Atelier 14 : Poets and Poetry (LOOP)
Responsables de l’atelier
Adrian Grafe
Université d’Artois
grafe.adrian@wanadoo.fr
Claire Hélie
Université de Lille
claire.helie@univ-lille.fr
Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt
Professeur agrégée
laurehelene.anthony@gmail.com
Being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts
John Keats’s concept of negative capability is one of the most fertile concepts in poetry; it defies our willingness to understand and make sense of everything and forces us to accept the paradox that in order to write, one must accept to reach beyond what words may speak or mean. The concept has been used in poetry studies, psychology, and philosophy, crossing disciplinary borders to help us grapple with the boundaries between the speakable and the unspeakable. Keats, however, was not the only poet concerned with the questions of identity and uncertainty. In this paper, I would therefore like to explore the enduring legacy of Keats’s negative capable poetics – the poetics of uncertainty, identity and self-effacement –, by crossing geographical, temporal and gender borders to focus on some of the poems of Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, who respectively wrote: “I have no face; I have wanted to efface myself” and “What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”
Biographie
Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt has taught translation and poetry at the Université de Bourgogne, creative writing at the INSPE in Besançon and currently teaches English in secondary school. Her doctoral thesis, Le devenir poétique de la sensation keatsienne dans l’oeuvre de Wilfred Owen, focused on the use of synaesthesia in Keats’s poetry and on his influence on Wilfred Owen’s works. Her current research interests include creative writing as well as the role of sensation, ecology and empathy in poetry. She published “Making Sense of Wilfred Owen’s Keatsian Heritage” in Etudes Anglaises (2020) and “Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive” for Arts of War and Peace (2021).
Sarah Bouttier
Ecole Polytechnique de Paris
sarah.bouttier@polytechnique.edu
Inhabiting the border between being and non-being in Pattiann Rogers’s recent works
The most interesting poems of Pattiann Rogers (US, born 1940) act as thought experiments, many of which inhabit the border between what is and what is not. In “In General” (2004) she tries to capture the essence of rain, night and wind before they become instantiated into punctual occurrences. All the while, their materiality is fiercely kept (we are not to talk of the concept of rain) so that the poem consistently sits across this border. In “The Creation of Sleep” (2008), her portrayal of the moment when one falls asleep as the crossing of a border from an absent presence to a present absence where one reaches “the very being of place” subtly spatialises another transgression between being and non-being. Rogers’s Big Bang narrative in “Observe the Rock” (2008) construes the original rock before it exploded as yet another border between being and non-being and probes it with questions such as “what is the thought of stone giving birth”? This paper will map those ways of sitting at the border of being – the most essential one – as moments laden with tensions, via negativa and material intensity.
Works Cited
Rogers, Pattiann (2004). Generations, Penguin Books.
Rogers, Pattiann (2008). Wayfare, Penguin Books.
Biographie
Sarah Bouttier is Assistant Professor of English at the École Polytechnique in Paris. She has been working on a monograph defining a poetics of the nonhuman encompassing a range of anglophone poets of the 20thand 21stcentury and has published widely on the nonhuman in literature and modern and contemporary poetry as well as on posthumanism and literature and science. She is co-editor of Legacies of Ursula K. Le Guin: Science, Fiction, Ethics.
Jennifer K. Dick
Université de Haute Alsace
jennifer-kay.dick@uha.fr
Borders and Borderlessness: talk on Eleni Sikelianos’ Fiercly exploratory, radically hybrid book: Your Kingdom
The porosity of borders and the celebration of the marginal, thus connective space, as central has become increasingly visible in contemporary poetry. At the same time, certain ecopoetic theorists and practitioners seek to draw our attention to, (perhaps as a means to abolish), the human dominance in the Anthropocene. This study proposes to explore how both of those foci come together in Eleni Sikelianos’ recent work Your Kingdom. From the dialogic with the dominant use of the pronoun “you” rather than the “I” in her lyric to Sikelianos’ hybridity (in terms of collage, sound-and language-slippages and image-text work) to its anachronism and treatment of themes such as an expanded notion of family trees, of ancestry and of connection to others and to the earth, this work attempts to abolish and negate the border. It seeks to reside in an all-of-us-one-species-one-earth zone.
