1 Beyond Gentility: Violence in the Poetry of Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit, Peter Redgrove and Robin Robertson Katrina Naomi Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD in Creative Writing 2 I would like to confirm that this thesis is my own work. Signed: Katrina Naomi Abstract The critical commentary, Beyond Gentility: Violence in the Poetry of Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit, Peter Redgrove and Robin Robertson, focuses on interpersonal violence. It includes a discussion on A. Alvarez’s essay ‘The New Poetry’ and critical reactions to the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The commentary defends the use of violence in poetry as a way of reflecting on the realities of contemporary society. NB: The creative element of this PhD, a collection of poetry, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me, is not included here because it will be published by Seren in June 2016. 3 Contents page Beyond Gentility: Violence in the Poetry of Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson and Peter Redgrove (Critical Commentary) 5 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 – Peter Redgrove 18 Chapter 2 – Robin Robertson 30 Chapter 3 – Pascale Petit 42 Chapter 4 – Sharon Olds 53 Chapter 5 – My Poetry 63 Conclusion 75 Appendix A – Interview with Penelope Shuttle regarding Peter Redgrove 79 Appendix B – Interview with Robin Robertson 84 Appendix C – Interview with Pascale Petit 91 Appendix D – Interview with Sharon Olds 100 Bibliography 116 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Stephen Knight and Blake Morrison for their unflagging advice, encouragement and support, and all the staff at Goldsmiths. I would also like to thank the editors of the following for publishing poems from The Way the Crocodile Taught Me: Acumen; Ambit; GLITS-E; Ink, Sweat & Tears; Irish Literary Review; Magma; New Welsh Review; Poetry Ireland Review; Poetry Society website; Popshot; Smiths Knoll; Stand; The Dark Horse; The London Magazine; The Poetry Review; The Reader; The Rialto; The SHOp; The Spectator; Times Literary Supplement and Yellow Nib. ‘Bearskin’, ‘Fledgling’ and ‘The Way the Crocodile Taught Me’ were first published as part of ‘The Argument: Art V Poetry’, a collaborative project with the artist Tim Ridley, and exhibited at the Poetry Café (London, 2013) and StAnza Poetry Festival (St Andrews, 2014). ‘The Bear’ won second prize in the 2012 Poetry on the Lake Competition (short poem category) and ‘The Woman Who Walks Naked’ was highly commended. ‘September’ was commended in the 2011 Poetry Society Stanza Competition. ‘Comfort Me with Apples’ was commissioned by Poetry Wivenhoe and first published in KJV – Old Text, New Poems (Wivenhoe: Poetry Wivenhoe, 2011). A version of ‘Another Planet’ was first published in Lunch at the Elephant & Castle (Matlock: Templar Poetry, 2008). My thanks to Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson and Penelope Shuttle for agreeing to be interviewed, along with Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein, Blake Morrison and Neil Roberts. Thanks to the librarians at the British Library, the Goldsmiths Library (particularly Mark Preston), the Peter Redgrove Archive at Sheffield University, Morrab Library and the Poetry Library. With gratitude to the Royal Literary Fund for a grant to complete the writing of The Way the Crocodile Taught Me and bursaries from Goldsmiths to enable me to pursue this PhD. 5 Beyond Gentility: Violence in the Poetry of Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit, Peter Redgrove and Robin Robertson Introduction ‘It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without’ – Wallace Stevens.1 This commentary discusses the work of four contemporary poets and concludes with a reflection on my own poetry. I consider violence in poetry from different viewpoints and approaches, placing contemporary work in a historical context. I argue that violence in poetry – whether thematic or imagistic – is necessary, even desirable, if poetry is to reflect, reinterpret and respond to our experience of life. I consider critical responses, including hostility to violence in poetry, and whether this hostility is gendered. I also consider whether women and men write about violence in their poetry differently. Research and academic writing on violence in contemporary poetry is a relatively neglected area.2 I draw on interviews3 I have conducted with Sharon Olds, Pascale Petit and Robin Robertson, and an interview with Penelope Shuttle, Peter Redgrove’s widow.4 I consider a different aspect of violence in poetry in the work of each of these poets. It would be impracticable within the constraints of a thesis to cover all of the contemporary poets who regularly write on violence.5 I focus on Olds, Petit, 1 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London: Faber, 1960), p. 36. 