{"title":"Thomas A. Clark in Conversation with David Bellingham","authors":"D. Bellingham","doi":"10.16995/BIP.756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.756","url":null,"abstract":"A conversation between Thomas A. Clark and David Bellingham held at the Poetry Library in Edinburgh during the Thomas A. Clark conference organised by Alice Tarbuck.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44147017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"a place apart: Papers from the Edinburgh Symposium on the Poetry and Practice of Thomas A. Clark Papers from the Edinburgh Symposium on the Poetry and Practice of Thomas A. Clark","authors":"A. Tarbuck","doi":"10.16995/BIP.814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.814","url":null,"abstract":"In this editorial essay for a special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Alice Tarbuck introduces the issue’s four articles, and gives an overview of Clark's career and the current state of critical studies of his work.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45651444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry's Law","authors":"Joe Luna","doi":"10.16995/BIP.746","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.746","url":null,"abstract":"This essay tries to interpret Anna Mendelssohn’s poetry by thinking about the ways in which her poetry consistently returns to the matter of her survival. It closely reads Mendelssohn's correspondence with Douglas Oliver and her poetry of the late 1990s, first by identifying the role played by the enemies of poetry in that writing, and second by attempting to account for this role in terms of both Anna Mendelssohn's life as a poet, and the formal political responsibilities and necessities by which the poetry is animated. The essay locates a formal precedent that illuminates both of these roles in traditional Jewish lamentation, and Mendelssohn's work is identified with this tradition in order to unpack the complexity of her embattled lyric oeuvre. The essay further suggests that Mendelssohn's insistent anti-political stance throughout her writing life entails a politics of communitarian solidarity to be found only within the remit of poetic writing. The name for this radically negative aesthetic foundation is the title of the essay.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43015271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Reviews: Toward. Some. Air. reviewed by Lila Matsumoto; For the Future reviewed by Shalini Sengupta","authors":"Lila Matsumoto, Shalini Sengupta","doi":"10.16995/BIP.1298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.1298","url":null,"abstract":"Lila Matsumoto reviews Toward. Some. Air.: Remarks on Poetics, edited by Fred Wah and Amy De’Ath (2015); Shalini Sengupta reviews For the Future: Poems & Essays in Honour of J.H. Prynne on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday, edited by Ian Brinton (2016).","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49355869","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conference Report: ‘Peter Larkin: Poetry, Phenomenology, and Ecology’, 26th of April 2017, University of Warwick.","authors":"Gabriel James de Sousa, Gabriel James de Sousa","doi":"10.16995/BIP.1340","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.1340","url":null,"abstract":"This is a report detailing the ‘Peter Larkin: Poetry, Phenomenology, and Ecology’ symposium which took place at the University of Warwick on 26th of April 2017. It functions as an introduction to a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry of articles based on the proceedings of the symposium, guest edited by Professor Emma Mason of the University of Warwick.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43794507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bright Discontinuities: Peter Manson and Contemporary Scottish Poetry","authors":"Stewart Sanderson","doi":"10.16995/BIP.754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.754","url":null,"abstract":"Critical responses to Peter Manson’s work often refer to him as a Scottish or Glasgow-based poet. In a review of Manson’s 2017 pamphlet Factitious Airs, Alice Tarbuck proposes that one of the key things differentiating Manson from his avant-garde contemporaries is his attentiveness to place and particularly “to Scottish speech rhythms and cultural ideas.” Nonetheless, most critical writing on Manson has sought to read his work primarily in terms of international movements in experimental poetics. This article therefore considers Manson’s relationship with and place within contemporary Scottish poetry, asking what connections can be made between his writing and that of his geographical peers. Manson has, notably, written very sympathetically about Tom Leonard’s work. Another potential point of contact would be Object Permanence, which, like Poor. Old. Tired. Horse thirty years before, brought writers from Scotland into contact with new currents in international poetry (and vice versa). In Manson’s work as a translator of Mallarme there is also a connection with the modern(ist) Scottish tradition of poetic translation exemplified by Edwin Morgan. Situating Manson’s work in the landscape of contemporary Scottish poetry, this article asks to what extent this offers a potentially fruitful context within which to read his work – going on to explore what the implications of such a reading might be.