Louis Cabri, University of Windsor, Canada
O’Hara’s Mayakovsky

Frank O’Hara’s writings contain more references to Vladimir Mayakovsky than to any other poet who is not O’Hara’s peer. His assessment of Mayakovsky as revolutionary poet is very much Pasternak’s (in Doctor Zhivago and elsewhere). Pasternak identifies any “social command” made upon the poet (by the poet himself, as in Mayakovsky’s own formulation of a “social command” for poetry, or by others – the State, for instance) with a Romantic notion that the poet has a societal role to fulfill. Like Pasternak, O’Hara rejects the idea that there is a social role preset for the poet. O’Hara’s poetics of sociality extricates the social from its political role-playing shell found in Mayakovsky.
     At the same time, for both Mayakovsky and O’Hara, sociality is a civic, not a private phenomenon – and in this O’Hara’s Mayakovsky differs from Pasternak’s. For O’Hara, the idea of the person is fully social, relational, and public. Paradoxically, however, O’Hara’s “person” is fundamentally nonrepresentational; poetry is therefore in this sense a mode of abstract expression. O’Hara’s social admits the person, but not the personality, nor the private, bourgeois individual. Refiguring the social – society – as a set of personal yet social (therefore public) relations constituting the poet’s life, O’Hara adjusts Mayakovsky’s revolutionary “social command” for poetry to a seemingly less heroically transformational scale. However, O’Hara’s nonrepresentational person holds forth Whitman’s promise of “a new Poetry” with democratic vistas.

Anthony Caleshu, University of Plymouth, UK
Bivouacked between Worlds: James Tate and the Vietnam Years

Where the original Surrealists of Andre Breton’s troupe had a deliberate political manifesto, the American ‘neo-surrealists’ of the 1960s and 70s are rarely read for their leftist leanings. R.D. Rosen, for example, refers to this generation of poets as "morally homeless" and only concerned with a solipsistic struggle:
     We used to be simply against American politics; but after so much unsuccessful counter-movement, we are paralyzed and forced to live outside of those politics. We used to write directly against the war. Now we can only get at the war by writing about everything else… A couple of years ago, poetry was still being exercised as a polemic against America; but now we content ourselves with the fact that poetry proves that at least the poet is still alive.
     I want to re-read the poets of these years, particularly James Tate. My argument is that Tate’s poems have a “darker” view of American politics than is commonly thought. By bringing the surreal world to a real America he makes the two "worlds collide" as he writes in one poem ("Cosmology" Oblivion Ha-Ha 19). In the space of the collision, Tate’s poetry – especially of the Vietnam years – might be read as having counter-cultural concerns for his homeland.

David Callahan, Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
“There’s nothing I can’t find under there”: Survival Strategies in the Poetry of Li-Young Lee

In Marc Augé’s The War of Dreams he writes of how “analysts of modernity have effectively identified two opposing types of myths: myths of origin … and myths of the future, eschatological myths corresponding to the modern time which makes the future the principle of meaning” (74). These principles find a melancholy tension in the immigrant’s project, in which the sharpness of origins left behind comes up against the blurred anxieties of a future unmoored or eccentrically moored in myths of origin. This increasingly prevalent contemporary tension is exacerbated in the work of writers from cultures or peoples whose origins are perceived as alien to the cultures in which the writers’ futures have been placed. In answer to the fissure between these myths the work of Li-Young Lee confronts the aporia of loss, memory, and belonging with poetic strategies in which origins are explored in language aware that in not being the language of those origins the quality of its witness must emerge from its acquaintance with gaps, with weeping, with the dismantled, as with the presentness of touch. This paper would attempt to account for the beauty of Li-Young Lee’s poetry in its translation of the politics of exile into the shock of experience.

Pierre Carboni, University of Nantes, France
James Thomson’s “Doric reed”: The Scottish poet and the politics of the pastoral in Augustan Britain after the Union

