of art’s resources to the...

Spatial dialectic and political poetics in Agnès Varda’s expatriate cinema

Agnes Varda has been an important figure in French and European cinema for over fifty years. Her work is often discussed in the context of new wave cinema and feminist approaches to film. Her expatriate films, however, have received little critical attention. An appraisal of Mur, murs (1980) and Documenteur (1981), both shot in California in the late 1970s, provides unique insight into Varda’s cinema. An analysis of the locational modus operandi of the Californian diptych demonstrates the aesthetic coherence of the director’s project, helping to situate these films within Varda’s cinematographic production. A detailed examination of the diptych’s aural qualities also illustrates Varda’s revisionist and political poetics and provides an interesting example of the way Varda explores the notion of space. Looking at these films carefully helps us understand the importance of adopting a comprehensive and self-reflexive perspective when studying women’s cinema and its many different facets.

Spatial dialectic and political poetics in Agnès Varda's expatriate cinema

Agnes Varda has been an important figure in French and European cinema for over fifty years. Her work is often discussed in the context of new wave cinema and feminist approaches to film. Her expatriate films, however, have received little critical attention. An appraisal of Mur, murs (1980) and Documenteur (1981), both shot in California in the late 1970s, provides unique insight into Varda’s cinema. An analysis of the locational modus operandi of the Californian diptych demonstrates the aesthetic coherence of the director’s project, helping to situate these films within Varda’s cinematographic production. A detailed examination of the diptych’s aural qualities also illustrates Varda’s revisionist and political poetics and provides an interesting example of the way Varda explores the notion of space. Looking at these films carefully helps us understand the importance of adopting a comprehensive and self-reflexive perspective when studying women’s cinema and its many different facets.

The Nationalist Imagination in Remi Raji'sLovesong for My Wasteland

Remi Raji, one of loudest and most eloquent political poets in Nigeria today, sees his craft as a means of conveying serious social message to his land. Raji's consummate political theme, which is powered by what he calls the nationalist imagination, is skillfully explored in his latest volume of poetry, Lovesong for My Wasteland (2005), more than in any of his previous collections. Following tradition of social commitments of African literature and evolving orature-based aesthetics that marries choreography to poetry (choreopoetry), Raji traces history of Nigeria, in symbolic forty-five verses of volume, exposing leadership failures and plunder of yesterday and today, and presenting a hope that is predicated on people's collective stand to build their ravaged land. The business of this paper is therefore exploration of Raji's political theme in his latest poetic effort to raise his society's consciousness to collapse of national psyche and to redirect their attention toward a better tomorrow for which they have to work.

The Poetics of Politics: "Theirs" and "Ours"

Events of political communication define issues and create spaces of action that position people with respect to them. How? Political talk is not effective in these ways just because it describes the world--as it is or as it might be. In various ways, effective talk in political events forms a diagrammatic microcosm of its targeted field of action, linking events of political process in which it thrives with varying degrees of compelling effectiveness. Political talk of the "factional" politics of Indo-Fijians draws on principles we can see--and discerning participants can hear!--as well in our own agonistic electoral politics of recognition.

Piercing the Screen of Words: Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver

Piercing the Screen of Words:Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver Carol Watts (bio) All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly. —Douglas Oliver (Penniless Politics 17) The relation between the writing of contemporary poetry and politics, understood in the broadest sense as a formal, affective and conceptual engagement with events in the world, or with kinds of commitment to their transformation, is an intensely contested one. It opens up a space that manifests the most complex, and occasionally disabling, kinds of interpellation: freights of identifying, cartographies of silence, incontrovertible demands. Such contestation has been known to descend into fistfights, even as its networks of collaborative connection can produce work of the most profound attention to the unfreedom of our time. Currently the range of contemporary poetries is burgeoning, aided by the speed and penetration of internet exchange, rolling blogzines, the possibilities of cross-medial experimentation; reinforced by the ambitious lists of print-on-demand publishing and proliferating numbers of artisanal small presses, which keep work in circulation and bring "lost" collections into view. At the same time, the practice of writing poetry also continues to carry with it the traditions [End Page 198] and more uncertain trajectories of such a contestation, marked by what is often described as the fate of the avant-garde. These struggles—internal to form, language, and a poetics of subjectivity and action—are always in transition, sometimes re-energized, as if brought into sharp focus again by new times. Or they can remain, like the rubble of barricades when the present action has moved elsewhere. It may be that the very conceptual terms for understanding these strategies and conflicts, and their sometimes corralling orthodoxies, are themselves undergoing a major shift. In such a generative environment, when the possibilities of poetry are being broken open, there are opportunities to read—and hear—earlier work anew, loosed from critical ways of seeing that could make its tactics and choices slip under the radar. It becomes possible to make out the risk of, and the stakes involved in, unique attempts to grapple with a writing "singed by the real," as Douglas Oliver put it in the late '70s (Diagram 11). The conjuring up of the barricades is appropriate as an entry point to the poetry of Douglas Oliver, since it is a dialogue with the "whisper" of Louise Michel, from the moment of the Paris Commune, which animates his final memoir, published after his death in 2000; it is, in central ways, a dialogue with the violence and hope of political necessity sustained throughout his writing, as John Hall has argued ("Ventriloquising"). Oliver's poetry is not widely known, and yet he is one of the most significant British political poets of the latter years of the twentieth century. His work draws on earlier traditions of prosody, from the use of visionary medieval dream poems (his response to Thatcherism in The Infant and the Pearl) and lyrics informed by Blakean songs of innocence and experience, to hybrids of satire and allegory, inventive in the manner of Pope and Swift, by way of Boccacio, Burroughs and a self-dethroning angry pathos of his own, brought to bear on U.S. democracy in Penniless Politics. Oliver's experience as a journalist in a Paris news agency also opens his writing in acute attention to the circuits of mediation governing events, in which the poet finds himself "skewing off sideways" (Salvo 13), or an unreliable point of transmission, as well as encountering news of lives and experiences he has no means to comprehend through the "screen of words" (Diagram 11), nor the right to represent. From The Diagram Poems, written between 1973 and 1979, to A Salvo for Africa, published in 2000, and the posthumous memoir, there is a continual process of reflection about the relation of writing to events, and the necessity (and impossibility) of poetic engagement "in the course of a world" in Theodor Adorno's words, "which continues to hold a pistol to the heads [End Page 199] of human beings" ("Commitment" 80). Necessity, because "our greatest cruelties often arise from a failure to imagine" (Salvo 9). Impossibility, because the lyric self as a...

The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis and Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference (s) by Nelly Richard

The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis and Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference (s) by Nelly Richard

Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era

Introduction * Nature and the Colonial Mind * Decolonizing Relationships with Nature * The 'Wild', the Market, and the Native: Indigenous People Face New Forms of Global Colonization * Sharing South African National Parks: Community Land and Conservation in a Democratic South Africa * Devolving the Expropriation of Nature: The 'Devolution' of Wildlife Management in Southern Africa * Decolonizing Highland Conservation * Responding to Place in a Post-colonial Era: Reflections on the Australian Experience * When Nature Won't Stay Still: Conservation, Equilibrium and Control * Beyond Preservation: The Challenge of Ecological Restoration * Feet to the Ground in Storied Landscapes: Disrupting the Colonial Legacy with a Poetic Politics * Conclusions * Index

A Brighter morn: the Shelley circle's utopian project

Chapter 1 Preface: Utopia and the Shelley Circle Chapter 2 Setting Minds Afloat: Shelley and Barruel in Ireland Chapter 3 A Political Poetics: Percy Shelley's Utopian Activism Chapter 4 Toward an Imaginative Poetics: A Convergence of Theory and Practice in A Philosophical View of Reform Chapter 5 Private Visions/Public Responsibilities: The Alastor Volume Chapter 6 Re/membering Home: Utopian Domesticity in Mary Shelley's Lodore Chapter 7 The Aesthetic of Utopia in Shelley's Queen Mab Chapter 8 Science and Spirit: Shelley's Vegetarian Essays and the Body as Utopian State Chapter 9 Prophet and Loss: Women and the Shelley Circle's Utopian Project

Jean Genet and the Poetics of Palestinian Politics: Statecraft as Stagecraft in 'Quatre heures a Chatila'

