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Touching the Untouchable: the Language of Touch in the Poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts

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Touching the Untouchable: the Language of Touch in the Poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts TOUCHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: THE LANGUAGE OF TOUCH IN THE POETRY OF MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS MARTIN ULRICH KRATZ PhD 2016 TOUCHING THE UNTOUCHABLE: THE LANGUAGE OF TOUCH IN THE POETRY OF MICHAEL SYMMONS ROBERTS MARTIN ULRICH KRATZ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 ABSTRACT 4 NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS 5 INTRODUCTION 7 Methodology: The Language of Touch 12 Critical Discourse on the Poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts 25 Chapter Breakdown 35 CHAPTER 1: FIGURING THE TOUCHABLE AND THE UNTOUCHABLE 42 Shell and Spark: Tactile Realism and Symbolism in Incarnational Poetics 48 Machine and Ghost: Negotiating Cartesian Dualism in Drysalter (2013) 73 Body and Soul: Writing into the Gaps Between the Corporeal and Spiritual 101 CHAPTER 2: EXPOSING THE LIMITS AND EDGES OF TOUCH 122 Twenty-first-Century Metaphysical Poetry: At the Limit of the Conceit 125 Between Spaces: Blurring Edges in ‘Edgelands’ 155 1 CHAPTER 3: ‘HOW TO TOUCH UPON THE UNTOUCHABLE’ — FOUR CASE STUDIES 173 ‘Voice-prints’: Lyric Touch in ‘Last Words’ (2002) 177 Caring: Touching the Dead and the Corpse Poem in Corpus (2003) 200 Contamination: Cold War Poetics in Burning Babylon (2001) 218 ‘Metaxu’: Simone Weil’s Touch in Soft Keys (1993) 251 CONCLUSION 274 BIBLIOGRAPHY 285 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the AHRC for the generous studentship that allowed me to complete this project; my supervisors Angelica Michelis and Nikolai Duffy for their patience, forbearing and support over the past three years; everyone at the Graduate School and the Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science who has been involved with the project from the interview stage to its submission; and Deborah Bown, because she knows everything and helps everyone. A particular thanks goes to all my fellow research students in room 117: Suaad Albani, Leda Channer, Caroline Baylis-Green, Charlene Crossley, Jonathan Greenaway, Sam McCormick, Catherine McDermott, Eileen Pollard, Hanan Ben Nafa, and Fariha Tajammal. I would also like to thank my two proofreaders, my sister Johanna and my sister-in- law Liz, for taking the time to help; and everyone who supported us with childcare — especially mum and dad who made the trip up from London so often, despite having enough going on in their own lives. Thank you. Finally, I want to thank Molly for her patience, support and love, and my daughter Ada for keeping me grounded. I could not have done this without you. There. It’s done. I’m back. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis analyses the language of touch in the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts. A single-author study, it uses key tropes in Roberts’s poetry (shell/spark, ghost/machine, body/soul) as points of engagement with the wider concerns of contemporary poetry discourse. The mechanics of contact are explored through the investigation of the limit of the conceit and the trope of the ‘edgelands’. The thesis concludes with four case studies in which touchable touches on untouchable in Roberts’s work (‘voice-print’, care, contamination, ‘metaxu’). The tactile textual analysis of Roberts’s poetry is read in relation to the writings on touch of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida in order to explore the various aspects in which touch is meaningful as a critical and poetical concept. Specifically, this thesis draws on their writings to demonstrate the insistence on separation as a condition of contact in Roberts’s poetry, an emphasis which allows Roberts to create alternatives to traditional, Cartesian binaries of the touchable and untouchable. Furthermore, the language of touch draws attention to the shared concerns in Roberts’s poetry and different poetic traditions, in particular Metaphysical poetry and Modernism. A central concern of this thesis is the extent to which Roberts’s poetry represents a metaphysical poetry of the twenty-first century. This thesis contributes to the existing discourse on Roberts’s writing, by extending and critiquing the engagement with his work to date. This thesis ultimately suggests that Roberts is a model poet of the contemporary period for the way his poetry negotiates contemporary events and social developments, and for the way his underlying poetics resonate with contemporary thinking in other disciplines such as theology and philosophy. 