Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

SUMMARYFor as long as I have been a poet I have spoken to other poets about why and how they write. I came into contact with the field of Linguistically Innovative Poetry (LIP) as a young poet attending readings in London in the late eighties and early nineties. This gave me the foundations of a poetic career which I have built on ever since. In addition to LIP informing my creative work, I have also conducted academic research in this area, most distinctively by interviewing innovative poets about their work, the kinds of materials they use, their influences, future plans, views of contemporary practice and so on. Often these are the same questions I am asking of myself in my own creative writing, and therefore these interviews can take the form of a dialogue between writers seeking illumination for certain problems or issues they are encountering and can directly inform the production of new creative work.Moreover, reflection on these conversations can be a valuable way of theorising contemporary practice more generally, and, in the context of Linguistically Innovative Poetry, the statements that authors make about writing (poetics) are invaluable for gaining a better understanding of their formally challenging work.In this project I will engage a range of linguistically innovative poets in dialogue about their writing and mutually explore issues in innovative poetry, in terms of its practice, its aesthetics and its politics. The poets Karen Mac Cormack, Jennifer Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady have all agreed to be involved in the project. I have chosen these poets because I am interested in how they approach issues which I am seeking to develop in my own creative work. These issues include the relationship between autobiography and poetry (Moxley and Mac Cormack), the relationship between political argument and poetry (Brady), and the issue of how to extend one's formal range in terms of multi-media presentations of poetry (Bergvall).This research will generate examples of what is called poetics, a discourse that is achieving wider recognition in academia as worthy of study in its own right. Produced by writers and oriented towards the act of making, poetics occupies the middle ground between theory and practice. Poetics is an unpredictable discourse that performs many roles: it is speculative, conjectural, analytical and polemical. It might appear as literary criticism, as polemic, reviews, statements, manifestos, interviews, group discussions, verse-essays and so on.The contact and conversation with these writers will, it is hoped, help me to develop my own poetics and influence the production of new writing. The process will also generate a rich set of dialogues on a broad range of themes. Reflection on this material will in turn generate insights into early twenty-first century innovative writing practices.