Is this pure utopianism? Just a poetic response to the way we have cookie cuttered our earth, our histories and languages? Or can the struggle within these poems to see human on par with animal, plant, rock, and earth, its struggle to negate boundary (place, language, culture and generational and society borders), provide readers with tools to reimagine the world we live in? Tools to resee ourselves as one with the species we live among? As one facing the dangers which threaten us? Is art, as Thijs Biersteker argues, perhaps the key to overcoming our environmental crisis because it allows us to begin to overcome the crisis of imagination facing the environmental catastrophes here and which we can see are to come? This study will trace Sikelianos’ own struggle within this one work of hers to overcome the borders which encapsulate and thus separate us from our kingdom. It asks, can we see ourselves in a “coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before…” or are we to remain relegated to a laziness to overcome the barriers borders and taxonomies set around us, thus remaining: “like some plants” … “high//on the organization scale which makes you/wanton with some/lazy notion of perfection”.
Biographie
Jennifer K Dick is an author, translator, reading events organizer and MCF who directs the English Dept at UHA in Mulhouse. A member of ILLE, her research primarily focuses on text and image in postmodern 20th and 21st century books, recently on works about identity and multi-language use by contemporary poets such as Myung Mi Kim, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Craig Santos Perez, Anne Carson, Bhanu Kapil and Susan Howe. On this same author, JenniferShe recently completed for Creative Writing and Literature classroom use a “Readers and Writing Teaching Guide” for Coffee House Press to accompany Eleni Sikelianos’ book Your Kingdom and her chapter “The Nonsingular Self: A study of Bhanu Kapil and Eleni Sikelianos’ Poetic Autobiographical Writing” is forthcoming in the book coming out in Vulnerability and radicality in contemporary British and American autobiographies, edited by Nelly Monk et Aude Haffen. Éd Les Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, France. Spring 2024.
Michèle Draper
Université Gustave Eiffel
michele.draper@univ-eiffel.fr
G. M. Hopkins’s poetry: crossing the borders of poetic form
Hopkins’s poetry crosses borders in many different ways. His poetry is highly original and, to him, this idiosyncrasy — what he called ‘dinctinctiveness’ – was the very definition of poetic style. Whether from the point of view of his wording, difficult grammar, or of his experiments in form, Hopkins played with boundaries — to the point of obscurity in meaning. He also played with the limits of prosody as he created a new rhythm — sprung rhythm, the very characteristic of which was to extend the boundary of the line of poetry.
We will we explore how Hopkins’s poetry stretched the frontiers of poetic form, taking examples, in particular, from his experiments in sonnet form, the curtal sonnets ‘Pied Beauty’, ‘Ashboughs’ and his long sonnet ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, in his own words, ‘the longest sonnet … ever made.’
Bibliography
BOTTALA P., MARRA, G., MARUCCI, F. (eds). Gerard Manley Hopkins : Tradition and Innovation. Ravenna : Longo Editore, 1991.
GARDNER, William H. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) : A Study of Poetic Idiosyncracy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. [London, Secker and Warburg, Vol. i, 1944, 2nd. edn. rev. 1948 ; vol. ii, 1949.]. London, New York, Toronto : OUP, 1958 ; rev. 4th. edn., 1966.
HOLLOW A Y , Marcella M. (Sr.). The Prosodic Theory of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Washington : The Catholic University of America Press, 1947.
ONG, Walter J. (S.J.). Hopkins’ Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry. Immortal Diamond, 1949, p. 93-174.
PITCHFORD, Lois W. The Curtal Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Modern Language Notes, 47, 1952, p. 165-169.
WARD, Dennis. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves’. The Month, 8, 1, 1952, p. 40-51.
WATERHOUSE, John F. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Music. Music & Letters, Vol. 18, N° 3, July 1937, p. 227-235.
WILSON, Christopher R. Nineteenth-Century Musical Agogics as an Element in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Prosody, Comparative Literature, Vol. 52, N° 1, (Winter, 2000), p. 72- 86.
YADUGIRI, M.A. Linguistic Deviations in Hopkins’ Poetry. The Hopkins Quarterly, 11, 1, Spring 1984, p. 3-30.
Andrew Eastman
Université de Strasbourg
eastman@unistra.fr
‘Kansas//Ozymandias’: Writing Without Borders in Ronald Johnson’s Ark.