4 NOTES AND ABBREVIATIONS Roberts’s poetry is noteworthy for what I have called homonymic titling, that is the use of identical titles for different poems. For the sake of clarity, I have followed the example of PN Review 199, in which homonymically titled poems from the collection Drysalter have been numbered.1 As a consequence, homonymically titled poems, which are not numbered in the collections they are published in, are differentiated by roman numerals in brackets in this thesis, e.g. ‘Mapping the Genome (I)’, ‘Mapping the Genome (II)’. Poem titles which appear as part of a numbered sequence in their collections, also have roman numerals, but without brackets, e.g. ‘Last Words – I’, ‘Last Words – II’. Throughout this thesis, I will differentiate between the words Metaphysical and metaphysical, a rule taken from David Reid who capitalizes Metaphysical to refer to the movement of poetry in the seventeenth century, and the lower case when using it in any other sense, such as with regard to metaphysical philosophy.2 References to the Oxford English Dictionary will appear as the abbreviation OED. The online version of the OED was used for this thesis http://www.oed.com/. All entries were verified and accessed on the 2 September 2015. 1 Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Eight Poems’, PN Review, 199 (2011), pp. 50-51. 2 David Reid, The Metaphysical Poets (UK: Longman, 2000), p. 11. 5 Further abbreviations for key texts used in this thesis are: JD John Donne, Complete English Poems E Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands SK Michael Symmons Roberts, Soft Keys RS Michael Symmons Roberts, Raising Sparks BB Michael Symmons Roberts, Burning Babylon C Michael Symmons Roberts, Corpus HH Michael Symmons Roberts, The Half Healed DS Michael Symmons Roberts, Drysalter PEPP The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 6 INTRODUCTION The central research question of this thesis asks what is at stake in the use of the language of touch in the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts. Through an extensive textual analysis, it seeks to understand how far Roberts’s poetry, informed by his tactile poetics, represents, thematically and stylistically, a metaphysical poetry of the twenty-first century. To answer this question, particular attention will be paid to the way in which Roberts’s poetry repeatedly stages a touching of the untouchable. This thesis also establishes to what extent the language of touch offers the possibility of creating a point of mutual understanding between diverse religious and secular readerships in light of the poet’s own question, how can contemporary poets ‘explore religious faith and experience in a secularised language and culture’.3 As well as contributing to existing scholarship on Roberts’s poetry, this thesis contributes to the wider discourse on touch and literature. Specifically, it identifies the resurgent academic interest in the two apparently unconnected scholarly fields of haptics on the one hand and contemporary poetry on the other hand as evidence of concerns arising from a shared contemporary milieu. Roberts has published six major poetry collections to date, has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize three times, and has won both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Whitbread Poetry Award, among many others. However, as 3 Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Poetry in a Post-Secular Age’, Poetry Review, 98 (2008), 69-75 (p.69). 7 David Wheatley writes, ‘the critical attention received by contemporary poets is often of an ephemeral kind, with even prize-winning status conferring no guarantee of a reputation’s survival’.4 Despite his acclaim, there has been no significant critical study made of Roberts’s poetry, a striking omission when set against the background of the burgeoning field of contemporary poetry criticism that has seen a range of critical studies made of a number of Roberts’s contemporaries, including Kathleen Jamie, Carol Ann Duffy, and Don Paterson.5 It is this omission which prompts the demand for and extensive textual analysis of his work, and ‘the pace of engagement with language, the care and the speculation, the imaginative work, and the historical questions which close reading involves’.6 This thesis identifies above all that what comes to stand out in the close reading of Roberts’s poetry is the high level of attention to the tactile register that occurs in his writing. This includes instances of physical contact between people and objects, as well as the notion of touch in its broadest sense, such as when one says, ‘this poem touched me’. His poetry also involves the use of a broad palette of tactile language applied to both secular and spiritual concerns. This attention to the language of touch in turn coincides with a resurgence in the field of what might be broadly speaking called haptics (the study of the sense of touch) across a broad 4 David Wheatley, Contemporary British Poetry (London: Palgrave, 2015), p. 2. 5 Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. Rachel Falconer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland, The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy:
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