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- Volume 6, Issue 1, 2016
Book 2.0 - Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2016
Volume 6, Issue 1-2, 2016
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‘Orphans of Poetry’: The poetry of childhood and the poetry for children of Robert Graves
More LessAbstract‘Orphans of Poetry’ examines poems by Robert Graves in order to argue three related points: that Graves’s ideas about childhood and children’s poetry, which anticipate more contemporary attitudes, were significantly shaped by his harrowing experience in the trenches in World War I; that Graves had an extraordinarily complex idea of nonsense as something larger than reasonableness and believed in its ‘explanatory power’, a belief arising from a philosophical scepticism he adopted when he was in his early twenties; that his idea of nonsense dovetailed with the notion of poetic truth, or a kind of knowledge accessible only through poetry or only to readers of any age who had the capacity to conceptualize in the mode of a poet.
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‘Prized assets of a ghost economy’: Some notes on The Unreturning
More LessAbstractThis article explores aspects of the creative strand of the author’s research into Great War poetry and twenty-first-century legacies of the war itself. Whilst one of the two accompanying poetry collections retains a more discernible resemblance to the prevailing mode of lyric elegy, his prose poem sequence, The Unreturning, consciously seeks to disrupt this tradition by adopting the less common neo-modernist poetics of writers such as Geoffrey Hill. What follows is a brief discussion of work-in-progress towards the creation of more resonant and meaningful contexts for our remembrance of a century-old conflict that continues to enjoy extraordinary levels of cultural and political privilege in the United Kingdom.
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Reflections on teaching poetry
More LessAbstractIn this article, the writer reflects on her practice as poet, her experience as a teacher of literature and creative writing, and her own training, and how these have contributed to her personal approaches to teaching poetry writing in Higher Education. She also examines how these approaches have helped her overcome the acknowledged particular difficulties of teaching both the reading and the writing of poetry.
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‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’: Reflections on routes into reading, writing and mentoring
By Anna KiernanAbstract‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, the title of the poem by Sylvia Plath, forms the starting point of this reflective account because it captures the interdisciplinarity that characterizes my practice and pedagogy, in terms of writing and collaborative working. This article draws on various creative writing methods in response to work by, and projects undertaken with, a range of writers, journalists, musicians and artists. Beginning by re-examining Dorothea Brande’s seminal text The Habit of Writing (1981) as a means of identifying the tensions writers often experience between their ‘creative’ and ‘critical’ selves, the article concludes that cross-disciplinary working may offer a way of expanding on Brande’s notion of these binary selves in favour of a creative/critical/collaborative self.
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‘The real life of language’: Encouraging young poets in universities
Authors: Mick Gowar and Mark WormaldAbstractMark Wormald and Mick Gowar both teach in universities in the city of Cambridge – Mark at Pembroke College, and the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; Mick at the Cambridge School of Art, and Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at Anglia Ruskin University. Both are published poets, and both have spent significant portions of their professional lives teaching poetry, and encouraging the writing of poetry. They have a shared interest in the life and work of the English poet and essayist Ted Hughes, and have collaborated on a number of literary events that have brought together students and staff from both universities. But, as their conversation reveals, the differences in their backgrounds and professional experiences are as marked as the apparent similarities.
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Iconoclast artists: Creating spaces for improbable friendships
Authors: Matthew Russell and Marlon LizamaAbstractIconoclast is a growing community of young artists that provides unique support and encouragement for hundreds of students from five of Houston’s public schools and two juvenile detention centres. Founded in 2014 by Marlon Lizama and Matthew Russell, Iconoclast is seeking to cultivate a new imagination among the next generation of young writers, poets and visual artists. Located primarily in the inner city, Iconoclast seeks to nurture improbable friendships that span the boundaries of race, religion, socio-economic groupings and ethnicity, and give the art that emerges a platform. By coming together to write, discuss ideas and perform, Iconoclast is building a different reality for our students and our city. In the following article, drawn from interviews with Mick Gowar, Marlon Lizama and Matthew Russell, I trace the roots of Iconoclast in their own personal histories, outline the achievements of Iconoclast so far, and set out their hopes for the future of the project.
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More than ‘a moment’s monument’
More LessAbstractThis article surveys the place of the sonnet in contemporary poetry, from the publication of Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae (1978) to the present day. After a reflection on the nature and critical history of the sonnet as a form, drawing on Don Paterson’s introduction to his 101 Sonnets anthology for Faber (2012), the article looks at the re-possession and reworking of the form by Hill, Heaney (under the influence of Robert Lowell) and Paterson, especially in the latter’s free ‘versioning’ of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke, 2012). The article investigates the relevance of both terms in Rossetti’s definition of the sonnet as a ‘moment’s monument’ (1881) and concludes with a survey of sonnets in more recent work, including Adrian Rice’s Moongate Sonnets (2013), Richard Berengarten’s Notness (2013) and Adam Crothers’ Several Deer (2016).
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Alienated majesty (redux): Geoffrey Hill and ‘a theology of language’
By Travis HelmsAbstractThis article offers a critical ‘appreciation’ of Geoffrey Hill and his ‘theology of language’, specifically as it is embedded in his prose essays and sequences of poetry. By examining Hill’s remarks on language’s fallenness and poetry as ‘an act of at-one-ment’, and by demonstrating the ways in which three of Hill’s poetic sequences embody or enact those claims, it underscores the ways in which Hill continues the work of ‘theo-poetic’ thinkers such as Milton, Coleridge, Emerson and Whitman – and importantly departs from it. Situated in the context of this tradition, Hill is given tribute as a highly original theological thinker.
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Reviews
Authors: Deborah Padfield, Tom Docherty, Amy Crawford and Michael BrownAbstractTHE WHITE STONES, J. H. PRYNNE (2016) New York: NYRB Poets, ISBN-10: 159017979X, ISBN-13: 9781590179796, p/bk, £11.39
MY GRANDMOTHER’S GLASS EYE: A LOOK AT POETRY, CRAIG RAINE (2016) London: Atlantic Books, ISBN-10: 1848872895, ISBN-13: 978-1848872899, h/bk, £19.99
ODES, SHARON OLDS (2016) London: Jonathan Cape, 116 pp., ISBN-10: 1911214063; ISBN-13: 9781911214069, p/bk, £12.00
E-BOOKS VS. AUDIOBOOKS: SOME THOUGHTS ON SELF-PUBLISHING
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