Ventriloquism

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.

Built Words

Chapter 2 explores the hybrid poetry and artwork of David Jones, a figure often identified as late modernist. With close attention to the interplay of word and image in The Anathemata (1952), it analyses Jones’s use of illustration and inscription, divine and human embodiment, and vulnerable built and printed material—especially his depiction of crumbling theological structures, Greek and Roman statues, and medieval city fortifications. Focusing on the colloquy of material across forms, this chapter shows how columns and stone structures in Jones’s poetry propel audiences between word and matter, demanding new modes of corporeal reading engagement. It also considers the architecture of the page, and the design models that inform the late modernist text’s inscriptions, words, and images.

Lunatic Forms

Chapter 1 examines derivation and re-animation in Djuna Barnes’s early-twentieth-century lyric novel, Nightwood, focusing on redeployed aesthetic figures: the sleepwalker, the unstoppable narrator, the animate statue. It shows how Barnes’s resurrection of character types is informed by the genre-fusing innovations of the commedia dell’arte. It reads Barnes in dialogue with both Laforgue’s and Verlaine’s development of the Pierrot-figure, and the sad and ominous clowns in grotesque theatre, which inform Chaplin’s Tramp and Beckett’s clowns, as well as Barnes’s characterization of the ‘doctor’. Does Nightwood cast its characters in stone, locking them into old, ritualized narrative strategies? Or are these types themselves on the move; re-animating generations of performances and forms, from Shakespeare’s bawdy, to Rabelais’s carnivalesque, to Aphra Behn’s moon-philosopher, Doctor Balierdo?

Introduction

To consider the long twentieth century from the unheeded perspective of fugitive engagement is to approach its literary energies from a distinctive, unsettling angle. Fugitivity sits between two concepts of movement and change; that of flight from a given order, place, or form (which reconfigures understandings and identities), and that of ephemerality (a provisional ...

Collaboration

This chapter examines a particular instance of canonical late-twentieth-century poetry that shows close collaboration with the visual arts. It takes as a case study the work of Ted Hughes, who is often considered central to the development of the English poetic canon, in his collaboration with the American artist and publisher Leonard Baskin in producing the 1973 book, Cave Birds. The trade volume initially contained over ten of Baskin’s pen-and-ink images (which had inspired Hughes to pen his poems). Why, then, are Baskin’s artworks no longer published alongside Hughes’s poems? This chapter puts drawing and text back into dialogue, offering a sustained intra-artistic reading of an image-poem pair as it resonates with the vision of Michelangelo, Michael Ayrton, Giacometti, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. Artwork and literary text interact before our viewing-reading eyes, performing an eloquent expression of the complexity of aesthetic co-constitution, across media and history.

Moving Statues

Chapter 3 focuses on patronage, passivity, and the politics of poetic reception in the mid-twentieth-century work of F.T. Prince. It examines the motives for his trans-historical engagement with Michelangelo’s sculpture and poetry, and allies the motifs of stasis and the statue that comes to life with the condition of being roused from (readerly) repose. Re-awakening his forebear’s material, Prince’s lyric forms are closely attuned to the politics and economics of the situated, commissioned (and compromised) cultural work, even as it emphasizes how the neglected statue, dormant artistic legacy, or underappreciated poem can be transformed in a new era, for a fresh audience. Chapter 3 both examines the negotiations at play in contemporary reactivations of earlier models of commission and reception, resistance and slumber, and considers the ethics of the quietly fugitive provocation in the twentieth-century poetry industry.

Afterword

The story of fugitive dynamics told in this book is one that may or may not resonate with the reader’s literary predilections. During the course of writing, the author too has been swayed from appreciation of co-constitutive energies by deep cultural attachments to the belief that real literary agency belongs to a single human (an author), and that the diverse collaborators involved and the materials ‘produced’ are secondary. In crafting and recrafting the sentences of this book—especially in attempting to select appropriate verbs—I have come to see how difficult, indeed, how radical a task it is to rewrite the default grammar of contemporary literary-artistic agency, which has habitually assigned activity to singular human creators. But this critical tendency results in an undernourished account of the complex operations, collaborations, and contestations between and within bodies, including nonhuman and quasi-human bodies. One example is the plastic and decompositional forms animating Paul Muldoon’s and Norman McBeath’s pieces. Another is the powerful chthonic presences that give rise to Ted Hughes’s and Leonard Baskin’s ensnared and multispecies beings....

Reverberation

Chapter 5 explores—from the direction of non-mainstream poetics—the politics of embodiment and reception in Denise Riley’s poetry. Its focus is her late-twentieth-century avant-garde pamphlets and small press publications. What is at stake in Riley’s poetic emphasis on the punctured, uncertain, and wounded textual-corporeal body? Why do her poems invite readers to witness the traces of their physical making/printing? The chapter examines what Riley’s use of unmarked space can teach readers about their role in the politics of production and reception. It explores how sparse type energizes gaps between words (giving them a fugitive figuration) and draws attention to the conflict involved in acts of listening and receiving, inking and uttering. The chapter considers whether such effects are compromised when larger, more commercial houses republish the works.