Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Series Editor David Herd University of Kent Canterbury, UK Founded by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and continued by David Herd, Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning feld of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes: social loca- tion in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Since its inception, the series has been distinguished by its tilt toward experimental work – intellectually, politically, aesthetically. It has consistently published work on Anglophone poetry in the broadest sense and has featured critical work studying literatures of the UK, of the US, of Canada, and Australia, as well as eclectic mixes of work from other social and poetic communities. As poetry and poetics form a crucial response to contemporary social and political conditions, under David Herd’s editorship the series will continue to broaden understanding of the feld and its signifcance.

Editorial Board Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Temple University Vincent Broqua, Université Paris 8 Olivier Brossard, Université Paris-Est Steve Collis, Simon Fraser University Jacob Edmond, University of Otago Stephen Fredman, Notre Dame University Fiona Green, University of Cambridge Abigail Lang, Université Paris Diderot Will Montgomery, Royal Holloway University of London Miriam Nichols, University of the Fraser Valley Redell Olsen, Royal Holloway University of London Sandeep Parmar, University of Liverpool Adam Piette, University of Sheffeld Nisha Ramayya, Queen Mary University of London Brian Reed, University of Washington Ann Vickery, Deakin University Carol Watts, University of Sussex

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14799 Jo Lindsay Walton · Ed Luker Editors Poetry and Work

Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry Editors Jo Lindsay Walton Ed Luker Bath Spa University University of Surrey Bath, UK Guildford, UK

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics ISBN 978-3-030-26124-5 ISBN 978-3-030-26125-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26125-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover credit: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

Jo Lindsay Walton acknowledges the support of the Institute of the Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, for part of the time spent preparing this collection. Both Jo and Ed would like to thank our families and friends, as also to express our gratitude to Rachel Blau Duplessis, Robert Hampson, Rodrigo Toscano, Juliana Spahr, Anne Boyer, Samantha Walton, Lila Matsumoto, Nat Raha, Eleanor Careless, Sara Crangle, David Herd, Surya Sekaran, Preetha Kuttiappan, and Allie Troyanos for their contributions and enthusiasm, and to Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave for her patience, encouragement, and scrupulousness. And we’d both like to give special thanks to Ian Davidson for all his support and guidance.

v Praise for Poetry and Work

“This volume represents an outstanding contribution to current debates in contemporary poetry. It examines the poetry of work and the work that poetry does in a highly original, theoretically sophisticated and ana- lytically nuanced manner. The essays engage with work and labour across a range of poetries and constituencies and provide a timely address to the place of work in the context of a post-work future and the privatised dig- ital market. It is likely to be seen as a major, paradigm-shifting work in relation to contemporary poetry.” —Robert Hampson, Professor of English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and author of Seaport (2008)

“To think poetry and work together is to question poetry’s standing both against and as work, to hypothesize what poetry itself might be in the world of those who wish to end all we have hitherto known as labor. The essays in this collection engage fearlessly with the permutations, consequences and destructive capacities of this questioning. They repre- sent a new generation—perhaps, we hope, the last generation—of those who will even speak the words poetry and work as if they were commen- surate. That the book speaks to such a hope is the highest possible form of recommendation.” —Anne Boyer, Associate Professor, Kansas City Art Institute, USA, and author of A Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018) and Garments Against Women (2015)

vii viii PRAISE FOR POETRY AND WORK

“In a time when there is virtually no subjectivity that hasn’t found its ‘voice,’ no ‘topic’ that hasn’t been duly treated, no ‘issue’ that’s not been confronted, the concept and reality of work in poetics remains elusive at best; at worst, a near censorship of it reigns. But upon close examination, it becomes clear that overtly fushing out the phenome- non of work from aesthetic acts, embarrasses aesthetic discourse in general. Idealism collapses unto materialism. And it is from this humbling and renewed state of awareness that we must begin. In this riveting new collection, the three intertwined aspects of work—the symbolic, the productive, and the distributive—are explored thoroughly. The essays themselves stand as authentic poetic acts. Cultural archeologists of the future might well regard this volume as an essential guide to the ever expanding horizon of that strange human productive activity we call poetry.” —Rodrigo Toscano, author of Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008) and Explosion Rocks Springfeld (2016)

