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This paper constitutes a radical re-reading of W. S. Graham’s long poem, The Nightfishing (1955). It begins by attending to the poet’s brief but significant time spent in New York and how the resonant influence of Marcel Duchamp may have unexpectedly influenced Graham’s composition of The Nightfishing, which has previously been read as a metaphysical journey out into language-as-ocean, and while such a reading is valid, it is also selective; this paper, instead, reads The Nightfishing as equally – if not more – indebted to Graham’s parallel experiments with and interest in what he calls ‘already made phrases’. John Cage is introduced as a comparable second-generation Duchampian, and whose experiments with tape-recorders form an important parallel example to Graham’s own interest in vocal materiality. The paper thereby provides a new transatlantic inflection to Graham’s verse-composition, and reveals it as structured by the indeterminate qualities of recording equipment, radio, quotation, citationality, and sampling. In this light, his work becomes recontextualised as a curation of found voices – a reading that relates also to larger questions of intention, contingency, and the critic’s own mode of composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper will look at two Irish literary texts from the mid-1990s up to the present day, and will read these texts in terms of their dramatisation of the politics of debt and guilt. Attention will be given to how different literary genres narrated debt and guilt in Irish society under the sway of the globalised Celtic Tiger economy. An analysis of Denis O'Driscoll's poem, 'The Celtic Tiger' will be presented first of all, as the poem is instructive on Ireland's new slew of performed identities during the economic 'boom', and the poem will be attended to in terms of the cultural politics of performance, desire and affect. Subsequently the paper will analyse Claire Kilroy's novel, The Devil I Know, an analysis that will be underpinned by a theoretical framework that focuses on how debt and guilt are formative of the modern sovereign subject. The arguments forwarded in the paper will take significant theoretical guidance from both Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurizio Lazzarato. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the problem of dwelling in Gertrude Stein's collection of prose poems Tender Buttons. Though Stein's innovative language and depiction of objects and alterity have long been the focus of a scholarly investigation, rarely have critics investigated how Stein's objects relate to each other, and how her poetic language intervenes on the literary construction of spatial relationships. Drawing principally on Martin Heidegger and Michel de Certeau, this paper investigates Stein's employment of a tactical approach to dwelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the philosophic and political potentials of lyric poetry through an archaeology of its ideological participation, situating a critical moment of the form's partial liberation in the poetry of Paul Celan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inclusion of excerpts from Muriel Rukeyser’s long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. However, Rukeyser’s eco-ethical concerns in her work after ‘The Book of the Dead’ have been largely neglected by literary ecocriticism. This paper proposes that The Life of Poetry (1949) deserves a foundational place in what we now, after the rise of environmental activism in the 1960s, call ecopoetics. In Rukeyser’s literary-activist essays, the rhetorical use of natural world imagery to illuminate poetry’s ability to effect social and political change reinforces an environmental context for poetic responsibility. Furthermore, Rukeyser’s argument for the treatment of poetry as a ‘resource’ anticipates contemporary environmental discourse on consumption and sustainability and situates poetry squarely within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Ben Lerner's discussions of poetry and poetics in his two acclaimed novels,Leaving the Atocha Stationand10.04, have not received the serious attention they deserve. Here, I examine the novels as clear extensions of Lerner's poetic project as seen in his three volumes of ‘verse', and link them to the theoretical discussions of poetics one finds in the prose of poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dickinson, or Pound. This in turn opens the way to seeing Lerner as engaged in an ongoing project in which neither prose nor poetry is privileged, but each dialogues with the other in what must be considered a serial prosimetrum. Following from this, I examine how the prose writings illuminate and enact the poetics of virtuality which Lerner favours and explores in many ways, not least of which being the displacement of poetry and poetics into novels, and the disturbing of the claims generally made for each genre. Ultimately, Lerner's opposition to ‘mere actuality’ or ‘mere positivity’ can only be understood if his novels are allowed to be disturbed by the volumes of poetry that surround them, rather than being left to stand as copious containers that might bound the poetic impulse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I will approach Robert Creeley and some later writers’ confusion about and misreadings of the poetry of Louis Zukofsky through the case of the Oakland A's, a baseball team that both Creeley and Ron Silliman erroneously connected to Zukofsky's long poem ‘A’. I will open this quite specific account to a more general approach towards the Language Poets’ readings of Zukofsky, readings that reveal as much about those poets’ practices as Zukfosky's. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]