Responsables de l’atelier
Claire HELIE (Université de Lille)
Lacy RUMSEY (ENS Lyon)
Anthony-Gerroldt Laure-Hélène, chercheuse indépendante,
Emancipation in Pirmohammed, Tempest and Elhillo
Another Way to Split Water, by Alycia Pirmohammed (2022), Divided by Itself and One, by Kae Tempest (2023), Girls that Never Die, by Safia Elhillo (2022): on the surface level, the three collections seem to have little in common. The poets come from various places (Canada, the USA and the UK), and have different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Yet, despite these differences, the three collections are all concerned with the question of identity and with finding ways to reinvent the self through poetry. Exploring their relationship to their own bodies, to nature and to the written word, the three poets play with the visual conventions of poetry as if to break away from them. Doing so the poetic word reveals ways to set the self free from the confines of the body and from the social constraints imposed on the female and the queer body, asking, in Safia Elhillo’s words: “But what if I will not die? What will govern me then?”. In this paper, I would therefore like to explore whether the poets’ images of splitting, dividing, multiplying and dying can be viewed as linguistic markers of emancipation and as ways to celebrate the often conflicted relation between the freedom to become oneself and the ties to the past that will not break.
Duperrier Félix, Paris Cité, duperrier.felix@gmail.com
Revisionist History in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’
This paper explores Charlotte Smith’s historical imagination in ‘Beachy Head’ (1807). Multiple, and at times competing, accounts and models of history inform Smith’s lyric meditation on the national past. On the one hand, ‘Beachy Head’ takes exception to grand historical narratives, stressing the fundamentally non-linear and ateleological growth of the British nation. Its insistence on recurring episodes of invasion and subjugation at the hands of powerful historical entities – such as the House of Normandy, Danish raiders, or the Roman Empire – emphasises the transience and instability of political authority. ‘History from below’ emerges as an alternative, replacing the actions of ‘great men’ with representatives of marginalised communities, such as shepherds, smugglers, a hermit, or Indian subjects of the British Empire, and, implicitly, women. The various forms of oppression or disaffection from established power that these figures symbolise register Smith’s opposition to arbitrary and hegemonic authority. In adopting this contrasting perspective, Smith intimates a post-revolutionary commitment to political reform. This paper proposes to reflect on how the liberal politics of Smith’s historical poem materialise into concrete poetic practices. Smith repurposes the legacy of Miltonic sublimity and blank verse not only to counterpoint the turbulence of history, but also to advocate, and indeed perform, the loosening of artificial and inherited constraints. Freedom from ‘the troublesome and modern bondage of riming’ parallels the emancipation from unjust authority that the poem defends and enacts. A twofold argument underpins this reading of ‘Beachy Head’. In the first place, the poem reads like a feminist intervention into the male preserve of history-writing and epic poetry. Smith establishes herself as one of those whom Lynette Felber terms ‘Clio’s daughters’, that is to say the constellation of ‘women [who] not only sought to influence and mediate but also to create the records of history’.1 As a ‘mother of the nation’, to borrow Anne Mellor’s phrase, Smith thus asserted an ambition to ‘participat[e] fully in the discursive public sphere and in the formation of public opinion’.2 Yet Smith’s ambition to be viewed as a serious and legitimate contributor to these genres also draws attention to the cognitive value that she assigned to her poetry. The sense of historical flux that pervades ‘Beachy Head’ originates in a lyric awareness of spatial and temporal relativity. This meshes with Jonathan Sachs’s idea of the Romantic ‘poetics of decline’, which understands poetry as ‘a way of writing framed by meter and rhythm, with temporal functions built into its very basis’, and which therefore affords ‘a temporal sense and a capacity for articulating new kinds of temporal experience’.3 The rhythms of poetry, Smith seems to suggest, could absorb, reflect, or organise the rhythms of history. Ultimately, Smith’s formal resources take on a deliberative function, whereby her verse performs an ethical and historical kind of thinking.