“This collection of essays rigorously explores how capitalism, reproduc- tive labor, the falling rate of proft, and acts of working are represented in post-war poetry. Poets are unacknowledged day job workers of the cultural production world. A signifcant part of post-war poetry is written during time stolen on the day job or late in the evening, after a long shift. As such, poems are full of theoretical possibilities for understanding how work has shaped the aesthetics, the affnities, and the utopian claims of contemporary literature. This book stands as a committed investiga- tion into an array of affnities between the ordinary grounding of work and its utopian claims.” —Juliana Spahr, Professor of English, Mills college, USA, and author of That Winter the Wolf Came (2015) Contents

1 Introduction: Working Late 1 Jo Lindsay Walton and Ed Luker

Part I Essays

2 Show Your Workings: Other Forms of Labour in Recent Poetry 71 Peter Middleton

3 Bird-Song by Everyone, for Everyone: Poetry, Work, and Play in J. H. Prynne’s Prose 105 Lisa Jeschke

4 “The Stitching of Her Wake”: The Collaboration of Pamela Campion and Ian Hamilton Finlay 121 Lila Matsumoto

5 Basil Bunting and the Work of Poetry 139 Annabel Haynes

ix x CONTENTS

6 Art Takes All My Time: Work in the Poetry and Prison Writing of Anna Mendelssohn 165 Eleanor Careless

7 Queer Labour in Boston: The Work of John Wieners, Gay Liberation and Fag Rag 195 Nat Raha

8 Without the Text at Hand: Postcolonial Writing and the Work of Memorisation 245 Aimée Lê

9 Body Burdens: The Materiality of Work in Rita Wong’s Forage 263 Samantha Walton

10 “Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies 291 Lytton Smith

11 “What Gives Pause or Impetus”: The Double Bind of Labor in Rodrigo Toscano’s Poetics 309 Jose-Luis Moctezuma

12 Distributed and Entangled Posture in Catherine Wagner’s My New Job and Nervous Device 327 Holly Pester

Part II Refections

13 The Exploit: Affective Labor and Poetry at the University 355 Catherine Wagner CONTENTS xi

14 Floating On—If Not Up—Ward 371 Tyrone Williams

15 Extract from the Poetic Labor Project 375 Amber DiPietra

Index 381 Notes on Contributors

Eleanor Careless completed her AHRC-funded Ph.D. Serve Your Own Sentences: Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn at the University of Sussex in 2018. Her current research focuses on rep- resentations of imprisonment by women in the twentieth century. She is currently an Associate Tutor within the School of English at the University of Sussex. In 2016 she was the recipient of an AHRC International Placement Scheme research fellowship at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and in 2017 she was awarded a Literary Encyclopedia Travel Award which facilitated archival research at the Harry Ransom Centre in Austin, Texas. She won a British Association of Modernist Studies essay prize in 2018, and has publications forthcoming from Palgrave (2019), Modernist Cultures (2019) and College Literature (2020). She is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on Anna Mendelssohn for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Amber DiPietra has worked as a community practice artist, poet, performer, disability rights advocate, intimacy coach, and a certifed Sexological Bodyworker/Somatic Sex Educator. Since this piece was written in 2010, Amber DiPietra has left San Francisco and moved back to Florida due to health issues and increasing pain. Public transit as well as disability services and community are fairly non-existent in Florida, so she is now a sex worker and body worker, which is labor she can do from home. Her book Waveform (2011), in collaboration with Denise Leto, meditates on chronicity and foating. Her work has also been

