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'Goblinlike, Fantastic: Little People and Deep Time at the Fin De Siècle
ORBIT-OnlineRepository ofBirkbeckInstitutionalTheses Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output ’Goblinlike, fantastic: little people and deep time at the fin de siècle https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40443/ Version: Full Version Citation: Fergus, Emily (2019) ’Goblinlike, fantastic: little people and deep time at the fin de siècle. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through ORBIT is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email ‘Goblinlike, Fantastic’: Little People and Deep Time at the Fin De Siècle Emily Fergus Submitted for MPhil Degree 2019 Birkbeck, University of London 2 I, Emily Fergus, confirm that all the work contained within this thesis is entirely my own. ___________________________________________________ 3 Abstract This thesis offers a new reading of how little people were presented in both fiction and non-fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. After the ‘discovery’ of African pygmies in the 1860s, little people became a powerful way of imaginatively connecting to an inconceivably distant past, and the place of humans within it. Little people in fin de siècle narratives have been commonly interpreted as atavistic, stunted warnings of biological reversion. I suggest that there are other readings available: by deploying two nineteenth-century anthropological theories – E. B. Tylor’s doctrine of ‘survivals’, and euhemerism, a model proposing that the mythology surrounding fairies was based on the existence of real ‘little people’ – they can also be read as positive symbols of the tenacity of the human spirit, and as offering access to a sacred, spiritual, or magic, world. -
'I Should Want Nothing More': Edward Thomas and Simplicity
Journal of the British Academy, 7, 89–121. DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/007.089 Posted 4 November 2019. © The British Academy 2019 ‘I should want nothing more’: Edward Thomas and simplicity Chatterton Lecture on Poetry read 1 November 2018 GUY CUTHBERTSON Abstract: In the years before the First World War, the ‘Simple Life’ became somewhat fashionable, and Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was one of those Edwardians who were attracted to simplicity, both as a way of life and as a way of writing. As a book reviewer and biographer, he greatly admired simplicity in literature (as seen in, among others, William Cobbett, W. H. Davies, J. M. Synge and Robert Frost). His prose moved towards plainness, and his poetry is beautifully simple. This simplicity has been problematic, however. His poetry is unsuited to the decoding and exegesis (which might be suited to Modernism) that universities seek to conduct. Academics studying his poetry have allowed themselves to believe that they have found complexity, hidden beneath superficial simplicity, whereas in fact Thomas is a poet of genuine bareness, clear-as-glass honesty, magical brevity and childlike simplicity. His simplicity has been popular, and seems to suit some 21st-century fashions. Keywords: the Simple Life, simplicity, complexity, Edwardians, universities, First World War, Modernism, Robert Frost, William Cobbett, J. M. Synge In the decade or so before the First World War, simplicity became somewhat fashionable—indeed it was a religion for some. This craze is captured rather wonderfully in the Edwardian hit musical The Arcadians (1909), where the central character is given the name ‘Simplicitas’, idyllic Arcady is recreated in London at a successful new health food restaurant and men are ‘keen as a knife / On the simple life’.1 Although some might want it otherwise, Edward Thomas was part of this atmos- phere. -
Dionne Brand's Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship
Dionne Brand’s Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship Diana Brydon “I say this big world is the story, I don’t have any other” (Inventory 84) Rosi Braidotti suggests that “The human has been subsumed in global relations of intimacy, complicity and proximity with forces of the inhuman and post-human kind: scientific, industrial and military complexes, global communication networks, processes of commodification and exchange on a global scale” (264). She argues further that it is the task of critical theory to track the “fluctuations“ of this new disorder (264). In this paper I ask what tracking these fluctuations involves, for the poet Dionne Brand who sets herself this task in her long poem, Inventory, and for the critic who reads her work fully attentive to the historical legacies of humanism and their entanglements with the humanities and the humanitarian.1 The CFP for this special issue asks two related questions that I pursue here: “what good is the study of literature?” and “how does the turn to ethics position literary criticism in relation to politics?” It is not possible to answer these questions definitively. In this paper, I follow Brand’s lead into registering the visceral force of the kinds of global intimacies enumerated by Braidotti in order to ask what these practices imply for the political projects of citizenship and community in contemporary times. I argue that to fully grasp the implications of how Brand’s poetry engages and is engaged in these emerging global complicities, critics need to attend to the dynamics of the experiential dimensions of its affect as well as its explicit meaning.2 “On Poetry,” the last essay in Dionne Brand’s Bread Out of Stone, concludes: “Poetry is here, just here. -