Politically speaking, the Scottish poet James Thomson (1700-1748), a “son of the manse” born in pro-Hanoverian Selkirkshire, was a staunch whig and unionist. His poetic work, entirely composed in England where he chose to establish himself in his twenties, celebrates the achievements of unionised Britain as well as the patriot-whig ideology of his London patrons and friends. However, Thomson’s most essentially “political” works, especially Britannia (1729) and Liberty (1735-6), are not as successfully “poetic” as his more influential creative works, The Seasons (1726-34) and The Castle of Indolence (1748), in which he moves from conventional party politics to a more personal expression of the politics of poetry in the post-Union context of Augustan Britain.
     The main focus of our prospective paper would be to analyse the symbolic status of Thomson’s poetic personae in both The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence. These personae are figures of retreat, country musicians whose emblematic instrument is the humble “Doric reed” (Autumn, 890). The poetic self and its expression appear as marginalized as the Doric dialect became in the Age of Pericles when Athenian domination was universally acknowledged. But the Arcadian musician and his pastoral flute are also reminiscent of Theocritus’ Doric dialect in his highly influential, although not metropolitan, Idylls. Thomson’s peripheral “Bard” is also described as being “of little Druid-Wight” (The Castle of Indolence, II, 289). Despite his rural identification, he appears as a quasi-supernatural seer, invested with such a high civic mission as his prototype, the virgilian vates, held in Roman poetry and society under Augustus. In the post-Union context, the Bard’s instrument is noticeably a “British Harp” (Castle, 408). This emblem of Thomson’s definition of poetry is the produce of an exercise in national and individual mythopoeia which blends Scottish folk culture with classical and biblical references so as to vindicate the role of the Scottish self on the new “British” scene. Thus using the ambiguities of the pastoral genre as the “natural” expression of his complex poetic personae, in other words as his own “Doric” dialect, Thomson the unionist and “impersonal” neo-classical poet chooses high Augustan English rather than the vernacular to defend and illustrate Scotland’s (as well as his own) creative genius in a rather paradoxical way. In doing so, he shows through symbol that, rather than remaining peripheral elements in an increasingly English-dominated context, they should become central to the Union’s political and poetic life.

Rachel Carroll, University of Teesside, UK
The Violent Space: Poetry, Black Power and African American Masculinity in the ‘prison poetry’ of Etheridge Knight

This paper will explore the representation of African American masculinity in the ‘prison poetry’ of Etheridge Knights (1931-1991), a poet of the Black Arts Movement, the cultural counterpart of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960’s. Knights’s representation of African American masculinity will be placed within two historical and cultural contexts. Firstly, the legacy of slavery and racism and its contribution to the ‘criminalising’ of black masculinity, from the construction of escaped slaves as thieves in improper possession of their own bodies to the racialised discourses of the American ‘punishment industry.’ Secondly, the contemporary context of the Black Power movement and the relationship between its radical appropriation of political agency and arguably patriarchal discourses of militant masculinity.
     This paper will suggest that the ‘violent space’ [from “The Violent Space (or when your sister sleeps around for money)”] within which Knights writes can be understood as the actual and discursive confinement of African American masculinity, by racial and gendered constructions of identity, to a “life locked down” (Bell hooks, We Real Cool); it will consider the ways in which the reflective interiority of Knights’s poetry allows for an exploration of African American masculinity as other than a space constructed by and through violence.

Ashley Chantler, University of Chester, UK
Against Tub-Thumping: Zbigniew Herbert and the Extraction of Meaning

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-98) was born in Lwów, Poland. On 17 September 1939, Red Army tanks entered the city and began a long cycle of war, national defeat and repression. During the Nazi control of Poland, 1941-45, Herbert was a member of the Polish resistance movement. It was then that he began to write poetry, but it was not until 1956, after Stalin’s death, that he published his first collection, Struna Swiatla (A Chord of Light). Both Nazism and Communism are behind Herbert’s poetry; he refused to foreground them: ‘I might have written something of this sort: “O you cursed, damned people, so-and-sos, you kill innocent people, wait and just punishment will fall on you.” I didn’t say this because I wanted to bestow a broader dimension on the specific, individual, experienced situation, or rather, to show its deeper, general human perspectives.’
     My paper begins by using Herbert as an example of how poetry can be profoundly ‘political’ without being overtly so, how offering ‘broader’ dimensions and ‘general human perspectives’ results in texts that challenge dogmatic and unwavering points of view (personal, political, religious); acknowledge the complexity of human experience; and favour the extraction of meaning and, as Herbert says, the ‘cry of hope’ over ‘the shriek of terror’.
     I argue that Herbert’s poetry offers a more constructive model for political poetry than ‘We blew the shit out of them’ polemics and go on to consider why poets such as Pinter are drawn to make explicit statements.

