10Poetics
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ywcct/mbx010
ISSN1471-681X
Autores Tópico(s)Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature
ResumoThis review explores publications in the field of Poetics published in 2016. The review is divided into three sections: 1. A ‘Bitter Logic’ reviews Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry and Mandy Bloomfield’s Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History, and considers the different strategies of poetic self-qualification and self-interrogation examined by Lerner and Bloomfield; 2. ‘Making Language Strange’ looks at the possibility and capacity for defamiliarization in Stephen Burt’s anthology The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth Century Poetry; 3. ‘Morbid Interregnums’ explores poetry’s environmental engagements by way of Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, biology and technology in contemporary British and Irish poetry, and Stephen Mentz’s Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719, which reframe, to an extent, the bitter logic of section one within an ecological context. So then. That was the year that was. The year of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood, Caroline Ahern, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and Carrie Fisher, and the year, of course, of Brexit and Trump. Poetry, too, had its losses—Geoffrey Hill and Yves Bonnefoy passing within a week of the UK EU referendum—and, insofar as its readers and writers constitute a community, they were also exposed as riddled with internal divisions. Perhaps the noisiest such division stemmed from the high-profile prizes awarded to three female ‘minority’ poets, Claudia Rankine, Sarah Howe, and Vahni Capildeo being the winners, respectively, of the 2015 Forward Prize, the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2016 Forward prize. Peter Riley took this as evidence that: ‘The basis of judgement’ in poetry has ‘shifted from aesthetic to moral’ (‘Poetry Notes’, The Fortnightly Review [12 April 2016], fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2016/04/vahni-capildeo/), which in turn prompted Dave Coates to argue that ‘these terms are difficult to define and deserve far more careful unpacking than Riley offers. A cynical reader might guess he means the lyric poetry supported by the canon and reified by generations of elite readers has, for once, been deemed second best to an experimental form written by a poet for whom the canon has little time’ (‘On Warsan Shire, Peter Riley and Poetry Criticism’ [2 May 2016], davepoems.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/on-warsan-shire-peter-riley-and-poetry-criticism/). It is not hard to see parallels with contemporary politics—one speaker at a conference I attended last year compared Riley’s position to that of the All Lives Matter movement that has sprang up in recent years in response to Black Lives Matter. But perhaps the most striking parallel is the sheer scale of the fracture and its complexity, the ways in which possible common ground quickly mutates into battlefields, and the terms and processes by which we navigate such spaces become slippery and uncertain. Riley’s is a broadly positive review of Capildeo, and Coates acknowledges that he ‘very likely means well’. Both are earnestly engaged in a serious debate about contemporary poetry and poetic culture and present detailed and sophisticated readings to make their case, but the narrow terrain of headlines, soundbites and hashtags seems inevitably to turn such a debate into something resembling into a pistols-at-dawn duel.
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