2 Specific writing on this topic includes Egbert Faas, ‘Poetry and Violence’, in Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London: Faber, 1994), pp. 251-67 (note his name is misspelt here as ‘Ekbert’). Broader yet related studies include John Fraser, Violence in the Arts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu (eds.), Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001 (London: Norton, 2014); Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (New York: Norton, 2011) and Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004). 3 See Appendices A-D, pp. 79-115. 4 Redgrove died in 2003. Redgrove’s Collected Poems (London: Cape, 2012) and biography, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (London: Cape, 2012) were edited by Neil Roberts. 5 Other contemporary poets who regularly write in response to interpersonal violence include: Moniza Alvi, Julie Carr, Carol Ann Duffy, Vicki Feaver, Adam Foulds, David Harsent (although much of 6 Redgrove and Robertson because they have been particularly influential on my writing and thinking. Violence is manifold and definitions are problematic. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines violence as: ‘The exercise of physical force so as to cause injury or damage to a person, property, etc., physically violent behaviour or treatment.’6 I extend this definition to include psychological violence, such as bullying, and threatening or manipulative behaviour. I find Judith Butler’s discussions, which stress vulnerability, useful. She states that violence exposes ‘human vulnerability to other humans […] in its most terrifying way, a way in which we are given over, without control, to the will of another’.7 While some, such as Henrietta Moore, believe violence to be ‘remarkably under theorized’,8 others such as Neil L. Whitehead find ‘Most recent anthropological commentators […] agree on one thing – that violence is pervasive, ancient, infinitely various, and a central fact of human life’.9 My focus is on interpersonal violence, including sexualised violence,10 which is carried out in peace time, rather than during war.11 In considering artistic responses to interpersonal violence, F. T. Marinetti in the 1909 Futurist manifesto, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, stated that art – which I take to include poetry – ‘can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice’.12 Valentine de Saint-Point in her 1914 Manifesto of Futurist Women, called on women to Harsent’s later work has been in response to war), and Selima Hill. 6 In the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 3535. 7 Judith Butler, ‘Violence, Mourning, Politics’, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, ed. Judith Butler (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 28-9. 8 Cited by Neil L. Whitehead, in ‘On the Poetics of Violence’, in Violence, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp. 55-77 (p. 62). 9 Whitehead, p. 55. 10 Catharine MacKinnon in ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory’, considers whether rape is ‘an act of violence’ or ‘an expression of male sexuality’, in On Violence: A Reader, ed. Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (London: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 286-91. 11 However, Sharon Olds’s collection One Secret Thing (London: Cape, 2009), contains a sequence of war-related poetry, which I refer to in chapter 4. 12 Nelson, p. 19. 7 find their ‘cruelty’ and ‘violence’ and ‘become sublimely injust once more, like all the forces of nature!’13 The Futurists’ sweeping statements influenced the Actionists who used provocative acts and language as a way of shocking people into thought. The Actionists also drew on Antonin Artaud’s ‘theatre of cruelty’, which used ‘extreme action, pushed beyond all limits’.14 Artaud said ‘It is cruelty that cements matter together, cruelty that molds the features of the created world.’15 While Artaud has been dismissed as ‘a madman’,16 and the language of the Actionists and Futurists is overblown, the idea that artists need an intensity of some kind is not unusual. The Futurists’ simplistic view that ‘art can be nothing but violence’ is questionable, particularly given their links to fascism and their glorification of war as, ‘the world’s only hygiene’.17 However, contemporary theorists such as Nigel Rapport have made links between violence and creativity, primarily in terms of violence’s departure from order and the creative spaces that may be generated.18 The philosopher Slavoj Žižek in Violence draws on theories of ‘symbolic violence’, arguing that even using language is violent, because it ‘dismembers’ and ‘simplifies’. ‘When we name gold “gold”, we violently extract a metal from its natural texture’.19 He echoes the ideology of the Russian Formalists, such as Roman Jakobson, who saw literature as ‘organised violence committed on ordinary speech’.20 I will briefly return to these ideas in my chapter on Redgrove. Žižek’s argument in response to Adorno is also worth considering: 13 Nelson, p. 64. 14 Nelson, p. 15. 15 Nelson, p. 18. 16 Nelson, p. 15. Others, such as Sanche de Gramond, find value in his ‘madness’. See ‘Antonin Artuad’s Biography’ <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/antonin-artaud> [accessed 11 October 2013].