Eastman Andrew, Université de Strasbourg, eastman@unistra.fr
Self-Negating Form: Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetic Emancipation
Elizabeth Bishop’s poetic influence has greatly developed among Anglophone readers since her death in 1979—a situation which may seem paradoxical in so far as her writing has been identified with “reticence” or “restraint”. Her own poetic development has been read as a gradual process of “emancipation”—in the sense that she gradually allowed herself to speak more freely about issues of personal trauma, gender, sexuality which were clearly central to her experience. Witness the close of her last published poem, “Sonnet” from 1979—a poem built around the opposition between “Caught” and “Freed”, and closes with a “rainbow-bird” reflected from a mirror edge, “flying wherever/ it feels like, gay!” Bishop’s “Sonnet” works with this traditional form while bending it, inverting octet and sestet, compressing lines to two beats each; what this sonnet makes clear is that Bishop’s poems think about poetic form. In Bishop’s work, as Vidyan Ravinthiran argues in his Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic, “questions about form are unavoidable, and need to be made simultaneous with the subject-matter of poems” (67). But critics have tended to see Bishop’s work with form as a drawback, an obstacle to their modernity: Marjorie Perloff criticized her “orderly sequential-associative style” (quoted White 44); Stephanie Burt notes that Bishop’s predilection for “closure” makes her ”conservative”, and raises problems for the extent to which her poems can inspire contemporary poets (321-322).
But Bishop herself seemed to feel that what we call “poetic form” has been given only limited scope—as if “emancipation” might be sought not in escaping from form, but in developing, extending, radicalizing its possibilities. Her poetry, like that of Donne or Herbert, or Marianne Moore, seems to require a different form for each poem. In an essay on Moore, Bishop quotes Poe’s discussion of “originality”, where he complains that “The extent to which this has been neglected in versification is one of the most unaccountable things in the world”; “originality” would demand, Poe noted, “less of invention than of negation” and is to be sought in “an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration” (Bishop 684). In several Bishop poems, originality indeed seems to depend on a kind of formal negation, in which form seems to be “frittered away” or to become unrecognizable. “Roosters” and “O Breath” are two poems working with endrhyme which raise the question of what rhymes with what, and ultimately, of what rhyme consists in. In both of these poems, it is not clear whether emancipation is from form, or of it, since form itself seems to be made questionable or “equivocal”. And in both “Roosters”, a reflection on militarism and masculinity, and “O Breath”, a reflection on the way social constraints affect intimacy, questions about form, I will try to show, are inseparable from questions of social and sexual emancipation.
Bibliographie
Bishop, Elizabeth. Poems, Prose, and Letters. Library of America, 2008.
Burt, Stephanie, “Elizabeth Bishop at the End of the Rainbow”in Reading Elizabeth Bishop, Edinburgh UP, 2019.
Ravinthiran, Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic. Bucknell Univ. Press, 2015.
White, Gillian. Lyric Shame: the “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. Harvard UP, 2014.
Elzière Sophie, INALCO, selziere.inalco@gmail.com
Ted Hughes’s Plays and Days: Emancipation in Season Songs
Ted Hughes described his 1975 collection Season Songs as children’s poems that ‘grew up’. The collection is made up of 28 texts by Ted Hughes and 15 illustrations by Leonard Baskin, whose visual patterns and poetic refrains highlight the passing of seasons and the wonders of the natural world. Anthropomorphism, a common feature of children’s songs and fables, helps the reader to consider emancipation not only as a way to question the relations between adult and child, human and nature, but also the possibility for human structures and artistic creations to evoke the natural world or to contain its power and freedom.
Anthropomorphism is notably used as a hyperbolic device to magnify the cycles of growth and decay of the natural world. For instance, Ted Hughes resorts to the traditional form of Old English Riddles to represent the miracle of wheat growth and harvest in ‘The Golden Boy’. He also pays attention to the complex interconnections between all living species in these ecosystems, or alludes to the threats of exploitation and pollution in cautionary tales, like ‘Work and Play’, which turns from the Golden Age of summer agricultural labour to the Iron Age of industrial pollution.
The poet relies on the recreational quality of children’s songs, as both playful and inventive fabrications, to convey candid messages to his readers. Anthropomorphism not only exposes the faults of mankind in animal-guise, but also challenges the way humans deal with non-humans, both in literature and literally. For instance, ‘The Stag’ shows the violence of human predation on that ‘strange earth’. The poems, that Ted Hughes famously conceived of as ‘animals’ in Poetry in the Making, also question the artist’s own will to ‘hunt’ and ‘capture’ reality, and confront the readers to the strangeness and unknowability of non-human experience. In this respect, Leonard Baskin’s sometimes abstract illustrations are reminders of the necessity to change perspectives, away from anthropocentrism, and to give up ambitions to control or comprehend.
By alluding to the taste of intoxicant plants, the smell of raw earth, or the touch of sun rays, the poet shares a continuum of sensorial experience between human and non-human beings. Therefore the emancipating power of artistic creation is best exercised when it gives pride of place to the materiality and expressiveness of the natural world, enabling human readers to develop their imagination to connect to its many critters while respecting their difference and freedom. For example, ‘April’s Birthday’ evokes ‘the swallow snips the string that holds the world in / And the ring dove claps and nearly loops the loop’, which emphasizes the poetic ecology of the birds’ regenerative ´strings’ or ´loops’ of life, migration and death, and humbly represents a community of more-than-human makers of the world.
Bibliographie
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Boehrer, Bruce, Molly Hand and Brian Massumi, eds. Animals, Animality and Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity Press, 2013.
Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. 1951. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Coetzee, John M. The Lives of Animals. Princeton University Press, 1999.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Animal That I Therefore Am’. Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28.2. 2002.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Driscoll Kari and Eva Hoffmann, eds. What Is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies, Entanglement. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Springer Nature, 2018.
Faas, Ekbert. Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe. Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. Routledge, 2004.
Gifford, Terry and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. Faber, 1981.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.
—. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
—. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Hughes, Ted. Poetry in the Making: A Handbook for Writing and Teaching. Faber, 1967.
—. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Ed. William Scammell. Faber, 1995.
—. Collected Poems. Ed. Paul Keegan.Faber, 2003.
—. Letters of Ted Hughes. Ed. Christopher Reid. Faber, 2007.
—, and Leonard Baskin. Season Songs. Poems by Ted Hughes, Pictures by Leonard Baskin. Viking Books, 1975.
Lidstrom, Susanna. Nature, Environment and Poetry: Ecocriticism and the poetics of Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Routledge; 2015.
Lundblad, Michael. Animalities. Literary and Cultural Studies Beyond the Human. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
Morrison, Susan Signe. The Literature of Waste. Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matters. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Middelhoff, Frederike, Sebastian Schönberg and al. Texts, Animals, Environments. Rombach Verlag, 2019.
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Parkinson, Claire. Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. Routledge, 2020.
Reddick, Yvonne. Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Robinson, Craig. Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being. The Macmillan Press, 1989. Sagar, Keith. Ted Hughes and Nature: ‘Terror and Exultation’. Fastprint Publishing, 2009. Skinner, Jonathan. ‘Statement for “New Nature Writing”’, ecopoetics 4/5 (2004-2005).
Goursaud Bastien, UPJV, bastiengoursaud@hotmail.com
Sean Bonney, Political Freedom and the Subjective
As a political activist involved in the 2010 student protests and anti-austerity protests, Sean Bonney conceived of his work of that time as a response to those events and loosely described his aesthetics as “militant poetics”. Yet, his avant-garde poetry is torn between two opposing impulses—the desire for collective political praxis and the expression of individual political outrage. Of his book Happiness (2011) he wrote that it was about “the transformation of internalized violence into social violence, to the point where […] voices can reject their victimhood, and claim some degree of social strength.” Elsewhere, commenting on Rimbaud’s letter to Georges Izambard, Bonney interprets the famous “derangement of all the senses” as a derangement of the social senses, what he calls “a collectivising of subjectivity”.
Bonney’s appropriation of that poetic project, in particular through the poems’ channelling of other voices, will be at the core of this paper. It will also look at how Bonney’s later poetry, forced to reckon with the experience of political failure, attempts to define a poetry that is a site for combatting capitalism’s decimation of real subjectivity.
Johnston Andrew, CPGE Lycée du Parc, ajohnstonleparc@gmail.com
Yeats, the Upanishads, and the poetics of spiritual liberation
This paper will explore the place of ‘mukti’, the Upanishadic notion of spiritual emancipation, as it is articulated in the late poetry and vision of W. B. Yeats. These Indian scriptures represent an early interest in Yeats’s poetic and spiritual search (the two being one), to which he returned more fully at the end of his life, as evidenced in his collaboration with Sri Purohit Swami in the translation of the Ten Principle Upanishads (1937). Of this Vedantic thought he wrote in a letter to Sturge Moore, “this seems to me the simplest and to liberate us from all manner of abstraction and create at once a joyous, artistic life”.
Yeats’s symbolism and prosody will be explored as the means of expressing character and action rather than abstractions, maintaining a tension between living fully in the world, including political struggle, and escaping the cycle of suffering and rebirth. This can come through the Vedantic resolution of the duality of desire (‘is’ and ‘ought’), or of knowledge (‘knower’ and ‘known’). For Yeats, emancipation in these terms is life-affirming, and so the Soul’s offer in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ of a final escape from rebirth is rejected by the poet.
We will look in particular at the Byzantium poems, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’, his prose work A Vision and Yeats’s poetic rendering of the Upanishads in this light. Occasional useful parallels will be drawn between the Yeatsian vision of liberation and Kathleen Raine’s late poetry. The poetess was both a specialist of Yeats and drawn to Indian philosophy in her later years.
Lemeunier Samantha, ENS Lyon, samanthalemeunier2@gmail.com
The Digital Emancipation of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry
This paper examines how William Carlos Williams’s poetic experiments anticipate the procedural and generative logic of digital literature, thereby emancipating poetry from the constraints of linearity, fixity, and interpretation. As Robert Lowell described in 1961, Williams’s writing unfolds through “ramifications,” a prefiguration of the associative logic of hypertext. For example, with his “Readie Pome” (1932), Williams sought to contribute to Bob Brown’s project The Readies (1930) in which the poem was to become a machinic and modular text, where syntax is reduced to linguistic code and meaning arises through iteration and compression. In Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (2014), Jessica Pressman situates this experimental modernism within the genealogy of electronic literature, which reveals continuities between modernist and digital aesthetics. Williams’s assertion that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” takes on literal significance in programmable media such as Mark Sample’s “This Is Just Infinite” (2021), a digital reimagining of William Carlos Williams’s iconic poem “This Is Just To Say.” Each iteration produces a variation on Williams’s original text. “This Is Just Infinite” exemplifies how electronic poetry radicalizes modernist experiments with form and translates 20th-century writings into the language of the hypermodern and algorithmic age. By transforming a static, canonical poem into a dynamic and participatory experience, Sample’s work emancipates Williams’s poem from its fixed form and questions traditional notions of authorship and textual stability. Yet, this so-called emancipation raises questions: does algorithmic openness truly liberate the text, or does it bind it to the determinism of code? In translating poetic creativity into computational procedure, to what extent does the digital medium redefine the ontology of the poetic object itself? This paper consequently contributes to such debates on the continuity between modernist experimentalism and electronic literature, while reassessing what it means for poetry to be “free” in a world governed by algorithms.
Bibliographie
Brown, Bob. The Readies. Roving Eye Press, 1930.
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. University of Alabama Press, 2002.
Pressman, Jessica. “Machine Poetics and Reading Machines: William Poundstone’s Electronic Literature and Bob Brown’s Readies.” American Literary History, 23, no. 4 (Winter 2011), pp. 767- 794.
Pressman, Jessica. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Sample, Mark. “This is Just Infinite.” Samplereality, 2021, <https://samplereality.itch.io/this-is-just-infinite>
Smith, Hazel. “No Ideas but in Technology: William Carlos Williams, Concepts of the New, and Electronic Literature.” William Carlos Williams Review 41, no. 1 (2024): 30-57.
Williams, William Carlos. “Readie Pome.” Collected Poems Volume 1. New York: New Directions, 1986, p. 356.
Saby Aurélien, CPGE Hélène Boucher, saby.aurelien@yahoo.fr
“Have a Good Time” (1931) by W.H. Auden, or Emancipation in the Wood?
John Fuller claims that “[a]ll constraints are stimulating to poetry” (Writing the Picture, 2010). One may add that formal constraints are liberating indeed, as exemplified by W.H. Auden’s sestina entitled “Have a Good Time” where a mysterious anonymous character experiences an uncanny form of emancipation as soon as he enters the forbidden wood: “Now, curious, following his love, / […] Finds consummation in the wood / And sees for the first time the country.” A close reading of this poem may evidence the paradoxical role of formal constraints in the process of emancipation… and of creation. The sestina’s resurgence as a viable poetic form in the 1930s is tied to William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) where it is described as “freakish”. The safe, stable framework of Auden’s sestina, with its reassuring bay (“You’ll never catch fever then in the country. / You’re sure of a settled job at the vats”) actually seems strangely frozen – a utopian country so carefully mapped out that it sometimes verges on dystopia –, thereby encouraging a wish for emancipation through self-assertion. Nevertheless, “Have a Good Time” also highlights that any desire for emancipation is inevitably linked to a solid frame – mirrored by the very complex form of the sestina – to emancipate oneself from. Auden’s lines are thus fraught with tensions between tradition and liberation that turn out to be interdependent. They strikingly celebrate the conventional forms and myths (utopia, “Merry Old England”) they aim at breaking away from, while having the reader witness various kinds of creative emancipation – from childhood to adulthood, from a reassuring bourgeois industrial setting to a more authentic world, from conservative inaction to challenging action and self-fulfillment, from the “frozen speech” of myth to poiesis “contracting into an essential system” (Roland Barthes, Mythologies).