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This paper examines Yoogum and Kudjela poet Lionel Fogarty's commitment to define the terms in which his work will be remembered through close analysis of a range of archival materials gathered by Kalkadoon scholar Philip Morrissey and Tyne Daile Sumner for Lionel Fogarty's Selected Poems 1980–2017 (2017). I describe this component of his work as hauntology, a term picked up from Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993) by Eve Tuck and Christopher Ree, who redefine hauntology as a 'relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society's assurances of innocence and reconciliation.'1 In reference to these materials, I argue that Fogarty's poetry has a hauntological capacity to recall the moment of the poem's expression in endlessly cyclical processes so as to resist closure. By analysing the way these materials exemplify Fogarty's poetic principles, the paper anticipates a shift in the relationship between Aboriginal Australian writers and the literary archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lionel Fogarty occupies a curious place in Australia letters. Widely regarded as the most important Aboriginal poet of his generation and even, as John Kinsella declares, 'the greatest living Australian poet', he has nevertheless received relatively little attention from scholars and is published by small, independent presses. Where considered at all, his politically charged, singular poetry is often treated with baffled awe or else conceived as a method of resisting the coloniser through an idiosyncratically 'creolised' English. This paper returns to various critical attempts to think Fogarty's poetry, from 'deep reading' to 're-reading' – some of which, like the trope of 'unsettlement', have yielded influential hermeneutics for the reading of Australian poetry per se – and treats these past readings as an entry point for an analysis of the complex rhetorical and poetic games of address in Fogarty's poetics. It considers, in turn, the poetic importance of Fogarty's sustained commitment to internationalist, liberationist, and anti-colonial politics, which it conceives as a poetics of solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Tony Harrison's poetic studies of deindustrialised Yorkshire anticipate Jason Moore's eco-Marxist critique of the neoliberal energy economy. Critical discussion of Tony Harrison's poetry has focused on the characteristic stances and techniques by which the poet first established his canonical standing, essaying his uneasy class consciousness and explosive use of regional dialect. Precious little attention has been paid to the ecological concerns that have become an increasingly integral element of Harrison's work. In the long narrative poem v. (1984) Harrison responded to the hard-fought Miners' Strike (1984-5), protesting the disenfranchisement of the British industrial working class. In some of v.'s more speculative lines, he countenanced the possibility of coal's eventual 'exhaustion'. In the film poem Prometheus (1998), he appraised the Miners' Strike from the distance of a decade, anchoring the poem in the perspective of a cancer-ridden coal miner. In the image of a dying, chain-smoking, Prometheus, Harrison cast the peculiar ironies of Britain's ongoing coal dependency in particularly profound relief. This paper finds that the evolution of Harrison's lyric voice captures much of the underlying music of British society, as it confronts the legacy of industrialisation, as history closes in, unremittingly, on capital's socioecological endgame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saying 'we', using the first-person plural, might speak for a community. But it also raises the problem of speaking as that community, determining it. In this paper, I address the poetics of this problem of indeterminacy through reading George Oppen. Oppen's negotiations with the social are focused on his increasing use of 'we' in place of a lyrical 'I-you' address. In reading this 'we' with Kant's 'common sense' – the aesthetic construction of consensus – I suggest that Oppen gives form to the indeterminacy of this common. In this, Oppen both re-imagines Kant's 'common sense' and troubles it. Kant's imagined community is shown to have limits in its own multiplicity. Reading Oppen's poetic use of 'we' against Kant's 'common sense', then, I explore the way each addresses a 'common' which exceeds their capacity to determine it. Finally, this leads me to consider the implications of these 'commons' for critical reading. If criticism is grounded on its own 'common sense', its form of sociability with its poetic object, then the inclusions and exclusions, the peculiar exterior-interiority of Oppen's and Kant's sociability, re-describe the limits of that critical reading, and should cause us to rethink its political implications. [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]