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Durham E-Theses Durham E-Theses Aective Mapping: Voice, Space, and Contemporary British Lyric Poetry YEUNG, HEATHER,HEI-TAI How to cite: YEUNG, HEATHER,HEI-TAI (2011) Aective Mapping: Voice, Space, and Contemporary British Lyric Poetry, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/929/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Heather H-T. Yeung 1 ABSTRACT Heather Hei-Tai Yeung Affective Mapping: Voice, Space, and Contemporary British Lyric Poetry This thesis investigates the manner in which an understanding of the spatial nature of the contemporary lyric poem (broadly reducible to the poem as and the poem of space) combines with voicing and affect in the act of reading poetry to create a third way in which space operates in the lyric: the ‘vocalic space’ of the voiced lyric poem. Together with the poem as and of space, the vocalic space of the contemporary lyric poem gives way to an enunciating I and eye with which we, as reader, identify and which we voice, in a process of ‘affective mapping’. Voice, and the spaces the I/eye of the contemporary lyric poem visualises and articulates, is affective, contested, and multiple. Visual and vocalic identification with the voice of the poem through this free, fragmented, or multiple, I/eye leads us to understand more fully the poem on its own terms. The chapters of this thesis offer readings of John Montague’s The Rough Field, Thomas Kinsella’s A Technical Supplement, Kathleen Jamie’s This Weird Estate, and Alice Oswald’s Dart, as well as the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Thom Gunn and Mimi Khalvati, in order to investigate the implication of this thesis on the way we read, voice, and analyse contemporary British lyric poetry. The work of each poet offers different perspectives on perception, place, and space, and different engagements with the voiced and textual spaces of poetry, from the more formal poetics of Heaney, Jamie, and Gunn, to the experiments with text and image of Montague, Kinsella, and Jamie, the use of different languages by Montague, Jamie, and Khalvati, and the manipulation of the space of the page and angle of poetic vision and voice by Montague, Khalvati, and Oswald. The chapters work almost chronologically from The Rough Field (1972) to Dart (2002) with an emphasis on the importance of space, voice, and affect to the readings of the poems and poets in question. Heather H-T. Yeung 2 Affective Mapping Voice, Space, and Contemporary British Lyric Poetry Heather Hei-Tai Yeung PhD Thesis Submitted for Examination Department of English Studies University of Durham 2011 Heather H-T. Yeung 3 CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6 STATEMENT OF COPYRIGHT 7 DEDICATION 8 AFFECTIVE MAPPING: VOICE, SPACE AND CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LYRIC POETRY 9 INTRODUCTION Mapping I: The Poem as and of Space 10 Mapping II: Vocalic Space and Affective Engagement 20 CHAPTER I: JOHN MONTAGUE Mapping a/new Ireland: The Rough Field 37 CHAPTER II: THOMAS KINSELLA ‘There will be no waste’: Economies of Poetic Production 75 A Technical Supplement 86 CHAPTER III: KATHLEEN JAMIE Body-Space 105 CHAPTER IV: SEAMUS HEANEY Power and Movement: the Bog Poems 123 CHAPTER V: THOM GUNN Gendered Space, Poetic (Dis)place 144 Heather H-T. Yeung 4 CHAPTER VI: MIMI KHALVATI Intimate Perception 173 CHAPTER VII: ALICE OSWALD Of Passage and Process: Dart 202 AFTERWORD D’autres mappemondes 231 APPENDICES I: Stéphane Mallarmé (from Un Coup de Dés) 243 II: Bob Cobbing ‘Square Poem’ 244 III: Ian Hamilton Finlay ‘Lochan Eck Garden’ & ‘Sea Poppy II’ 245 IV: John Montague (from The Rough Field) 246 V: Laocoon (Vatican & Diderot) 248 VI: Thomas Kinsella (from A Technical Supplement) 251 VII: Kathleen Jamie (from This Weird Estate) 252 VIII: Pablo Reinoso ‘La Parole’ 253 IX: Jen Hadfield ‘Burra Grace’ 254 LIST OF WORKS CITED 255 Heather H-T. Yeung 5 ABBREVIATIONS In chapter order: JMCP: John Montague, Collected Poems (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 2003) TKBU: Thomas Kinsella, Belief and Unbelief (Dublin: Peppercanister, 2009) TKCP: Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001) TKME: Thomas Kinsella, Marginal Economy (Dublin: Peppercanister, 2006) TKRP: Thomas Kinsella, Readings in Poetry (Dublin: Peppercanister, 2006) KJTH: Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House (London: Picador, 2004) KJWE: Kathleen Jamie, This Weird Estate (Edinburgh: Scotland and Medicine, 2007) SHDC: Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006) SHHC: Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (London: Faber, 2010) SHOG: Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Collected Poems 1966-1996 (London: Faber, 1998) TGBC: Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000) TGCP: Thom Gunn, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1993) MKEL: Mimi Khalvati, Entries on Light (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) MKMF: Mimi Khalvati, The Meanest Flower (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007) MKSP: Mimi Khalvati, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2000) AOD: Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber, 2002) Heather H-T. Yeung 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS a common idiom carries through complex articulations call it a place it was not your intention to bring all your resources here but you do Thomas A. Clark1 Firstly, I would like to thank the University of Durham and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, without whose support this work would not have been possible. Secondly, to Gareth Reeves for his indispensable guidance and support over the last four years. Gareth Reeves (again!), Stephen Regan, Michael O’Neill, and Tim Clark, for steering me to this path and guiding me down it. Thirdly, to Marc Botha, my co-conspirator, and to Amanda Taylor, Will Viney, Michael Davidson, Tim Brennan, Ollie Taylor, and Anna Camilleri for your encouragement, moral support, time spent with my work, and for being the soundest of sounding boards for various readings, ideas, and theoretical freewheelings. Finally, to all those friends and family who have provided love and support over the last four years, and who have occasionally dragged me away from the world of books into the world. Aoife Bharucha, Tom Coker, Victoria Mast, Eleanor Beeson, Duncan Proctor, and Rebecca Stuart-Lee: thank you! 1 Thomas A. Clark, The Hundred Thousand Places (Manchester: Carcanet, 2009), 69. Heather H-T. Yeung 7 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Heather H-T. Yeung 8 In memoriam Alan Skene Virtutis Regia Merces Heather H-T. Yeung 9 Affective Mapping: Voice, Space, and Contemporary British Lyric Poetry INTRODUCTION Nous n’allons plus vers un univers, mais vers des multiplicités de mondes possibles. Soit donc à les dessiner.2 Mapping is the locus of the project: the descriptive and generative tool that is capable of producing and accommodating together the many and different possible unfoldings of the project(s) […]. Mapping is always an incomplete and insufficient description and its incompleteness remains open to the condensation of multiple possibilities.3 The first section of this introduction will be primarily concerned to investigate the different spatial natures of the poem: broadly reducible to the poem as and the poem of space. The second section will be concerned with voicing and affect in terms of the act of reading poetry: I posit the ‘vocalic space’ of the voiced lyric poem as a third way in which space operates in the poem. Together with the poem as and of space, the vocalic space of the contemporary lyric poem gives way to an enunciating I (vocal utterance and implied speaker’s point of view or a personal or psychological point of view) and eye (vocalic landscape and mimetic constructions of landscape, theme, and image in the space of the poem) with which we, as reader, identify and which we voice. The I/eye is at once the poem and our reading of the poem, the guiding principle by which we navigate our poetic experience. This I/eye can be stable and uncontested, but is more often than not multiple, diverse, and contested in location, visualisation, and enunciation. An increased awareness of space in and of poetry may aid us, as a reader, to voice, engage with, and to map, the poem on its own terms. 2 Michel Serres, Atlas (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 276. 3 Theresa Stoppani, ‘Mapping: The Locus of the Project’, Angelaki 9.2 (2004), 282. Heather H-T. Yeung 10 Mapping I: the Poem As and Of Space L’époque actuelle serait peut-être l’époque de l’espace.4 In a reading of Walter Ong’s The Presence of the Word, Louis Sass discovers that ‘the written word could […] be said to freeze thought, by organising it and preserving it in a visual space; it thereby offers a new image of an independent mental universe […]. The commitment of sound to space that is inherent in alphabetical writing had a noticeable effect on our sense of the world’.5 The written, silently read, word promotes an engagement with literature that is in many ways interior, or withdrawn, where the dominant sensory modality is vision rather than noise or odour.6 For Sass, this withdrawal and subsequent aesthetic sensory deprivation is related to the schizoid tendencies he perceives as an inherent part of High Modernist literature and art.
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