Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

Questions of Anticommunism

This chapter reveals exchanges among Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, and Heberto Padilla. Bishop’s relation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) inflects her Brazil poems, described here not as self-conscious critiques of travel literature but as negotiations of liberal ideas about international class politics and poverty, revealed in elaborate sound patterns. Transfiguring middle-generation formalism, Walcott lyricized his increasingly vexed relation to the hemispheric tours he attended with support from the CCF. Actively influenced by Lowell’s psycho-political stance, Padilla’s critiques of revolutionary Cuba aggravated a crisis of cultural permissiveness in the state bureaucracy known as “the Padilla Affair” after the poet was imprisoned and forced to recite a coerced confession as a condition of his release. Lyric sequences by Bishop, Lowell, Walcott, and Padilla sought new strategies of hemispheric cultural diplomacy by enacting crises of confessional lyric formalism as an aesthetic ideology in service to anticommunist policy.

Lyric Words, not Worlds

The notion that a lyric poem generates a world seems derived from the analysis of narrative fiction and risks setting the study of lyric poetry on the wrong track. Although lyrics often contain fictional elements – minimally sketched characters and incident – it is best to start from the presumption that they are at bottom not fiction. One can then analyze the tension between what one might call fiction and song, or fictional elements and ritualistic elements, as in Roland Greene’s analysis of lyric sequences. The positing of a fictional world created by a lyric poem and including a fictional speaker or persona risks trivializing lyric poems by relativizing their claims to the situation of a particular individual instead of granting them the authority of poetic form. Even lyrics that do create a fictional speaker often make claims about the world – our world and not a special fictional world – that are authorized by the poet. A superior default model for thinking about lyric, then is the classical concept of lyric as epideictic discourse, closer to oratory than to mimesis. The lyric characteristically strives to be itself an event rather than a representation of an event.

Aleksandr Sumarokov's Elegit liubovnye and the Development of Verse Narrative in the Eighteenth Century: Toward a History of the Russian Lyric Sequence

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.