Ronald Johnson’s Ark, written between 1970 and 1990 and published in 1996, is an American long poem working in the tradition of Leaves of Grass, The Cantos, The Maximus Songs, and “A”. Johnson called it “a lofty Temple of words, images, and music”; its intense and continually surprising wordplay aiming, as Guy Davenport suggested, to “discern the order of [man’s] relation to the natural world”. Ark’s visual and musical language depends notably on sections of concrete poetry, which work by erasing the spaces or borders between words, as in “earthearthearth” (“Beam 24”). Meanwhile, the generally centered lines of the poem’s three sections, its “beams”, “spires”, and “arches”, erase or suppress the borderline and border space of left and right margins. To this is added a typically nominal syntax which often suspends assertion, and likewise temporal boundaries and reference points, by eliminating finite verb forms.
As its title suggests, the poem is meant to travel above the earth’s contested borders, to transcend history and politics, working in the mode of what Henri Meschonnic called “l’imitation cosmique” (Critique du rythme). Yet, even so, Ark is, in its concrete poetry notably, “bound” to English, on the one hand, and to the intrications of English with alphabetic writing. And it is a fundamentally American poem, built out of quotations from, for example, Thoreau, Dickinson, Zukofsky and L. Frank Baum (the author of The Wizard of Oz). Within the poem we find references to a specific historically and politically defined space, Kansas, where Johnson was raised. “Kansas”, at the end of “Ark 49, Masthead”, is rhymed with “Ozymandias”, suggesting desert emptiness, but also American imperial power, its effects on the North American continent and beyond.
The proposed paper will look at the way American expansionism and its history are written and erased into Ark, a poem whose Transcendentalist celebration of the natural world depends on the insights afforded by mid-twentieth-century American science and space exploration.
Bibliography
Ronald Johnson, Ark, Flood Editions, 2013.
Stephanie Burt, “Ronald Johnson’s Ark: A Poem in Three Dimensions”, New Yorker, 12 March 2014.
Guy Davenport, “Ronald Johnson”, in The Geography of the Imagination, Godine, 1997.
Biographie
Andrew Eastman is Maître de conférences at the University of Strasbourg. His research focuses on language and subjectivity in English-language poetries. He has recently published articles on Whitman’s rhyme, punctuation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and Susan Howe’s “type collages”. He is currently working on rhyme and voice in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems.
Bastien Goursaud
Université de Picardie Jules Verne
bastiengoursaud@hotmail.com
“Think about a cyborg to get to the immigrant”[1]—Bhanu Kapil’s nomadic poetics
Bhanu Kapil’s poetry is characterized by a constant interrogation of the political nature of lyric enunciation. As Sandeep Parmar has pointed out, her poetry strives to carve out a space between both mainstream humanist lyricism and the anti-lyric tradition because “to not need to recognise oneself, to render oneself without a voice, is only appealing or possible for those who have not been screened out, marginalised, silenced by the powers inherent in language itself.”[2]
Whether it be the human-animal continuum in Humanimal or Incubation or the violence of migrant embodiment in Ban en Banlieue and How to Wash a Heart, Kapil’s poetry and performance constantly explore in-between spaces and experiences.
This paper is an attempt to understand how Kapil’s fluid use of prose and verse as well as her performance practice can be read as ways of inventing a “nomadic [poetic] self”, one that resists the “violences of both coherence and negation.”[3]
Biographie
Bastien Goursaud is a Senior Lecturer at Université d’Amiens Jules Verne after completing a PhD at Sorbonne Université under the supervision of Prof. Pascal Aquien. His work focuses on the interactions of page and stage in contemporary British poetry.
Adrian Grafe
Université d’Artois
grafe.adrian@wanadoo.fr
Crossing Poetic Borders with Deportees and Refugees
‘All they will call you will be “deportees”’ sang Woody Guthrie in ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’ (1948). This paper sets out to consider the treatment of immigrants, deportees and exiles in works by Guthrie, W. H. Auden (‘Refugee Blues’, 1939), and Bob Dylan (‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’, 1968), and some poems by A. E. Stallings, especially ‘The City (after Cafavy)’ (2016). Our aim is to examine how poets deal with the theme of the displaced and to test Stallings’s claim that linguistic precision is necessary for a poem to be able to ‘play into’ the reader’s understanding of such persons’ situations: ‘Whether you use the terms migrant, expatriate, refugee, changes how people relate.’ Some of these works are wary of empathy (Stallings: ‘Empathy isn’t generous,/It’s selfish.’; Dylan—who consciously makes his immigrant antipathetic), preferring razor-sharp technical accomplishment (Stallings) and play with genre (Auden), while others seem specifically designed to arouse pathos (Guthrie).
Biographie
Adrian Grafe (Université d’Artois) co-heads the SAES Poets and Poetry panel, as well as the LOOP poetry society, with Claire Hélie. He has published broadly on poetry, popular music and literature. His current research projects include rock artists’ responses to Romantic texts and a paper for a conference on countertextuality.
Claire Tardieu
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
claire.tardieu@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
‘Displacement was my inheritance”: spatio-temporal exile in Kathleen Raine’s poetry.
In the opening pages of Farewell Happy Fields, Kathleen Raine’s words – ‘Displacement was my inheritance’ – seem to echo this purely rhetorical question, which perfectly expresses her intellectual stance: ‘What is all the art and poetry of the world but the record of remembered Paradise and the lament of our exile?’ The originality of Raine’s autobiography lies precisely in the fact that she associates feelings of life in Eden or exile with symbolic places corresponding to the different phases of her life. Thus, while Bavington, Martindale and Sandaig represent Eden, Ilford, London and Cambridge embody exile. The same neo-romantic and symbolist stance places Raine’s critical writings on William Blake and W.B. Yeats among others ‘outside’ or rather ‘against’ the twentieth century, a materialist century if ever there was one.
This paper will attempt to show how the poetic work in turn reflects the dialectics of Eden and exile in both its spatial and temporal dimensions. We will begin by looking at the extent to which the maternal heritage of displacement plays a dominant role in Raine’s poetic creation. Then, we will examine how the intellectual heritage passed on by her father, and above all by her spiritual master William Blake, also permeates the creative work of a poet who can best be described as a resistance fighter of the imagination.
To this end, we will study a number of emblematic poems from Raine’s latest collections.
Bibliography
Raine, Kathleen. Farewell Happy Fields. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1973.
Raine, Kathleen. Collected Poems. London : Faber & Faber, 2019 [2000].
Biographie
Claire Garnier-Tardieu is Professor of English Didactics at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and a specialist of the work of Kathleen Raine (1908-2003). In May 2023, she delivered a lecture at the Temenos Academy in London: “Kathleen Raine, Architect of Paradise”. She is the author of a doctoral thesis, several articles and a biographical essay on the 20th century British poet (L’Harmattan, 2014). She also maintained a correspondence with her for twenty years and translated prose texts and poems.
Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans
Université de Picardie Jules Verne
aurelie.thiriameulemans@gmail.com
Poétique de la frontière dans les derniers poèmes d’Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin, autrice américaine de fantasy et de science-fiction décédée en 2018, a été déclarée légende vivante des lettres américaines (avril 2000). Ses œuvres complètes achèvent de paraître aux éditions Library of America, avec un dernier volume, consacré à sa poésie, édité et préfacé par Harold Bloom. Ses deux derniers recueils sont parus en français, pour la première fois, en mai 2023.
Fille d’anthropologue, Le Guin porte sur le monde un regard venu d’ailleurs, les confins de la galaxie ne lui sont pas plus étranges ni étrangers que le sel de cuisine, les adventices de l’ouest américain, les volutes d’encens. Son œuvre poétique fait sien le déplacement du regard qui est au cœur de sa poétique romanesque.
Dans ses deux derniers recueils, la question du déplacement vers une frontière toujours mouvante, images de la vieillesse et de la mort, imprègne de nombreux poèmes, notamment « So Far » qui prend pour comparant le périple impossible du Lieutenant William Bligh « [aboard] an over-loaded open boat four thousand miles from Tonga past the Australian coast to Timor in Maritime Southeast Asia », ou encore « All Aboard » où chaque réveil matinal de presque nonagénaire est peint comme un dépaysement.
Biographie
Maîtresse de conférences à l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne depuis 2009, Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans a consacré sa thèse de doctorat à William Wordsworth (Wordsworth et ses miroirs. Résonances des mythes d’Écho et de Narcisse. Grenoble : PUL/ELLUG, 2014) et produit des articles et communications sur le romantisme anglais, avant de rediriger ses recherches vers l’héritage du romantisme dans les littératures dites de l’imaginaire. Elle coordonne avec Marion Leclair (Artois) un séminaire doctoral consacré à ces questions. Après une première expérience de traduction en 2020 (Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown, National Book Award 2020), elle traduit à présent l’œuvre poétique d’Ursula K. Le Guin (Derniers Poèmes, Paris : Aux Forges de Vulcain, 2023) et signe l’article consacré à sa poésie dans le recueil Ursula K. Le Guin, De l’Autre côté des mots. Chambéry : ActuSF, 2021)