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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]

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]