Wound Building: Dispatches from the Latest Disasters in UK Poetry

Wound Building is a volume of essays, with digressions, on one group of contemporary poets active in a self-organizing political poetry scene in the UK, most of whom have little to no audience outside of the little magazines that they publish and the reading series they put on. The book is a front-line report on the rapid development of this poetry in the period between 2015 and 2020, with a particular focus on the relationship of poetry to violence and its representation. The poets discussed here write violent love poems and violent elegies as well as violent fantasies composed in stabs of violent verse and violet prose. The poems themselves comprise fantasies of killing David Cameron, dreams of being split open along a seam, basement songs, hundreds of pages of notes on working life in a privatized care home in Hove, East Sussex, a four-line slogan about the Cologne groping scandal of New Year 2016, variations on the Refugees Medical Phrasebook, a life wasted in a factory in Guangzhou, an autobiographical sci-fi interbet fever dream, an anarchist elegy, and a refusal to argue. Ultimately, Hayward argues that the lessons this poetry teaches is never to write a “worthy” narrative when a fucked up collage will do. Rather than a cohesive “account” of a “school” of poets, or a “contribution” to the boring tittle-tattle of aesthetic debates over British poetry as an institution, Wound Building is a front-line report on the local disasters of a contemporary UK poetry caught in the grip of the historical cataclysm of capitalist culture. Wound Building is further concerned with aesthetic problems related to Marxism, anarchism, contemporary trans politics, and class, though its “theoretical” preoccupations are subordinated to its desire to provide a ground-level view on the writing itself, its production, its intellectual aporia, and the ways it finds itself outstripped by the ongoing “march of events.” The book will be of interest not only for those concerned with contemporary British political and experimental poetry, but also more generally for anyone who wishes to think carefully about what it means to make art about present-day history and its many horrible enormities. The book’s title is derived from the idea of sublime woundedness that subtends the context of the poets discussed here: the impressions of wounds opening up like LED-lit shopfronts in the night, in a parallel universe in which injury is intoxicatingly impersonal and structural, and which forms the environment in which the poems fight to absolutize the value of every last breath, or face into the reality of extravagantly violent wish fulfillment, or dissolve themselves in a search for new ways of professing love, or transform into a kind of expressionism of vomiting up medical-diagnostic categories found in abstract social labor, or pump their verses full of the convulsive rhythms of surprise and sudden relief, without any guarantee that this is the right thing to do or that anyone will even fucking hear. Wound Building does not historicize this state of affairs as much as it attempts to live alongside the immediacy of this work, in order to see what is still possible for poetry, and criticism, to make and do.

ENTREVISTA COM SÉRGIO MONTEIRO DE ALMEIDA

Em seu volume 10, a Revista Muitas Vozes apresenta uma conversa com o artista visual e poeta experimental Sérgio Monteiro de Almeida. Artista intermídia, Sérgio participa desde 1984, do movimento artístico do Paraná e do circuito internacional de arte postal. Como poeta visual, publicou em inúmeras antologias e revistas especializadas, tanto no Brasil como no exterior, por exemplo CULT (Brasil) e Rampike Magazine (Canadá). O artista participou de importantes exposições de poesia visual como Bienal Internacional de Poesia Visual e Alternativa no México (1987, 1990, 1992, 1996 e 2010); Post-Art International Exhibition of Visual/Experimental Poetry (San Diego State University - USA, 1988); Bienal de Veneza (2005 e 2009, curadoria de Caterina Davinio); Harvard’s Visual Poetry exhibition (Harvard University, USA, 2004, 2005); Biennale Internationale de Poesie Visuelle (França, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021). Recentemente, teve poemas publicados nos livros Davinio C. Virtual Mercury House, Planetary & Interplanetary Events (Itália, 2012); Zúñiga A, Espinosa C. La mirada transgressora - literatura expandida(México, 2017); Dencker KP. ÜberViele/S- Begegnungen 1960–2020 (Alemanha, 2021).

Wanting to Be Another Person: Resurrection and Avant-Garde Poetics in George Herbert

George Herbert’s poetry frames the body in the light of an eventual resurrection as a way of deranging any conventional sense of self or identity. Herbert is interested in the hypothesis that beneath the ambitions, emotions, and personal history of his socially conditioned self, there is another self that inheres in the body and that is in some sense “truer” than his social self. Herbert thus uses his poetry to seek a self (and a voice) that is different than the highly acculturated social person “George Herbert.” For Herbert, formally experimental poetry is a way of articulating the voice of this other self. Herbert drives his poetry to the point where his “own” voice is drowned out by a voice that is associated with the body. The chapter also examines what Herbert’s poetic theory of identity implies about an understanding of the emotions which are a key focus of many of Herbert’s poems. The chapter ends by examining the impact Herbert had on readers. By moving from a vision of poetry as representation or as beautiful object to a vision of poetry as social praxis that creates communities, Herbert anticipates avant-gardist movements of the early twentieth century

Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

The feminist avant-garde and feminaissance in american poetry and the visual arts

In this article, I will discuss the appearance and meaning of the terms feminist avant/garde and feminaissance. I will point to the differences in the mediums of these two fields of cultural production (verbal art and visual art). I am interested in the way these terms help us to construe histories but also impact the contemporary production of radical feminist practices. The notion of the feminist avant-garde was introduced by the American critic Elizabeth A. Frost in 2003 in order to point to the feminist avant-garde poetry tradition. In 2016, the curator Gabrielle Schor introduced the same term, using it for the international exhibition of performance artists from the 1970s. In both fields, the term avant-garde had been used to refer to male artistic and poetry practices. By applying it to radical women?s poetry and performance practices, these practices became visible, valued and recognizable. Feminaissance was introduced in the US in 2007 and referred to the several exhibitions dedicated to female art. The term expressed the optimistic re-actualization of female art, but at the same time, it provoked polemics regarding the contemporary construction of feminist art history. In the field of experimental poetry, feminaissance was used with the same meaning in 2007, at a conference dedicated to feminist experimentation. Within the visual arts, the term feminaissance foregrounded the problematics of the historization of female art, while in experimental poetry this discussion took place around the feminist positions of essentialism and anti-essentialism.

Entre la extrañeza y las equivalencias naturales: traducir la poesía experimental de Lorine Niedecker

This paper shows how my translations of objectivist American poet Lorine Niedecker for the bilingual volume Y el lugar era agua: Antología poética, published in 2018, have constantly sought for natural Spanish equivalences in sound and rhythm while trying, through different translating and rhetorical techniques, to keep the tone of strangeness that a more literal approach to the translation (after Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the translation of experimental poetry) would render. To this end, specific translation uses (punctuation sings such as the long dash and other visual display elements, paraphrasing and amplification, homophony, alliteration, and techniques for the reproduction of a sustained tone in the target text) will be explained with respect to the translation choices for some of the most successful poems of the author.