This study of Jean Genet's ‘Quatre heures a Chatila’ explores the relationship between the writer's literary ouvre and his political action, both of which constitute part of his same endeavour to define our socialized reality. It draws upon other Genetian works, notably Un captif amoureux for which 'Quatre heures' might be seen as a prologue, to describe how Genet's reality, or reel, originates essentially in his feerie-the dissemination of mask, stagecraft, fable. Reality for Genet comprises a plurality of ever-shifting truths played out within the mise-en-scene of social existence. The essay suggests that in 'Quatre heures' Genet champions the Palestinian Fedayee rebels because their ceaseless reinvention of politics, religion and society prevents any original cause from existing beyond the permanently unstable site of discursive relativity, or the feerie. The essay illustrates how, moreover, Genet's aesthetic is indissociable from Palestinian ethics. 'Quatre heures' bears witness to the Palestinian rejection of monolithic ideology both in its macrostructural thematics, which discuss the Palestinian revolt, and in its microstructural stylistics: perspectives are proliferated through a multiplicity of discontinuous styles, structures and registers; time-space unities are fragmented; genre is hybridized so that journalistic fact is fuelled with poetic imagery and reference to visual art. The essay concludes by suggesting that Genet's refusal of teleological development and definitive affirmation in his account of the Palestinian insurrection and of the Shatila and Sabra massacres, affords him and his Palestinians the possibility for perpetual poetic and political hermeneutic renewal. In addition, it enables the reader to metamorphosize the absence of essence into a creative affirmation, through constant interrogation of the text.

Text, Time, Process and History in Contemporary Chilean Theatre

This exploration of theatre as a ‘political poetics’ is based on a methodology developed through the study of theatre in Chile in the period of the Pinochet regime (1973–1989), and uses this as a way of reading the theatre of the transition and return to democracy. The understanding of a series of spaces that theatre negotiates, manipulates and occupies is seen to allow access to the fissures between these spaces. The essay explores the way these gaps might give access to a range of presences and absences in the dominant discourse, especially the national narrative around the historical present of the regime and the return to democracy. It is an exploration that leads to an unexpected insight into a central absence in the poetics of the stage during the dictatorship.

The Poetics of Politics

The author investigates how contemporary urban murals of the post-apartheid era contribute to the process of reconciliation and of creating and disseminating a new national identity for South Africa.

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle

Dancing with a Difference: Reconfiguring the Poetic Politics of Aboriginal Ritual as National Spectacle1

This paper argues that indigenous dance is a poetic politics of cross‐cultural encounter that engages Aboriginal identities with those of the Australian nation. I question the nature of this encounter in terms of a performative dialogue that is both musically and kinesically presented by indigenous communities and ‘translated’ into political discourse by the government. The sentiments of ‘translation’ raise questions as to how local ritual expressions of Aboriginal dance can mediate dialogue when presented as national spectacle. What is being meditated? What is happening in the process of evocation? In this performative nexus, I focus specifically on the poetic politics of Yolngu ritual as spectacle; the nature of performative dialogue in terms of shared dance forms between indigenous communities; the problem of the authentication of dance identities; and how corporeal dispositions of indigenous dance genres influence national sentiment by their symbolic power. I pursue these issues through an analysis of how ancestral dances have been repositioned in national performance venues, such as concerts, cultural centres and ritual arenas, as a means of asserting performative statements about indigenous positioning within the nation‐state. The nature of this dialogue raises questions of authenticity and processes of authentication. It highlights indigenous concerns to control representations of indigeneity as national event, as well as a desire to convey something of the sentiment and sentience embodied in the poetics of their ancestral performances.

The Poetic Politics of Dwelling

Etude de la conception duelle du lieu poetique et du sacrifice dans le fondement violent de la verite chez Heidegger, dans l'economie des facultes du sublime chez Kant et dans le tragique de la cesure chez Holderlin. Comparant le rejet du subjectivisme de l'esthetique kantienne chez Heidegger et le maintien de Holderlin au sein du contexte du sujet kantien, l'A. montre que la rupture anti-rythmique chez Holderlin est tournee contre l'autonomie du sujet, mais que le sacrifice etablit la precarite de la receptivite, exposant le sujet a la nature accidentelle de l'etre et lui ouvrant l'acces a la nature divine