xiii xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS anthologized in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011). Her frst solo performance art piece The Opposite of Evolution Dance Studio premiered at the Tampa Fringe Festival in 2018. You can fnd her at thebodypoetik.com. Annabel Haynes teaches poetry, modernism, creative writing and utopian fction at the University of Sussex, where she is a Teaching Fellow in Modern and Contemporary English. Her thesis, Making Beauty: Basil Bunting and the Work of Poetry (Durham University), adopted a new critical focus on the British modernist by investigating the consist- ent attention his poetry pays to different kinds of labor. Bunting’s ideas about alternative and ideal forms of creative work align with Annabel’s further interests in utopian work societies, and utopian and dysto- pian writing. She is working on a book on Bunting, as well as writing about utopian fction and Afrofuturism for the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More’s Utopia. She continues to write on Bunting and other poets writing in the modernist tradition, and recently con- sidered Bunting’s translocal connection to objectivist, and fellow folk-interested poet, Lorine Niedecker in a chapter for Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture, eds. Tara Stubbs and Doug Haynes (Routledge, 2017). Lisa Jeschke teaches at CAU Kiel and is a freelance translator. Both occupations are part-time. Publications include, with Adrian May (eds.), Matters of Time: Material Temporalities in Twentieth-Century French Culture (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), with Marina Vishmidt, “Work Breaks Us, We Break Work”, in 365 Days of Invisible Work, ed. domes- tic worker photographer network (Leipzig: spector books, 2017, n.p.) and, with Lucy Beynon, The Tragedy of Theresa May (Cambridge: Tipped Press, 2018). Aimée Lê is an Associate Member of the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. She received her Ph.D. from Royal Holloway, University of London, on the national question in twentieth-century American literature. With Fiona Chamness, she is the author of a book of poetry, Feral Citizens (Red Beard Press, 2011). Recent projects include an EP of (mis)translated Greek pop songs, Aliki in Saigon, through Greek queer label Fytini, and publications in Muzzle, Litmus Magazine, and The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Ed Luker has recently fnished a Ph.D. at Northumbria University on the politics of attention in the early poetry of J. H. Prynne and late modernism. He holds an M.A. in Critical Theory and a B.A. in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Sussex. He runs the RIVET. poetry series. He is the author of a handful of poetry collections, including Peak Return (2014), Headlost (2014), The Sea Together (2016), Compound Out The Fractured World (2017), and Heavy Waters (2019). Lila Matsumoto received her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on the Scottish-American transatlantic poetry connection as witnessed in the little magazines Migrant and Poor.Old.Tired.Horse. She currently lectures at the University of Nottingham. Her critical writing has been published in the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and Shearsman Review among other places. She co-edits the magazine Front Horse and her recent organizational work includes Modernist Art Writing/Writing Modernist Art; Outside-In/Inside-Out Festival of Outside and Subterranean Poetry, and an international symposium on artists’ books at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her frst collection of poetry Urn & Drum was published by Shearsman in 2018. She collaborates widely with musicians, artists, and other poets. Peter Middleton studied at Oxford, Sheffeld and SUNY Buffalo, and is currently a Professor of English at the University of Southampton. His books include Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015), Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (2005). With Nicky Marsh he edited Teaching Modernist Poetry (2010). His research interests include science and literature, modern and contemporary poetry, and auto- biographical non-fction. He has recently written essays on the role of analogy in literature and science studies, literary images of queer poetry communities, the history of science fction, the poetry of Peter Gizzi, and the frontier trope in late twentieth-century sciences. Peter’s poetry includes Aftermath (2003). Jose-Luis Moctezuma received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2018. His poetry and criticism have been published in Jacket2, Chicago Review, Big Bridge, MAKE Magazine, PALABRA, FlashPoint, Cerise Press, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Spring Tlaloc Seance, was published by Projective Industries in 2016, and his frst xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS full-length book of poems, Place-Discipline, was published in 2018. Place-Discipline was selected by Myung Mi Kim as the winner of the 2017 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Prize. He teaches at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. Holly Pester is a Lecturer in Poetry and Performance at University of Essex, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre. Between 2014 and 2016 she was an associate researcher at the Wellcome Collection’s Hub project, researching themes of rest and its opposites in neuroscience, social sciences and the arts. Her AHRC-funded doctoral research at Birkbeck, University of London