LOCATING the IDEAL HOMELAND TN the LITERATURE of EDWIDGE DANTICAT by JULIANE OKOT BITEK B.F.A., the University of British Columb
LOCATING THE IDEAL HOMELAND TN THE LITERATURE OF EDWIDGE DANTICAT by JULIANE OKOT BITEK B.F.A., The University of British Columbia, 1995 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULIFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) May2009 © Juliane Okot Bitek, 2009 ABSTRACT Edwidge Danticat, who has lived most of her life in the United States, retains a strong link with Haiti and primarily writes about the Haitian experience inside and outside the country. For Danticat, the ‘ideal homeland’ is a psychic space where she can be Haitian, American, and belong to both countries. Danticat’s aspiration and position as one who can make claim to both Haiti and the United States somewhat supports Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a fluid entity and an identity that is becoming and is, not one that is static and was. However, Danticat locates her ‘ideal homeland’ within the Haitian Dyaspora, as a social construct that includes all the people of the Haitian descent in the diaspora, whatever their countries of citizenship. This ideal homeland is an emotional and literary space for continued expression and creation of Haitian identity, history and culture. It is not a geographical space and as such, requires that membership in it engage through text. This paper investigates ways in which Danticat expresses the ideal homeland in her fiction and nonfiction works. I use Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, Edward Soja and Judith Lewis Herman among others, as theorists to discover this ideal homeland in order to show that Danticat, like many diasporic writers, is actively engaged in locating for themselves where they can engage in their work as they create new communities and take charge of how they tell their stories and how they identify themselves. -
Creole Modernism
ANKHI MUKHERJEE Creole Modernism As affirmations of the modern go, few can match the high spirits of Susan Stanford Friedman’s invitation to formulate a “planetary epistemology” of modernist studies. As she explains in a footnote, Friedman uses the term “planetarity” in a different sense than Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Death of a Discipline, where the latter proposes that “if we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us.”1 If Spivak’s planet-thought is a “utopian gesture of resistance against globalization as the geohistorical and economic domination of the Global South,” Friedman’s own use of the term ‘planetarity’ is epistemological, implying “a consciousness of the earth as planet, not restricted to geopolitical formations and potentially encompassing the non-human as well as the human.”2 Friedman’s planetary epistemology needs the playground of “modernism/modernity,” the slash denoting a simultaneous separation and connection, “the paradox of all borders,” which she considers to be richly generative (475). For modernism is not simply outside or after modernity, a belated reaction to the shock of it. It is contained within modernity (or particular modernities) as its aesthetic domain, and interacts with other domains, commercial, technological, societal, and governmental. It follows that “Every modernity has its distinctive modernism” (475). Pluralizing the key terms to engage with the polylogue of languages and cultures issuing from forms of modernism/modernity everywhere, Friedman’s invocation of this transformational (planetary) model of cultural circulation opens up possibilities for modernist studies to venture fearlessly outside the Anglo-American field and into “elsewhere” places that constitute modernism’s Other: the colonies and ex- colonies of South Asia and the Caribbean, the American South, and the Diaspora. -
Thresholds in the Prose Fiction of Walter De La Mare
THRESHOLDS IN THE PROSE FICTION OF WALTER DE LA MARE by JOANNA MARY WESTON B.A., University of British Columbia, 1967 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA June, 1969 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and Study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by his representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada ABSTRACT Walter de la Mare has always been known as a writer of fantasy and supernatural fiction. It is proposed here that he is, in fact, concerned with exploration of the conscious and unconscious selves. His exploration is more philosophical than psychological in that he makes no use of Freudian formulas. He follows rather the intuitive approach of Jung but uses the media of fiction and, thereby, imagery, to show the possibilities of man's infinite mind. He uses images of doors, windows, water and mirrors to show how the conscious and unconscious selves, the real and astral selves, are divided by lack of understanding, by refusal to accept the other, and by total denial of one another. -
