Fleurs du Travail, Fleurs Sublimes: Anna Mendelssohn's Involute Tulips

Aligning Anna Mendelssohn with the nineteenth-century, feminised genre of floral poetry, this essay traces Mendelssohn’s demarcations of tulips from 1974 to 1995. Through a series of close readings of Mendelssohn’s floral tropes, the essay identifies early preoccupations that contribute to her great poem, “Silk and Wild Tulips”, first published in 1995. For Mendelssohn, flowers stand for an inarticulable, idealised form of communication, and this thinking is consistent with that of her nineteenth-century forebears. Through its focus on Mendelssohn and flowers, the essay unearths both the thoroughness of Mendelssohn’s editorial processes, and some innately conservative strands of her thinking. A wide variety of unpublished archival materials are referenced, among them, prison diaries, photocopied pamphlet, poem manuscripts, marginalia, and typescript prose.

'A Hostile Environment': Failure of Composition in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn.

This essay examines the effects of incompleteness in Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry, when incompleteness constitutes a requirement to take the thought of the poem further, beyond and outside itself, especially in its refusal to be reconciled with reality as it exists. Taking composition to mean the integration of the materials of a poem into a whole, the argument seeks to show that Mendelssohn’s poems are not-whole, and do not construct a world, but on the contrary carry through an unappeasable criticism of the reality she lived, which is that of late twentieth-century Britain. Her work is in unremitting rebellion against language that covers over and permits misogyny, racism, class oppression, hatred of art, insipid living. She writes from a situation in which not-speaking is imposed, in which the speech organs themselves have been damaged and closed up. This condition carries a removal of the self from life, into a place of death. Another, contrary death, however, takes place in her poetry: that of the self that passes through a disintegration, which Mendelssohn places at the heart of ecstatic experience of life. She excoriates those who want to remove the extreme aliveness of lyrical language from life and poetry. The law is what gives permission to that suppression: her poetry repeatedly moves against the actions of the law as it deadens life and language. Mendelssohn’s poetry is an account, implacable and without resentment, of a life lived inside and against personal and historical suffering.

The Dance and Movement Work of Jennifer Pike Cobbing: Economies of Effort and Vitality Dynamics

Jennifer Pike (1920-2016) was a majorartist whose practice traversed the disciplines of painting, drawing,sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, jewellery-making, poetry andperformance. Although a fuller appreciation of the scale and range of herachievements has been recently enabled by the making of a film about her lifeand work by Holly Antrum (Catalogue,2013) and the publication of two volumes of selected works by Veer books (The Conglomerization of Wot and Scrunch, both 2010), her work has stillyet to be the subject of extended academic consideration. One aspect of Pike’spractice which is of particular interest to my larger project of examining therelationships between poetry and movement (2011, 2012, 2013), is her dance andmovement work which was often conducted in the context of collaborativeperformance with sound and visual poet Bob Cobbing and musicians such as VeryanWeston, Lol Coxhill and Hugh Metcalfe. This article introduces this aspect ofPike’s practice and offers some theoretical framing from Dee Reynolds’ work oneconomies of effort (2007) and Daniel Stern’s work on vitality dynamics (2010)before analysing recordings of performances in 2002 and 2007.