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49054643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Sourd-Muet”: The Poetics of Non-communication in Peter Manson’s ‘Sourdough Mutation’","authors":"Greg Thomas","doi":"10.16995/BIP.765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.765","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the formal characteristics of, and some possible motivations for, what I call ‘non-communication’ in Peter Manson’s 2014 poem-sequence ‘Sourdough Mutation’. Initially, I consider the distinctions between the compositional mode which defines this sequence and those which had characterised Manson’s previous poetry and prose – this distinction resting on a unique attentiveness in ‘Sourdough Mutation’ to the visual and sonic surfaces of language – before enumerating some of the grammatical, visual, and phonetic effects which generate this emphasis. I consider some potential influences on this aspect of the work, turning first to concrete poetry and secondly – and at greater length – to the Symbolist poetry of Stephane Mallarme. The main critical contention of this article is that ‘Sourdough Mutation’ partly constitutes a formal homage to the grammatical and phonetic playfulness of Mallarme’s poetry, an homage which could not have been incorporated into the translations of that poetry which Manson was concurrently producing because of his primary focus as a translator on the work’s semantic dimensions. Defining ‘Sourdough Mutation’ as ‘neo-symbolist’ on this basis, I consider some potential readings of the sequence’s political significance. Like Julia Kristeva’s reading of Mallarme’s poetry, the non-communicative register of ‘Sourdough Mutation’ might manifest a disturbance in the boundaries of the socially-mediated linguistic subject, with revolutionary implications. However, I acknowledge the tendency of this ‘Kristevan’ reading to lead to repetitive analysis of experimental poetry, and in conclusion offer an alternative, more contextually attentive 'political' reading of ‘Sourdough Mutation’, presenting its processes of formal permutation as analogies for the systems of financial exchange which precipitated the 2007-08 economic crash.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43195174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time, Attention and the Gift in the Work of Thomas A. Clark","authors":"A. Roberts","doi":"10.16995/BIP.766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.766","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers Thomas A. Clark’s critical stance towards modernity embodied in: (a) the presentation of time in his work; (b) the specific ways in which it values forms of aesthetic attention; (c) its treatment of the theme of the gift. It argues that, while his poetry doesn’t engage in direct polemic, nor focus on overtly political themes, its ecopoetic underpinnings and aesthetic values have ethical and political force. It is suggested that the invocation of specific forms of attention in Clark’s work resists the quantification of human experience; that its reimagining of time critiques the discourses of instrumental efficiency; and that its celebration of the gift as a form of relation seeks to hold at bay the commodification of aesthetic values. Time and attention are interpreted here via Deleuze’s philosophy of time, expounded in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense; in particular the distinction between ‘generality’ and ‘repetition’ and the three syntheses of time. Art’s critical function is seen in terms of Adorno’s concept of the artwork as the ‘social antithesis of society’. T.J. Clark’s study of Poussin, which reinserts the temporality of viewing artworks into the interpretation of visual art, is considered as a model for aesthetic attention; the elements of pastoral and the theme of mortality in Poussin’s landscape painting parallels aspects of Thomas A. Clark’s work.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41888162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"a common idiom ... call it a place","authors":"T. Jones","doi":"10.16995/BIP.733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.733","url":null,"abstract":"Building on recent studies of the relationship between visual poetries and eco-poetics, this essay argues that language conceived of as systematic is an important consideration in the work of Thomas A. Clark. Beginning with readings of some of his meta-poetical work from the early 1970s, the essay suggests that the overt interest in poetic language as a system analogous to an ecosystem continues into Clark’s later writing, though in a less overt, more ephemeralized manner. The essay explores ways in which Clark conceives of poetry as anti-entropic activity in a language system.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67481042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Attention: Thomas A. Clark and Simone Weil","authors":"Simone Kotva","doi":"10.16995/BIP.732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/BIP.732","url":null,"abstract":"This essay studies the connection between attention and redemption in the poetry of Thomas A. Clark. It discusses the possibility of using Simone Weil’s religious philosophy to interpret Clark’s understanding of attention as ‘waiting’. It argues that while there are affinities between Clark and Weil, Clark’s poetic practice also reveals a resistance to the ascetic extremes which attention assumes in Weil’s philosophy. To think through the difference between attention as method and style, the essay then draws on the failures of Descartes’ Meditations in order to argue that only a practical, that is to say, stylistic, engagement with attention will allow for the radical attention that Weil sought but could not achieve.","PeriodicalId":40210,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47118220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}