Kamau Brathwaite's Born to Slow Horses And
THE GRIFFIN TRUST For Excellence In Poetry Trustees: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Margaret Atwood KAMAU BRATHWAITE’S BORN TO SLOW HORSES Carolyn Forché AND Scott Griffin SYLVIA LEGRIS’ NERVE SQUALL Robert Hass WIN THE 2006 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE Michael Ondaatje Robin Robertson Toronto, ON (June 1, 2006) – Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Legris are the International and Canadian winners of the 6th annual Griffin Poetry Prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry David Young Prize, the richest prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the two winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry, including translations, published in English in 2005, and submitted from anywhere in the world. The awards event was hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize. Simon Armitage, renowned poet, author and playwright assumed the role of Master of Ceremonies. Judges Lisa Robertson and Eliot Weinberger announced the International and Canadian winners for 2006. More than 400 guests celebrated the awards, including former Governor-General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, acclaimed Canadian actors Albert Schultz and Sarah Polley, Senator Jerry Grafstein and his wife Carol, among others. In addition, poets, publishers and other literary luminaries attended the celebration. The evening’s theme was Shangri-La and featured a silk route marketplace replete with banners of fuschia, purple and gold. Hundreds of pigmy orchids and butterflies in a dizzying array of colours adorned the room. The event, which took place at The Stone Distillery in Toronto, offered up a menu of decidedly Asian fusion cuisine. Appetizers included mango and Thai basil sushi rolls, deep-fried plantain, sweet corn tamales, crab cakes on a bed of remoulade, and a sweet potato and jicama salad. -
Herbert Howells' a Garland for De La Mare Twelve Songs for Voice
BLOZAN, BENJAMIN C., D.M.A. Herbert Howells’ A Garland for de la Mare Twelve Songs for Voice and Piano: Contexts for Performance (2013) Directed by Dr. James Douglass. 166 pp. Because British composer Herbert Howells (1892-1983) decided in mid-career to concentrate his creative energies upon Anglican liturgical music, his many notable contributions to secular genres are often overlooked. This is certainly the case for A Garland for de la Mare, a collection of twelve songs for voice and piano on poems by Howells’ longtime friend Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), a work nearly unknown in the United States. Its posthumous publication in 1995 also contributed to its failure to enter the art song canon. The neglect suffered by this commemorative work—held in high esteem by all writers who have assessed it—is unfortunate and unwarranted. Howells and de la Mare are both ubiquitously regarded as master craftsmen in their respective disciplines. Additionally, they share a remarkable compatibility between musical and poetic languages which is vividly highlighted in the songs in Garland. The set gains additional significance by containing the only songs Howells worked on past 1934. Though early versions of several of the songs first appeared in 1919, the bulk of Howells’ effort occurred much later in the mid-50s (surrounding de la Mare’s death) and in the years leading up to the centenary of the poet’s birth in 1973. As such, they display a confidence and economy indicative of a composer fully in possession of his creative voice. This study aims to combat Garland’s obscurity by inspiring interest in informed performances of the songs therein. -
MAY 1913 One Shilling Net the BLUE R E V I E W LITERATURE DRAMA ART MUSIC
Volume I Number I MAY 1913 One Shilling Net THE BLUE R E V I E W LITERATURE DRAMA ART MUSIC Some Contributors to this Number : MAX BEERBOHM GILBERT GANNAN W. H. DAVIES WALTER DE LA MARE W. L. GEORGE W. W. GIBSON D. H. LAWRENCE KATHERINE MANSFIELD FRANK SWINNERTON HUGH WALPOLE NORMAN WILKINSON MARTIN SEGKER PUBLISHER NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI AND PRINTED LINENS Hchintzes and cretonnes in new and amusing de signs by modern artists. Gaily coloured & quaintly patterned. To be seen at "The Sign of the Fourposter" HEAL AND SON 196 etc. Tottenham Court Rd. W. MAY CONTENTS Page A Study in Dubiety By Max Beerbohm Frontispiece The Song of the Mad Prince By Walter de la Mare 1 The Vixen By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 3 To His Friend to try Another Tavern By Oliver Gogarty 4 The Soiled Rose By D. H. Lawrence 6 The Beggar's Hunt By W. H. Davies 24 The Esperanto of Art By W. L. George 28 Epilogue : Pension Seguin By Katherine Mansfield 37 The Theatre By Gilbert Cannan 43 Fiction By Hugh Walpole 46 COMPTON MACKENZIE'S Famous Novel CARNIVAL A new and cheaper edition of one of the most successful novels of recent years. Cover design by Norman Wilkinson. Ask for it at any bookstall. One shilling net. Postage 3d. THIRTY-FIFTH THOUSAND THE NEWEST POETRY WILLIAM GERARD-PIERS GAVE- F. E. WALROND-THE GODS OF STON : A PRINCE'S FAVOURITE. AFRICA AND OTHER POEMS. A Drama. By W. GERARD. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net. Royal 16mo. 1Is. 6d. -
