Parnok

2013

This thesis is composed of two parts: Hoard, a collection of poems, and Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry, an inquiry into the metaphor of darkness in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Anglophone poetry. Hoard includes four series of poems-'Red Boat', 'Hoxne', 'Quatrefoils' and 'White Swan'-which use the Hoxne hoard as a metaphor for lost love. The second series is titled 'Foundlings', and is based on archival tokens from children who were abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the mid-eighteenth century. The third series includes 'Elegy' and 'Decorations', and uses descriptions of the Staffordshire hoard along with eyewitness accounts of global conflict in the late-twentieth century to the present day. Dark Lyrics: Studying the Subterranean Impulses of Contemporary Poetry examines the theme of loss presented in the poems Hoard, progressing from orphans to silenced women to bereavement to war to ecological disaster. The book is a series of mediations of a central topic and includes close readings that show how an individual contemporary writer uses the topic within his or her work. Meditation One posits that forms of loss appear in poetry as metaphors of darkness, and proceeds historically through the work of Dante, Shakespeare and Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Wright; the chapter ends with a close reading of John Burnside's prose poem 'Annunciations' (Common Knowledge). Meditation Two looks at the mythological uses of the concept of darkness, especially as it represents ego loss, and discusses Joan Retallack's 'Afterrimages'; the chapter closes with a discussion of Rusty Morrison's Whethering and when the true keeps calm biding its story. Meditation Three looks at the emotions of lost love, both familial and romantic, and includes a discussion of Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions and ethics. The chapter includes close readings of Elizabeth Robinson's The orphan and its relations and Susan Howe's That This. Meditation Four discusses the pain caused by war and the form of my long poem 'Decorations'; it includes an examination of Seamus Heaney's North. The chapter concludes with an essay on Maxine Chernoff's book Without. Meditation Five discusses objects and how they become a part of the body and therefore become a potential locus for both pain and loss; the chapter closes with a close reading of Brenda Coultas' The Handmade Museum. The themes and ideas are reiterated in the Conclusion.

2012

This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations of one public space after another in the name of (almost) everybody, marks an appropriate moment for reflection on fear and religion by way of poetry. Donne’s career, before and after his ordination, is a life in poetry poised between love and death – or, more properly, in love, in medias res, eye to eye with death in the arc (as Doris Humphrey suggested) between dying and dying. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx characterized religion as “the general theory of this world,” inverted, as he understood it, because the state in which we live is upside down. A general theory of a world is a product of that world, but it is also a vision of the whole of that world articulated by one acting in it as a theorist, inside standing as though out. In a time and place marked by pervasive feelings of impending danger identified with death and politics, Donne embraced poetry as a sacramental act affirming the real presence of love. At a time when those feelings are familiar, that is where I propose to begin – not with a paper on Donne but, taking Donne as an exemplar, with a brief essay in what can be done in poetry in medias res to nurture a res publica that is not twisted by fear toward violence.

Erothanatos, 2021

Poetry, drama and the novel present readers and viewers with emotionally significant situations that they often experience as moving, and their being so moved is one of the principal motivations for engaging with fictions. If emotions are considered as action-prompting beliefs about the environment, the appetite for sad or frightening drama and literature is difficult to explain, insofar nothing tragic or frightening is actually happening to the reader, and people do not normally enjoy being sad or frightened. The paper argues that the somewhat limited and problematic epistemological framework for dealing with the question of fiction-induced emotions has been enhanced by a better empirical understanding of the role of the emotions in social animals and in our individual hedonic economies, as well as by a more generous philosophical assessment of what counts as 'real'. Literary works can be understood further as monuments to experiences of loss that memorialize the highly pleasurable attachments associated with them. The term 'poet' in the title of this article refers to the literary artist in general, following the usual translation of the term in Freud's essay, 'The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming'. 1 Its subject matter is the 'Anna Karenina problem', the 'paradox of car-ing', which has a double aspect. 2 First, the mode of generation and ontological status of literature-generated emotions remains contentious; there is no general agreement on whether we can actually care about things that never happened and people who never existed. Second, the pleasurable nature of the aesthetic experiences of grief, fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions remains puzzling, in the absence of better elucidation of the psychological mechanisms allegedly at work in catharsis or aesthetic distancing. Grief has meanwhile been undertheorized by philosophers. This is understandable. To the philosopher, the salient phenomena are attachment, the building and maintenance of social bonds, and cooperative activities. Moral and political philosophy have much to say about care, community, responsibility to others, and related topics. Neglect, secession, and aban-donment attract less attention, for it is hard to talk about that which is not. Yet we recognize that emotional life consists of cycles of attachment and loss and that their evolutionary roots are deep and wide. 3 Friends drift away or move away, and we replace them with new friends; the children whose needs structured our lives grow up and move out so as to have children of their own; we tear up the hearts of others and get our own torn up too. Ordinary conversation testifies to the centrality of these attachments and losses in people's lives.

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal

If to be sympathetic to others is a prerequisite for harmonious community, how does this function in the absence of identities in common? In his figurations of sympathy as auto-poetic affectivity, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself offers a way; exceeding the humanist register on which much thinking about community relies. Five hundred thousand iridescent bodies move as a coordinated phalanx in Mid-Atlantic: mega-shoals of teleost fish. A swooping mass of starlings wheel over the fields at twilight. Above them, nebulae composed of glowing dust particles coherently present themselves to human eyes as stars. We cannot say if mackerel know anything of nebulae. But when we write and read about them, such formations elicit our sympathies. They are excruciatingly beautiful examples of how poorly we conceptualise the relationships of parts and wholes. It takes considerable effort to imagine any precise connection between the fishes, the starlings and the cradles of the stars. They seem very distant from our conceptions of our own shoal, "our community". "Our community"? Who is this "we"? Whitman's Song of Myself answers with maximum inclusivity: the carpenter, the prostitute, the prize-fighter, the red girl, the child, the runaway slave. In its desire to speak to, and for, the many different individuals of the American en masse, Whitman's song might just as happily have been titled "Symphony of all Others". Renowned for its immense optimism about the social power of sympathy it is an exuberant celebration of the "common people", a refusal to countenance "a single person slighted or left away" (sec.19). Declaring "I am he attesting sympathy" (sec.22), the poem's democratic and compassionate persona offers a remarkable catalogue of America's diversity, moving from contralto to carpenter, duck shooter to deacon, culminating in the affirmation: "And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,/ And of these one and all I weave the song of myself" (sec. 15). Perhaps no other poet has aspired to contain such "multitudes" or to embrace a geography of selfhood that is so expansively drawn.

2005

Journal of literature and trauma studies, 2014