Miriam Marty Clark, Auburn University, USA
Bodily Pain and the Jurisdiction of Justice in Contemporary American Poetry (Adrienne Rich and Jean Valentine)

The paper I propose addresses links between private pain and social suffering in contemporary poetry. “Social suffering” is anthropologist Arthur Kleinman’s term for the “assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social force”—political, economic, and institutional power—“can inflict on human experience.” Focusing on Jean Valentine and Adrienne Rich, my paper considers how some recent American poets move beyond twentieth century confessional modes, shifting their focus from the inwardness of bodily and psychic experience toward an understanding of bodily vulnerability and pain as ethical ground, the basis for recognition and acknowledgement of wider forms of suffering. Suffering—lived or proximate—empties us, as Jean Valentine writes, “of every illusion of separateness.”
     I acknowledge these poets’ debts to the moderns — Yeats and Williams in their attunement to bodily experience, Lowell’s to psychic pain--and to the “bardic protocols” (Des Pres) that define what we think of as “political poetry.” At the same time I argue that those protocols should be expanded to account for the political and social force of recent poetry. “Social formations,” Denis Donoghue contends, “may more effectively be altered by images than by argument. The content of such imagery does not determine itself; nor does it arise spontaneously. An image, like a poem, is made. The question is: under what jurisdiction, if any, is the image made?” Citing Levinas, Donoghue concludes “The irresistible jurisdiction is that of justice.” In the poems I consider images of the body operate not under the confessional rubric of openness, frankness, and freedom but under the jurisdiction of justice.

Billy Clem, Waubonsee Community College/Northern Illinois University, USA
“for every drop of blood”: War, the Villanelle, and Three U.S. English-language Poets

The response to war and its violence from U.S. poets writing in English has been, in recent decades, both vehement and necessary. Usually working in free verse, anti-war poets have written to critique both the U.S. colonial/imperial policies/actions that inform war and the violence of transnational wars and genocide. Free-verse poetry is not, however, the only response. English-language poets writing in the U.S. have indeed used fixed-forms to challenge, critique, and protest war and its violence. In recent years the villanelle has become an effective fixed-form through which poets have written against war.
     Three U.S poets in particular are noteworthy for writing beautiful, penetrating, and important villanelles, over the last 20 or so years, in/as response to war. Rita Dove, Carolyn Kizer, and Agha Shahid Ali have created villanelles that both use and challenge this fixed-form to fashion seemingly calm and controlled poems that oppose war and its violence and call for a reflection on the form itself. Dove, in one of two poems in “Parsley,” uses the villanelle to understand the linguistic basis of violence in Trujillos’s Dominican Republic. Kizer critiques “The Gulf War” and its media representation in “On a Line from Valéry.” And Ali tackles transnational/international war and violence by contemplating responses to state-sanctioned wars, especially in Kashmir, in his poem “A Villanelle.” Thus in this paper, I will argue that each poet uses the properties of the villanelle—repetition, rhyme, obsession, tension, climax, and resolution—to interrogate content, subject, and form, to oppose war and to understand and fashion the villanelle in new and exciting ways.

Steve Cloutier, St Mary's University, Canada
“Soon whores will be obvious at corners”: Raymond Souster and the City

Lumberjacks. Farmers. Woodsmen. These are the stereotypical images of Canada, a view encouraged, even embraced, by many Canadian poets. Raymond Souster, however, deliberately attacks that view of Canadian society, defiantly writing about the city. Although a native of Toronto, Souster (born 1921) is an international poet who writes with ease about New York, London, and Brussels. This rural bias in the Canadian mentality persists, a hangover from the watered-down Romanticism of 19th Century Canadian poetry, and Souster attacks the poets who promulgate this view, writing that “Not one of them/with very much to say,/but dressing it up, faking it,/so they fooled quite a few in their time” (“Fredericton”, 1954).
     For Souster, this is not merely a question of subject but is, at its heart, politically motivated. Souster, a political and poetic radical, grapples with racism, poverty, and the legacy of Auschwitz in his poetry. To turn away from these issues and to turn to what amounts to a fetishization of a mythic Canadian past results not just in a paucity of subject matter but allows poets, and by extension their readers, to ignore the political and social realities of their time. Souster stands on the streets of Toronto and points an accusing finger at the city inhabitants (“bigoted, hypocrite, little wise, much foolish” – “Sleep Toronto”, 1953), urging them to “sleep with the dreams of profits, mergers, margins,/ sleep with the dreams of garbage-dump and dole” (“Sleep Toronto”, 1953).

