Dan Disney

‘Is this how it's supposed to work?’: Poetry as a radical technology in L2 Creative Writing classrooms

What psychic processes exist when a poem transmits into a non-native language? In acquiring a speaking position, L2 proto-poets participate in processes somewhat similar to making L1 poems, and yet particular pressures exist: how to feel like ourselves in a language we do not quite feel at home in? In this article, I propose a suite of strategies for teaching poems to non-native English-users, in order to promote an emergent Creative Writing (ESL) pedagogy in which lexical, systemic, and creative knowledge is advanced.

Narcissification, ideology, ethics, poetry? Flânerie amid big data's Homo digitalis

ABSTRACT Philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s In the Swarm (2017. Translated by Erik Butler. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) foretells of a near-future in which ‘the mounting narcissification of perception is making the gaze, the other, disappear’ (24). Asking the rhetorical question, ‘If poets are in the business of cultivating “voice” then, logically enough, to which ends?’ this paper intends to argue that poetry can be an ethical cry seeking a fraternity of others in a ‘post-truth’ era, which Han imagines to belong to the newly emerging Homo digitalis (11). Finally, this paper speculates that the creative producer must turn, politically, to face ourselves within our others, as distanced and as near as a mirror’s reflection. Making-sacred in the marketplace-real, by these means can we hope to shelter together, a fraternity gathered against what Han characterises as a fast-approaching shitstorm (2).

(Un)translatability? Between the (un)familiar and the intimate

ABSTRACT Reading Dryden’s seminal essay, ‘Preface concerning Ovid’s Epistles’ alongside Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’, this paper explores creative processes in which a selection of work from contemporary Korean poet, Lee Young-Kwang, is transmitted from its native Korean and into English-language versions. Lee’s poetry is a complex affair, and his challenging work – which includes implication-filled code-switching and seemingly untranslatable wordplays – places explicit pressures on those who would attempt to make versions. We characterise our task as a spondaic mode of responding and echoing; after Benjamin, we have striven to produce accurate transmissions of essential content. Focusing toward two poems in particular, ‘나무 金鋼 로켓’ (‘Wooden Diamond Rocket’) and ‘그늘 속의 탬버린’ (‘Tambourine in Shade’), this paper demonstrates how Dryden’s third rule of translation – imitation through non-equivalence – enables our small team to bridge gaps (syntactical, orthographic, prosodic, cultural) between Korean and English. Traversing heuristic processes including (but not limited to) correspondence, abandonment, and invention, we have created intimate but wholly strange (and we feel poetic) connections in which the source begets an echoing other.

Authenticity, aggressivity, self-doing: next thoughts on what poets might do

ABSTRACT Exploring the practice of vipassanā meditation as a heuristic path toward new modes of engaged creative production, this ficto-critical paper seeks for possible responses to the question, ‘what’s so good about authenticity?’ Reading Theodor Adorno and Jacques Lacan alongside a range of Buddhist scholars (Anthony Molino, Gary Snyder, Polly Young-Eisendrath) and against the grain of poems by Robert Hass and Wallace Stevens, central to this investigation is the Buddhist notion of prajñã, or ‘knowing-forth’: demarcating a difference between (a) rhetorical inauthenticities, which Adorno calls ‘identity thinking’, and (b) the prognosticatory ‘self-doing’ of meditators, knowing-forth is characterised here as an immanent mode of non-linguistic possibility. This paper asserts meditative processes as not only quieting all the usual syntagmatic organisations of the subject; speculatively, knowing-forth may also enable creative producers to traverse Lacan’s three stages of ego-consciousness, shifting toward domains the psychoanalyst asserts as ‘the Real’.

‘Know Thyself’? Borderlinearity in Alice Munro’s ‘Dimension’

ABSTRACT In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’.1 Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’ (Kristeva, 14) and, his drives and impulses disordered, his actions are regulated instead by ‘repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva, 11). Munro begins her story with Doree making a third trip to visit her antagonist; the first two he has ‘refused to see her’,2 and at work within these narrative structures are spatial, psychic, and potentially cathartic drives. Doree explores a boundary containing a monstrous presence, circling as if locked in the afterwardsness of repetition compulsion. She is at once searching for a means to anesthetise her trauma while seeking for ways to shatter those imago her much older husband has so expertly (and toxically) constructed.

Phantasmagoric Elegies? A late guide to wandering

ABSTRACT What is the thinking that poetry does? Amid shifting appearances, and in their attempts to capture evanescent moments of resonance, I read selected texts from Rilke, Stevens, and Nietzsche as engaging unconscious processes of wandering/wondering which enable creative producers to see what may already be there. Characterising creativity as a mode of swarming responsiveness, this ficto-critical paper reads Rilkean bees, Stevensonian lakes, and Nietzschean machines against the grain of Freuds notions of negation and libido, to speculate how wandering – into unfamiliar space, and across language – is inherently psychogeographical, as randomly filled with potential as the flâneurs approach to next interlude within phantasmagoric arenas.

Real Time Critical Responses – Potential for Creative Writing?

In the 2010 global video-linked creative experiment ‘Unmade!’ (see the report in New Writing, 8.1), multiple art form practitioners that is, those in Creative Writing, Drama and the Ceramic Arts met in a virtual global environment and produced a variety of creative works. The experiment was a wonderful success with the addition also of some technological experimentation and media artistry involving a fine media production team at the University of Montevallo, Alabama. However, something struck me, and as 2010 turned over into 2011 and moved along further, that thought grew bigger and more urgent. What struck me was the considerable degree of effort that was involved in setting up the 2010 link, and in maintaining it. The TV production team was tremendous and ensured it could happen, of course. But ‘Unmade!’ was without doubt a delicate combination of television production and creative practice webcast, TV production team working very hard to support creative practitioners, creative practitioners expertly beamed in and out and recorded but not independently present. To enable such a linked creative event to happen therefore involved two complete sets of people and two coordinated sets of timetables. What would have happened if the production team timetable had been less flexible? What would happen at any time if the kinds of technology we used in 2010 were not readily available to the creative practitioners, if they were somewhere independent of a university, for example, or in part of the world where even the most basic digital technology was a luxury? With these things in mind, and a group of colleagues keenly willing to participate, it was decided to hold a second event on 11April 2012. However, this time the plan was that we’d reduce the technological components to their most simple, their most portable and their most self-sufficient. This effectively removed one potential outcome the discoveries made by the production team during the event but in doing so it made the relatively low-tech flexibility something we could explore.