led to a major AHRC Cultural Engagement Award in contemporary poetic research. Her current research seeks to develop innovative practice-led research methodologies in relation to feminist theory. Her book on gossip and anecdote as forms of archive enquiry was published by Book Works in 2015, and was developed through an Arts Council funded research at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College’s Special Collections. Other publications include book chapters in Memory in the Twenty-First Century: Critical Perspectives from Sciences and Arts and Humanities, ed. Sebastian Groes (London: Palgrave Macmillan and NESTA, 2015), and articles in Feminist Review (Vol. 115, Issue 1, 2017) and Women: A Cultural Review (Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2015). Nat Raha is a poet, scholar and queer/trans activist. She is complet- ing a Ph.D. thesis titled Queer Capital: Marxism in Queer Theory and Post-1950 Poetics at the University of Sussex. Her poetry includes the collections: Of Sirens, Body & Faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), Countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013), and Octet (Veer Books, 2010), alongside numerous pamphlets. Nat’s essay, “Transfeminine Brokeness, Radical Transfeminism,” appears in the South Atlantic Quarterly, and she is the co-editor of the Radical Transfeminism Zine. Lytton Smith is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Center for Integrative Learning at SUNY Geneseo, having received his Ph.D. and M.F.A. from Columbia University. The author of two collections of poetry from Nightboat Books, most recently While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed By It, his critical work on Craig Santos Perez and Peter Gizzi has appeared in Literary Geographies and In the Air: The Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP). He is working on projects that explore the interaction between citizenship and poetic acts. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Catherine Wagner is a Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she directs the Creative Writing Program and is a founding member and president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which advocates for university labor. Full- length collections of her poetry include Macular Hole (Fence Books, 2004), My New Job (Fence Books, 2009), Nervous Device (City Lights Books, 2012) and Of Course (Fence Books, forthcoming). Her writing has been published widely in journals and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 2014) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Editions, 2015). She has previously written on the subject of poetry and labor for the Anglophone poetics anthology Toward. Some. Air (Banff Centre Press, 2014) and Poetic Labor Project (July 2012). Jo Lindsay Walton completed his Ph.D. at Northumbria University in 2016, and since then has been working at Surrey, Bath Spa, Leicester, Edinburgh, UEA, and Sussex. He is co-editor of a special issue of ASLE- UKI’s Green Letters on crime fction and the environment (2018); a special issue of The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry on poetry and secrecy (2018); the poetry reviews journal Hix Eros (2013–); the British Science Fiction Association journal Vector (2018–); and the small poetry press Sad Press (2009–). Samantha Walton is a Reader in Modern British Literature at Bath Spa University. Her research explores the intersection of mental health and ecology. In 2018–2019, she was a Writing Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center, Munich, and in 2016 held an Environmental Humanities Research Fellowship at IASH, University of Edinburgh. Samantha was funded by the British Academy in 2015–2017 for the project Landscaping Change, and the AHRC through their ECR Leadership Fellowship scheme for the project Cultures of Nature and Wellbeing (2016–2018). She co-edits the ASLE-UKI journal, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism and the poetry publisher Sad Press. Her academic publications include Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (OUP, 2015) and The Living World: Nan Shepherd and Environmental Thought (Punctum, 2019). In 2018, she published her frst full length poetry collection, Self Heal, from Boiler House Press. xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Tyrone Williams is a Professor at Xavier University, Cincinnati, where he teaches literature and theory. He is the editor of African American Literature: Revised Edition (Salem Press, 2008) and has published widely in scholarly and literary journals. His full-length collections of poetry include c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), Howell (2011) and As Iz (2018). List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Ian Hamilton-Finlay, with Richard Demarco, The Little Seamstress (1970) (©Tate, London 2018. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay) 126 Fig. 4.2 Ian Hamilton-Finlay, with Pamela Campion, Terra/Mare (1973) (©Tate, London 2018. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay) 127 Fig. 4.3 Ian Hamilton Finlay, with Pamela Campion, Homage to Kandinsky (1973) Reproduced in the Scottish Art Council exhibition catalogue “Inscape”, 1976 (By courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art Archive and the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay) 129 Fig. 6.1 Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art, p. 7 (Courtesy of the Anna Mendelssohn Estate) 180

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