The Listeners POEM TEXT SUMMARY
Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com The Listeners POEM TEXT SUMMARY An unnamed figure, the rT aveller, knocks on the door of a house 1 ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, in the moonlight and asks if there is anyone inside. The 2 Knocking on the moonlit door; Traveller's horse grazes in the quiet forest while the Traveller 3 And his horse in the silence champed the grasses waits for a response. A bird flies out of a small tower on the 4 Of the forest’s ferny floor: house and over the Traveller's head. The Traveller knocks again, 5 And a bird flew up out of the turret, more forcefully, and repeats his question. No one comes down from the house to meet him, however. No one even leans out of 6 Above the Traveller’s head: the window, the sill of which is covered in leaves, to look at him. 7 And he smote upon the door again a second time; He stands in place, puzzled by the lack of an answer. 8 ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said. Inside the house is a group of ghostly beings. These "listeners" 9 But no one descended to the Traveller; stand in the moonlight as they listen to the human voice coming 10 No head from the leaf-fringed sill from outside. The ghostly beings crowd around the staircase, 11 Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, onto which moonlight streaks, as the quiet atmosphere in the 12 Where he stood perplexed and still. -
James Kelman's Interview with John La Rose
The full interview with John La Rose1 More than twenty five years ago I was asked to interview John La Rose for the arts and culture journal Variant 19. Malcolm Dickson was then editor. The interview took place in John’s house in Finsbury Park. Malcolm organized the recording apparatus and also jumped about taking photographs. I had known John for a few years by then and had been in his company quite often; my only plan, therefore, was to start talking. He was a very strong and experienced orator, and with a tremendous breadth of knowledge. He was used to the toughest forms of meetings, those that began in confrontation and moved towards negotiation. I knew he would go where he thought necessary and return near enough to the starting point: my job was to resist interfering. The general population are unaware of the depth and complexity of the struggle of black people and other minorities in the United Kingdom. This transcription of a talk by John La Rose allows an insight into that and of the richness of the Caribbean side of its social and intellectual tradition. Insight here is gained into the inseparable nature of the culture and the political. There is also the matter of John's own centrality to some of the more crucial political interventions in his time. It should be a matter of concern how easily such a figure can be airbrushed from the political and cultural history of the UK, and the fundamental role played by John La Rose, his peers and contemporaries. -
Poetics, Time and Black Experimental Writing
After the End of the World: Poetics, Time and Black Experimental Writing by Anthony Reed This thesis/dissertation document has been electronically approved by the following individuals: Farred,Grant Aubrey (Chairperson) Maxwell,Barry Hamilton (Minor Member) Villarejo,Amy (Minor Member) Culler,Jonathan Dwight (Additional Member) AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD: POETICS, TIME, AND BLACK EXPERIMENTAL WRITING A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Anthony Reed August 2010 © 2010 Anthony Reed AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD: POETICS, TIME, AND BLACK EXPERIMENTAL WRITING Anthony Reed, Ph. D. Cornell University 2010 "After the End of the World" is a study of the poetics of experimental writing, focusing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Nathaniel Mackey, Suzan-Lori Parks and Kamau Brathwaite. By thinking form as a locus of political and conceptual contestation and transformation, I seek methods for conceiving politics in literature apart from its references or the identities of authors and characters. Writing in different genres, and with different political investments, each of these authors offers resources for re-imagining community as a project, for thinking the constitution of the self and political subject, and for conceiving politics and literary studies globally. Using a broad conception of literary experimentation as writing that departs from conventional forms and conventional thinking, I emphasize time of reading, among other times. Arguing that conceptions of time tend to be at the heart of political concerns throughout the sites of the African diaspora, this project challenges those notions of black writing that rest on the binary or oppression/resistance.