Peter Middleton

How to read a reading of a written poem

Poetry readings have become a standard element in the practice of poetry in the English-speaking world over the past fifty years, yet their significance as anything more than entertainment remains little understood.1 Literary studies has lagged behind another field that has made significant steps in the study of poetry performance—oral poetics. My title alludes to John Miles Foley’s recent textbook (2002) on the study of oral poetry, which offers both a comprehensive account of different theories of oral poetry and an extended introduction to his own contribution to the study of the units of composition. Foley’s work, like that of other ethnographers of oral poetry, has important implications for the study of the relation between any written poetry and its performance, even among the most literate, print-based cultures. My own research into the contemporary Anglophone poetry reading in which a written, often printed, text is read aloud, began with a puzzle: the seeming dissonance between the opportunities for understanding a poem when read silently and the fleeting impressions presented by an oral performance of the same text. Poetry readings can seem explicable if one thinks of them as entertainment, or part of the celebrity system, or as performances of a verbal score that like most musical scores can only be appreciated properly once converted by instruments and voices into sonic form. All of these variations do take place and important poetry has emerged in each area. Why then is it that such poetry is in the minority, and that the main body of contemporary poetry is also regularly performed by its authors and yet would seem to require the kind of thoughtful, prolonged attention that only silent reading of a printed text can supply? This question turns out to go much deeper than it would appear. It requires an almost complete rethinking of what we understand as the reading of literary texts in contemporary Western culture. The study of performance

Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition

Discusses issues of semantics and intentionality arising from syntactic fragmentation in the later poetry of George Oppen. Oppen’s reception was initially uncertain despite his Pulitzer, and one reason was his apparent willingness to make unequivocal affirmations in propositional form. My discussion follows Peter Nicholls’s meticulous analysis of a poem from Seascape: Needle’s Eye, and takes up references to Hegel on the speculative proposition, as well as intertextual references to Wallace Stevens, and Robert Duncan. After brief discussions of the contrasting modes of poetic proposition in Wordsworth and Susan Howe, the essay concludes that modernist poetry’s visible disruptions of normative linguistic structures can be approached through a study of the role of the proposition in poetry.

Strips: Scientific Language in Poetry

The poetry that flourished in America between the mid 1970s and the 1990s known as Language Poetry was influenced by changing public perceptions of the natural sciences as well as the influence of structuralist social sciences. By considering the importance of physics and chemistry for the British poet J. H. Prynne, and the epistemological implications of references to current scientific publications, I discuss the struggles of Language Poets and other contemporary writers to assert the primacy of their own cognitive inquiries in the face of the authority of the sciences. Does poetry adumbrate more extended forms of knowledge and truth than dominant scientific methods recognise, and if so how might writers and critics better articulate these possibilities? The essay demonstrates that these questions have to address sensuous particularity as well as conceptual argument.

Teaching modernist poetry

Modernist poetry has a reputation for difficulty as well as brilliance, obscurity as well as innovations central to modern culture. Modernist poets have experimented with form, subject matter, visual appearance, oral performance, publication, and every aspect of the material and intellectual culture of the poem. Helping students to recognise and understand the energies and interventions at work in this poetry makes great demands on the teacher of literature. In this timely book, leading poets and scholars discuss the pleasures and challenges of teaching the exciting, diverse field of modernist poetry from the beginning of the last century to the present. You will find here many practical classroom ideas, along with plenty of useful information about poets, poems, critics and histories of poetry

Epigenetics and poetry: challenges to genetic determinism in Michael Byers’ Long for This World, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's ‘The Four Year Old Girl’

The essay explores how a poem, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugges poem ‘The Four Year Old Girl’ (1998), and a novel, Michael Byerss Long for This World (2003), draw on the resources of the aesthetic to reflect on epistemological, ethical, and affective consequences of genetic variation that generates perceived disability. Although neither text explicitly addresses epigenetics, the same drive to understand genetic information in terms of development and environment which drives biological and medical research in epigenetics is very much present. The essay discusses the semantic space occupied by the concept of epigenetics, and then asks how, if at all, poetry might contribute to the intense debates opened up by challenges to genetic determinism by transgenerational heritability of changes to DNA. The essay contrasts avant-garde poetry with both amateur poetry about genetic disability and with a realist novel depicting a doctor and his family trying to help a child with a severe genetic condition. I suggest that we can think of Long for This World as an epigenetic novel, and ‘The Four Year Old Girl’ as an investigation of the semantic space now being opened up by epigenetics.

Textual memory: The making of the Titanic's literary archive

James Camerons film, Titanic , depended on both a recent spate of novels and short stories about the ship, and an earlier diverse archive. We argue that a case study of the cultural memory of the Titanic , alongside the changing modes by which the sinking is represented, can reveal more general traits of our tacit understanding of what now constitutes both history and the past. Through discussion of Camerons film, E.J. Pratts poem, Walter Lords documentary narrative, A Night to Remember , and novels about the ship by Cussler, Steele, Finney, Bainbridge and Bass, we show that contemporary popular culture imagines the past as a traumatic memory to which access can be gained through a technics of memory and representation which will reveal it as a witnessable location in time and space. We suggest that the reliance on models of memory needs to be questioned both ethically and through the study of narrative practices, because the willingness of readers and viewers to go on being there as the Titanic sails and sinks again and again can be read as an image of how it is actually history which sinks late modernitys representation of the past.

Folk Poetry and the American Avant-Garde: Placing Lorine Niedecker

What is the effect of placing speech in a poem? What is the effect of placing a poem in a collection of poems by other poets? These ordinary cultural acts of displacement are taken for granted by most writers and readers, but for the Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker they represented highly conscious acts alien to her everyday world. Although her fellow Objectivists were marginalized by the literary world for much of their careers, they mostly lived and worked within the metropolitan cultures where their avant-garde poetry was read. She spent almost all her life in rural Wisconsin in relative poverty, keeping her writing life quite separate from her various working-class jobs and the local community. By reading her relations with the poetic avant-garde in terms of these acts of displacement, it is possible to appreciate the complexity of a poetic style that can appear to dissolve meaning into a limpid clarity that leaves nothing to interpret, and to recognize that the poetic avant-garde makes rarely questioned assumptions about the universal transmissibility of poetry.

30@30: the future of literary thinking

All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility?

Warring Clans, Podsolized Ground: Language in Contemporary UK Poetry

Why does modernist American poetry look so different to its British counterparts? Tom Leonard, in an article first published in 1977 in that indispensable magazine Poetry Information, argues that a poet such as William Carlos Williams was inclined “to sec and treat language as an object in itself,” while modern British counterparts have not been able to do this so readily because of the degree to which language is thought of in terms of proper and improper usage. The ability to use standard English is a marker of education and social status, and because “correct” voice or pronunciation is such a social value, the force field of correctness distorts all perceptions of language, so that it appears as if “in reality, correct spelling and correct syntax arc synonymous with correct pronunciation.” Radical poets of course arc aware of this, but in order to counter its force they have had to precipitate out three components of the cultural voice, its “lexis, syntax and phonology,” in effect “dissecting the ‘voice’ of poetry.” This has led to specialization whereby poets have tended to concentrate on just one of these constituents. Amongst leading avant-garde British poets, Leonard identifies three who have taken this route: Hugh MacDiarmid has concentrated on vocabulary, Ian Hamilton Finlay on syntax, and Bob Cobbing on sound.

Conclusion: the History and Interpretation of Modernist Poetry

Discusses how teachers of modernist poetry can address the division between the modernism prior to world war 2 and postwar modernism, as well as the implications of the materialist textual strategies used by poets in this long tradition