Catriona Clutterbuck, University College Dublin, Ireland
Religious Politics and the Idea of Good Faith in Irish Poetry of the 1930s and 1990s: the work of Austin Clarke and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

This paper examines the links between two major Irish poets of different generations, whose key mid-career work is concerned with the links between existentialist good faith and religious faith, in the context of the dominance in their culture of a religious politics of bad faith.
      Clarke’s 1938 volume Night and Morning and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s 1994 volume, The Brazen Serpent emerge from the two decades of recent Irish history which are most sharply defined by religious politics: the 1930s in which the Catholic Church ascended to cultural and political supremacy, and the 1990s in which that power base collapsed.
      The proposed paper will investigate these volumes’ respective recuperation of subversive elements of traditional faith systems in order to challenge those systems’ destructive political impact. In doing so, it explores these two poets’ focus on the power of the aesthetic imagination to excavate space for the agency of belief, from inside the solidified mountain of assumptions of right built both by the Irish Catholic Church faith tradition and its belle letter detractors, in the two periods concerned.
      Clarke and Ní Chuilleanáin are each noted for a poetics of obliquity, a focus on native Irish culture, and a direct engagement with gender politics. The paper will suggest the convergence of these markers of their identity as poets with the theme of religious politics in their work, as above described.

David J. Connor, Hunter College - CUNY, USA
“I feel like there’s something wrong with me”: New York City Youth Labeled Learning Disabled 'Talk Back' through Poetry

This paper features the poetry of eight youth labeled learning disabled (LD) at some point in their public school education. The poems are part of a larger project in which I sought to understand life at the intersections of being labeled disabled, as well as being Black and/or Latino(a), and working class or poor. Throughout the U.S., such students are overrepresented in segregated classrooms. However most educational research does not sufficiently address this blatant social injustice. Instead, researchers continue to treat the variables of disability, race, and social class as separate, thereby neglecting the impact such identities have upon each other while also overlooking their role in preserving societal hierarchies and inequalities.
     I analyze how eight students used poetry to “talk back” to accounts of, and understandings about, LD conventionally found within the field of special education. Traditional conceptualizations of LD are almost always framed within a disempowering “medical-model” that posits individuals as deficient, in need of a cure. As “talk back,” the poems serve as politicized texts in that they offer marginalized students the dignity to speak for themselves. In this respect, the poems offer a window into the lives of segregated youth, revealing a confining world often filled with insecurity and psychological estrangement. Moroever, through poetry, the students emphasize that they see special education not as beneficial, but as one among many oppressive forms of containment in their lives, including housing projects, zoned schools, employment prospects, and severely limited access to college.

Jacques Coulardeau, Université Paris-Dauphine, France
Poetry's Commitment against War

"Artists have both the ability and the moral obligation to combat deceit and distortion. It is this ability to illuminate even difficult truths that defines an artist." Thus started the "Artists and Writers' Petition Against War on Iraq" in 2002. I will consider some poetic productions when this War on Iraq was being discussed and then launched, without entering the political field itself in many details. My resources will be: the "Poètes dontre la guerre" site and their poems; the action of artists and writers around Ursula K. Le Guin in the USA; the "Poets Against the War" site and their poems; the ebook "100 Poets Against the War", electronically circulated, then printed and manually circulated. I will determine the main themes, among others compassion for the victims of the war activities, military or civilian, direct or collateral; for the victims of torture; for the victims of propaganda distortion. I will trace allusions and references to older poets, and the Bible will be one poetical work. I will approach ethical, religious or philosophical opposition to war. I will scrutinize these poems for the link between a poetical production and the political action against war. My concluding discussion will concern the "ability and moral obligation" of the poet to commit his art against war. The end will be a question, and some tentative answers to it: Why did this particular war on Iraq prompt such a strong and rich reaction from artists, writers and poets?

Stef Craps, Ghent University, Belgium
Beyond Recovery: Witnessing, Ethics and Nationhood in the Poetry of Eavan Boland

The interrelations of gender, nation and poetry are a recurrent concern in the work of Eavan Boland, who is widely recognized today as the leading Irish female poet. This paper aims to correct what it diagnoses as a reductive understanding of this particular nexus in much Boland criticism. According to Boland, the familiar nationalist personification of Ireland as a wronged woman has occluded women's real experiences. From early on in her career, she has seen it as her mission to challenge the poetic tradition by writing about her own experiences as a woman and about history as experienced by women and other marginalized groups. Admirers and detractors alike have tended to construe Boland’s project as the displacement of the constrictive feminine iconography of the Irish nationalist tradition by new, plural myths of the nation. The poet allegedly makes it her business to recover the experiences of the previously excluded and to incorporate their stories into Irish (literary) history so as to make it more complete or representative. What tends to be ignored in such accounts is the self-reflexive dimension of Boland's writing, which problematizes such acts of recovery. Especially in her more recent work (starting with The Journey), Boland can be seen to articulate a radical, ethically motivated critique of poetic representation which works to unsettle reified conceptions of nationhood. Instead of commemorating the past by appropriating the experience of the silenced other, her poetry bears witness to an incommunicable history which disrupts rather than consolidates any preconceived sense of national self-identity.