12
Poetics

Abstract

This chapter begins with a discussion of three works of poetics that emphasize local and material concerns from poets-theorists-activists engaged in collaborative and experimental writing practices. This openness in form and enquiry is further reflected in the major works published in 2023 that are under examination in the body of the review, which together attend to six major topics: (1) the formation of national poetries; (2) the role of the academy in preserving or destabilizing the lyric voice; (3) the intimate impasse of confessional and anthropocentric writing; (4) the sensorial body of hybrid writing; (5) the limiting structures of racial capitalism; and (6) the role of poetry in public life. Ending with a brief reflection on the immense influence of Lyn Hejinian, this chapter attests to the openness of enquiry that the aesthetic, philosophical, and political field of poetics permits from its discrete social locations and close attention to the page, the voice, and the body.

Introduction

This year’s work in poetics contains scholarship committed to specifying the subject’s social location and celebrating affective relationships to the book. In that spirit, this introduction begins with a brief review of three books from 2023 that lie close at hand and are written by poets-theorists-teachers-activists who occupy the same location in which the review is being written (Montréal, Québec, Canada): Klara du Plessis’s I’mpossible collab, Erín Moure’s Theophylline: A Poetic Migration, and Gail Scott’s Furniture Music. Together, these books provide a theoretical lens for understanding the work of poetics as always already a form of collaboration. As du Plessis asserts, ‘When poetry faces its public, the welcoming gesture is implicit. Poetry’s hands say, come. Read me’ (p. 9). The book consists of a series of essays, loosely connected by an experimental approach to the concept of collaboration. Du Plessis’s sense of collaboration unfurls as a close attention to Canadian poetics, but it is a curious form of attention, manifesting in ‘No Collab’ as the activity of not reading, The book she is not reading is Lisa Robertson’s Boat (2004). By form of negation, the project becomes one about ‘the give and take of poetry and scholarship, the collaborative standoff between reading and thinking’ (p. 39), permitting a new ‘personal aesthetics’ (p. 40) from which she may begin to ‘write within the gap’ (p. 40). Elsewhere in the work, du Plessis attends to the minute details of the page. ‘Centering the Full Stop’, for instance, provides a thorough account of the effects of Dionne Brand’s punctuation in the long poem thirsty (2002). The full stop has the power of ‘[d]istinguishing between narrative prose and poetry’ (p. 61). The line without the full stop ‘embodies openness’ (p. 65). The essay proposes that ‘Brand has created a new grammar, diacritically shifting the accent to infuse the punctuation […] with the theoretical, socio-historical, and political’ (p. 80).

My first encounter with I’mpossible collab was outside the confines of the material book, when I heard du Plessis read ‘Collab Room’ in a collaborative poetry performance with Moure in August 2023. The occasion was the launch of Theophylline, a book du Plessis theorizes as being in ‘co-authorship’ (p. 33) with the subjects of its literary study: Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, and Angelina Weld Grimké. Moure’s book becomes a materialization of the scene of reading: ‘writing that functions to reveal me’, du Plessis writes, ‘as much as resisting the endless deferral, or complete unfeasibility, of ever clarifying poetry’ (p. 33). Translator and poet Moure’s project has never been one of fidelity to clear meaning-making. As with her translations of Fernando Pessoa, Moure writes and is drawn to literature ‘unafraid of contradiction or paradox, unafraid of the incommensurate’ (‘Fidelity’, p. 187). Poems by Moure and her alter ego Elisa Sampedrin accompany the writer’s account of her confrontation with the archive, so that Moure refuses closure in favour of openness: ‘In the Room, the three women American modernist poets whose works/voices I have chosen to open myself to: all have in some way a relation to elsewhere’ (p. 6).

Moure’s archival encounter takes place across borders. It is similarly in the United States that Scott primarily locates her latest work. Furniture Music is hard to categorize: novel, memoir, work of poetics scholarship. It provides an account of the contemporary avant-garde that coalesces around New York City in the years 2008–12 with a final interlude in 2016. As a prose writer, Scott tirelessly plumbs innovative poetries for ways outside ‘narration’s purposeful aspirations’ (p. 9). Significantly, however, Scott does not abandon prose. Her book of poetics seeks to answer ