Books by Lynley Edmeades
In this luscious collaboration poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek explore ideas of the ... more In this luscious collaboration poet Lynley Edmeades and painter Saskia Leek explore ideas of the quotidian and its everyday miracles. Their close, intense domestic observations merge with the philosophical, in a quest for deeper meaning. Leek’s high-colour palette and symbolic investigation of the domestic provide Edmeades with a starting point, to which she writes back with a chromatic and vivid pen.
In repetitive and evolving processes, artist and poet speak to each other through a prismatic renewal of familiar objects and images — fruit bowls, ceramic cups, sleeping babies, the view from a window — holding them up to the light and presenting them anew.
This fourth book in the kōrero series of ‘picture books for grownups’, edited by Lloyd Jones, is as surprising, engaging, and delightful and its predecessors High Wire, Shining Land and The Lobster’s Tale.
In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listen... more In this original second collection, Lynley Edmeades turns her attention to ideas of sound, listening and speech. Listening In is full of the verbal play and linguistic experimentation that characterised her first collection, but it also shows the poet pushing the form into new territories. Her poems show, often sardonically, how language can be undermined: linguistic registers are rife with uncertainties, ambiguities and accidental comedy.
She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening – or the errors of listening – in everyday communication.
Otago University Press, 2016
As the Verb Tenses is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic talent: one run with gleaming... more As the Verb Tenses is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic talent: one run with gleaming wires of joy. In poems that gather together the vivid details of childhood memory, the surreal juxtapositions of life in the contemporary West, the wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply lodged pain of historical and personal loss, Lynley Edmeades speaks to us in delicately spun lines that press out ironies, dissonances and profound formative experience.
From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry’s table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge.
This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent.
What a fine reminder this collection is, of how language is what memory is played on, and gives the moment its flair, its resonance, its abiding form. I admire As the Verb Tenses for how the past and the present so vividly ring in lines of such clarity and precision and deft witty assessing. As wine buffs like to put it, I was held by its immediate impact, as much as by its maturity and depth.
– Vincent O’Sullivan
Papers by Lynley Edmeades
Journal for Literary & Intermedial Crossings, 2022
University of Otago, 2013
This thesis examines the ways in which John Cage negotiates the space between musical and literar... more This thesis examines the ways in which John Cage negotiates the space between musical and literary compositions. It identifies and analyses the various tensions that a transposition between music and text engenders in Cage's work, from his turn to language in the verbal score for 4' 33'' (1952/1961), his use of performed and performative language in the literary text "Lecture on Nothing" (1949/1959), and his attempt to "musicate" language in the later text "Empty Words" (1974-75). The thesis demonstrates the importance of the tensions that occur between music and literature in Cage's paradoxical attempts to make works of "silence," "nothing," and "empty words," and through an examination of these tensions, I argue that our experience of Cage's work is varied and manifold. Through close attention to several performances of Cage's workby both himself and others-I elucidate how he mines language for its sonic possibilities, pushing it to the edge of semantic meaning, and how he turns from systems of representation in language to systems of exemplification. By attending to the structures of expectation generated by both music and literature, and how these inform our interpretation of Cage's work, I argue for a new approach to Cage's work that draws on contemporary affect theory. Attending to the affective dynamics and affective engagements generated by Cage's work allows for an examination of the importance of pre-semiotic, pre-structural responses to his work and his performances. At the same time, this thesis demonstrates the importance of music and literature as frameworks for interpretation even and especially where Cage attempts to undermine these frameworks. The thesis, then, identifies the tension between pre-interpretative affective response and preconceived frameworks for understanding as part of a dynamic that drives the interplay between music and literature in Cage's work.
Poetics Today, 2021
This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein's literary innovatio... more This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein's literary innovations and the new sound media of her time. By examining these connections, this article looks at Stein's compositional techniques—in particular her concept of the continuous present and her lifelong interest in speech and dialogue—to examine how new media technologies intersected with her attempt to change the way writing was written, read, and heard. By focusing on sound, and looking specifically at her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), this article reads Stein's innovative poetics against the backdrop of concurrent changes to audio technologies during her career. Finally, the article argues that by paying attention to the ongoing shifts in media ecologies in relation to modernist innovations, we might gain insight into the larger phenomenological and sensorial sphere that formed the backdrop to modernism.
Poetics Today, 2021
This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein’s literary innovations a... more This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein’s literary innovations and the new sound media of her time. By examining these connections, this article looks at Stein’s compositional techniques—in particular her concept of the continuous present and her life-long interest in speech and dialogue—to examine how new media technologies intersected with her attempt to change the way writing was written, read, and heard. By focusing on sound, and looking specifically at her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), this article reads Stein’s innovative poetics against the backdrop of concurrent changes to audio technologies during her career. Finally, this article argues that by paying attention the ongoing shifts in media ecologies in relation to modernist innovations, we might gain insight into the larger phenomenological and sensorial sphere that formed the backdrop to modernism.
This thesis examines the ways in which John Cage negotiates the space between musical and literar... more This thesis examines the ways in which John Cage negotiates the space between musical and literary compositions. It identifies and analyses the various tensions that a transposition between music and text engenders in Cage’s work, from his turn to language in the verbal score for 4’ 33’’ (1952/1961), his use of performed and performative language in the literary text “Lecture on Nothing” (1949/1959), and his attempt to “musicate” language in the later text “Empty Words” (1974–75). The thesis demonstrates the importance of the tensions that occur between music and literature in Cage’s paradoxical attempts to make works of “silence,” “nothing,” and “empty words,” and through an examination of these tensions, I argue that our experience of Cage’s work is varied and manifold. Through close attention to several performances of Cage’s work— by both himself and others—I elucidate how he mines language for its sonic possibilities, pushing it to the edge of semantic meaning, and how he turns...
Performance Research
This paper brings the two fields of performance writing and sound art together. I argue that both... more This paper brings the two fields of performance writing and sound art together. I argue that both performance writing and sound art look to interrogate similar degrees of in-betweenness, where doubt is beneficial and can serve to disrupt our previously conceived frameworks of interpretation. At the same time, both these genres aim to hover outside fixed frameworks or categories of understanding and interpretation. To think about performance writing through and with sound studies, I argue, means to prioritize the sound of language -- and the poetic performance that brings that sound to life -- over its fixed meaning. Consequently, the focus is on language-in-sound, which prolongs our affective engagement with the sonic capacities of language, rather than its subsequent semantic fields of reference. By way of illustration, this paper also includes a performative exegesis. This piece, titled ‘Say Sibilance’, was composed during the Performance, Writing Symposium in Wellington in March 2017, and aims to explore the ways in which language-in-sound enables us to throw open some of the classifications that have historically governed textual practice, before categorical or semantic interpretation kicks in.
Australian Literary Studies, 2014
Comparative Literature, 2016
Performance Research: On Writing and Performance , 2018
This paper brings the two fields of performance writing and sound art together. I argue that both... more This paper brings the two fields of performance writing and sound art together. I argue that both performance writing and sound art look to interrogate similar degrees of in-betweenness, where doubt is beneficial and can serve to disrupt our previously conceived frameworks of interpretation. At the same time, both these genres aim to hover outside fixed frameworks or categories of understanding and interpretation. To think about performance writing through and with sound studies, I argue, means to prioritize the sound of language -- and the poetic performance that brings that sound to life -- over its fixed meaning. Consequently, the focus is on language-in-sound, which prolongs our affective engagement with the sonic capacities of language, rather than its subsequent semantic fields of reference.
By way of illustration, this paper also includes a performative exegesis. This piece, titled ‘Say Sibilance’, was composed during the Performance, Writing Symposium in Wellington in March 2017, and aims to explore the ways in which language-in-sound enables us to throw open some of the classifications that have historically governed textual practice, before categorical or semantic interpretation kicks in.
Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life, 2018
A literary essay on grief and desire.
Landfall, 2017
A literary essay which explores ideas of listening/non-listening. Runner-up in the 2017 Landfall ... more A literary essay which explores ideas of listening/non-listening. Runner-up in the 2017 Landfall National Essay Competition (New Zealand).
Electronic Book Review, 2016
In an essay spanning modernist and postmodernist poetics, Lynley Edmeades demonstrates how postmo... more In an essay spanning modernist and postmodernist poetics, Lynley Edmeades demonstrates how postmodern poetry cultivates “present-ness” by drawing on Lyotard’s concept of “constancy,” Gertrude Stein’s notion of “continuous present” and Caroline Bergvall’s adherence to “non-linearity.”
Comparative Literature, 2016
John Cage's “Empty Words” (1974–75) was designed to collapse the space between music and language... more John Cage's “Empty Words” (1974–75) was designed to collapse the space between music and language. In attempting to do so, the work simultaneously disrupts and depends upon expectations generated by our regular interpretive frameworks. Using contemporary affect theory, I offer a new reading of “Empty Words” that locates and examines the pre-semiotic, pre-categorical dimensions of the state that occurs when these expectations are thrown into disarray. To examine the affective dynamic in Cage's cultivation of polysemy and indeterminacy, I draw on Brian Massumi's categorization of the event. I also employ Sianne Ngai's term “stuplimity” to discuss Cage's 1977 performance of “Empty Words” and to deconstruct the affective dynamic generated between Cage and his audience. While Cage is seeking to disintegrate the distance between music and language, he is simultaneously dependent on these frameworks to generate and prolong an affective engagement with the work.
Australian Literary Studies, 2014
Irish Pages: Journal of Contemporary Writing, 2012
Theses by Lynley Edmeades
This thesis examines avant-garde poetry's engagement with sound and sound technology over the las... more This thesis examines avant-garde poetry's engagement with sound and sound technology over the last eighty years. Focusing on the work of Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and Caroline Bergvall, I investigate the ways in which these figures use and experiment with new forms of audio and media technology. In the process, I show how avant-garde poetic responses to sound and sound technology can help us understand wider social and cultural changes in sound and sound media. By tracing the changes in the perception of voice and sound in poetry over the course of the last eighty years, I show how these three artists have been affected by changing sound media environments and how their work both anticipates and shapes these developments.
This thesis also proposes a new way of analyzing the operations of sound in avant-garde poetics. Drawing on Reuven Tsur's concept of “interpretive uncertainty,” I investigate the ways in which we engage with sound in language before it becomes categorically understood. Particularly relevant to the study of avant-garde poetics-where the emphasis falls on the expansion or rejection of preconceived boundaries-I consider how Stein, Cage, and Bergvall use sound and sound technology to generate interpretive uncertainty. Finally, by examining the connections and juxtapositions between the writers' various uses of sound and sound technology over time, I look to highlight the interplay between the sonic affectivity of language and the changing sound media environment.
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Books by Lynley Edmeades
In repetitive and evolving processes, artist and poet speak to each other through a prismatic renewal of familiar objects and images — fruit bowls, ceramic cups, sleeping babies, the view from a window — holding them up to the light and presenting them anew.
This fourth book in the kōrero series of ‘picture books for grownups’, edited by Lloyd Jones, is as surprising, engaging, and delightful and its predecessors High Wire, Shining Land and The Lobster’s Tale.
She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening – or the errors of listening – in everyday communication.
From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry’s table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge.
This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent.
What a fine reminder this collection is, of how language is what memory is played on, and gives the moment its flair, its resonance, its abiding form. I admire As the Verb Tenses for how the past and the present so vividly ring in lines of such clarity and precision and deft witty assessing. As wine buffs like to put it, I was held by its immediate impact, as much as by its maturity and depth.
– Vincent O’Sullivan
Papers by Lynley Edmeades
By way of illustration, this paper also includes a performative exegesis. This piece, titled ‘Say Sibilance’, was composed during the Performance, Writing Symposium in Wellington in March 2017, and aims to explore the ways in which language-in-sound enables us to throw open some of the classifications that have historically governed textual practice, before categorical or semantic interpretation kicks in.
Theses by Lynley Edmeades
This thesis also proposes a new way of analyzing the operations of sound in avant-garde poetics. Drawing on Reuven Tsur's concept of “interpretive uncertainty,” I investigate the ways in which we engage with sound in language before it becomes categorically understood. Particularly relevant to the study of avant-garde poetics-where the emphasis falls on the expansion or rejection of preconceived boundaries-I consider how Stein, Cage, and Bergvall use sound and sound technology to generate interpretive uncertainty. Finally, by examining the connections and juxtapositions between the writers' various uses of sound and sound technology over time, I look to highlight the interplay between the sonic affectivity of language and the changing sound media environment.
In repetitive and evolving processes, artist and poet speak to each other through a prismatic renewal of familiar objects and images — fruit bowls, ceramic cups, sleeping babies, the view from a window — holding them up to the light and presenting them anew.
This fourth book in the kōrero series of ‘picture books for grownups’, edited by Lloyd Jones, is as surprising, engaging, and delightful and its predecessors High Wire, Shining Land and The Lobster’s Tale.
She shuffles and reshuffles statements and texts, and assumes multiple perspectives with the skill of a ventriloquist. These poems probe political rhetoric and linguistic slippages with a sceptical eye, and highlight the role of listening – or the errors of listening – in everyday communication.
From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry’s table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge.
This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent.
What a fine reminder this collection is, of how language is what memory is played on, and gives the moment its flair, its resonance, its abiding form. I admire As the Verb Tenses for how the past and the present so vividly ring in lines of such clarity and precision and deft witty assessing. As wine buffs like to put it, I was held by its immediate impact, as much as by its maturity and depth.
– Vincent O’Sullivan
By way of illustration, this paper also includes a performative exegesis. This piece, titled ‘Say Sibilance’, was composed during the Performance, Writing Symposium in Wellington in March 2017, and aims to explore the ways in which language-in-sound enables us to throw open some of the classifications that have historically governed textual practice, before categorical or semantic interpretation kicks in.
This thesis also proposes a new way of analyzing the operations of sound in avant-garde poetics. Drawing on Reuven Tsur's concept of “interpretive uncertainty,” I investigate the ways in which we engage with sound in language before it becomes categorically understood. Particularly relevant to the study of avant-garde poetics-where the emphasis falls on the expansion or rejection of preconceived boundaries-I consider how Stein, Cage, and Bergvall use sound and sound technology to generate interpretive uncertainty. Finally, by examining the connections and juxtapositions between the writers' various uses of sound and sound technology over time, I look to highlight the interplay between the sonic affectivity of language and the changing sound media environment.
To investigate the concept ‘in-between,’ I read Bergvall through Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome,’ focusing on what Brian Massumi calls the ‘middling.’ By locating Cropper as a piece of performance writing, I seek to place Bergvall in the larger context of this ambivalent and complex term, one that I align with ‘middling’. I employ some of Bergvall’s own ideas about what performance writing is, and consider her current work within the historical context of other avant-garde and experimental writers. I ask how writing can be performative, both on the page and in spoken word, and how structures and constraints of power and identity can be both disseminated and reworked through the act of such experimental language projects.
Furthermore, this paper also locates performance writing—a relatively new term that encompasses a largely interdisciplinary practice—within the wider framework of performance and performance theories. By examining Cropper as a work of embodied presentation, this paper also looks as iterative poetics, interrogating the relationship between the written and spoken word, thus exploring its capacities for indeterminacy and proliferation.
By attending to the structures of expectation generated by both music and literature, I will argue for a new approach to Cage’s work that draws on contemporary affect theory. Attending to the affective dynamics and affective engagements generated by Cage’s work allows for an examination of the importance of pre-semiotic, pre-structural responses to his work and his performances. At the same time, my paper looks to demonstrate the importance of music and literature as frameworks for interpretation, even and especially where Cage attempts to undermine these frameworks. My paper, then, will seek to identify the tension between pre-interpretative affective response and preconceived frameworks for understanding as part of a dynamic that drives the interplay between music and literature in Cage’s work.
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