Espaços medonhos da poesia: os elementos da poética do horror nas obras de Anne Sexton, Philip Larkin e Severo Sarduy

Ao discutir os textos de Philip Larkin, de Anne Sexton e de Severo Sarduy, o artigo busca refletir sobre a importância da poética do espaço e das relações metonímicas para a subversão do binarismo da época estruturalista. Ao atualizar o regime das emoções negativas próprias aos contextos gótico e neogótico, e importante no âmbito vanguardista, a poesia se inscreve na resistência contra a reificação do ser humano promovida pelos discursos da opressão capitalista e de gênero. As experiências do horror do vazio e da anamorfose permitem uma reelaboração subjetiva dos dualismos especulares do narcisismo melancólico dos sistemas do poder.

Queer Poetic Time

This chapter argues that the representation of ‘queer’ time in postmodernist poetry extends beyond sexuality to encompass heterodox approaches to temporality more broadly. It starts by considering English poet Philip Larkin, suggesting how he reworked modernism within burlesque forms to evoke shifts in spatio-temporal scale. The second section, ‘Against Chrononormativity’, extends this analysis across various American postmodernist poets, arguing that interrogations of normative temporality in relation to gay sexuality (particularly in Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn) can be understood as commensurate with reconstitutions of linear time in the work of John Ashbery and Louise Glück. It concludes by drawing comparisons with two Australian postmodernist poets, John Tranter and Les Murray, both of whom seek to reorient the direction of time. It discusses Tranter’s crossing of postcolonial theory with formalism, while also examining how Murray draws upon Indigenous culture and human/animal relations to reconfigure Western culture from a posthumanist perspective.

The Planetary Clock

The theme of The Planetary Clock is the representation of time in postmodern culture and the way temporality as a global phenomenon manifests itself differently across an antipodean axis. To trace postmodernism in an expansive spatial and temporal arc, from its formal experimentation in the 1960s to environmental concerns in the twenty-first century, is to describe a richer and more complex version of this cultural phenomenon. Exploring different scales of time from a Southern Hemisphere perspective, with a special emphasis on issues of Indigeneity and the Anthropocene, The Planetary Clock offers a wide-ranging, revisionist account of postmodernism, reinterpreting literature, film, music, and visual art of the post-1960 period within a planetary framework. By bringing the culture of Australia and New Zealand into dialogue with other Western narratives, it suggests how an antipodean impulse, involving the transposition of the world into different spatial and temporal dimensions, has long been an integral (if generally occluded) aspect of postmodernism. Taking its title from a clock designed in 1510 to measure worldly time alongside the rotation of the planets, The Planetary Clock ranges across well-known American postmodernists (John Barth, Toni Morrison) to more recent science fiction writers (Octavia Butler, Richard Powers), while bringing the US tradition into dialogue with both its English (Philip Larkin, Ian McEwan) and Australian (Les Murray, Alexis Wright) counterparts. By aligning cultural postmodernism with music (Messiaen, Ligeti, Birtwistle), the visual arts (Hockney, Blackman, Fiona Hall) and cinema (Rohmer, Haneke, Tarantino), The Planetary Clock enlarges our understanding of global postmodernism for the twenty-first century.

DANIEL FELSENFELD (b. 1970)Annus Mirabilis (2007)

This chapter looks at American composer Daniel Felsenfeld’s Annus Mirabilis (2007). From a wide choice of Felsenfeld’s varied works, this short, witty, and oddly poignant setting of the well-known Philip Larkin poem is a real find and an especially welcome addition to the limited repertoire for bass voice. It is ideal for histrionically gifted performers wishing to enliven a recital programme of more serious fare. Felsenfeld neatly captures the painfully ironic, rueful essence of the text, and, in incongruous parody, draws on quotations from Purcell as well as two of the Beatles’ hits. Also an experienced writer, he obviously relishes supplying pithy notes for the performers, such as ‘with overdone pathos’, ‘melodramatically grand’, and ‘eerily strict’. The piano takes a major role, veering from baroque gestures and direct quotes to bravura gestures, amid constantly changing tempos and frequent rubato.

THOMAS HYDE (b. 1978)Three Larkin Songs (2003)

This chapter assesses Thomas Hyde’s Three Larkin Songs (2003). These three short, contrasting songs to richly-layered Philip Larkin texts constitute a cycle that is a boon for young singers seeking a piece of modest demands and unobtrusive craftsmanship which lies easily in the voice. A touching slow movement is framed by two fast-moving numbers, distinct in character. Even a baritone should not be taxed by the tessitura—the range is highly practical for all except basses and altos. Obligingly, the composer even offers to transpose the songs to suit individual singers. This is a return to an earlier practice, when vocal sheet music was issued in different keys: Low, Medium, or High. Piano parts, economically structured and relatively undemanding, are tailored sensitively to the voice part in perfect balance.

The Alvarez Generation

This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.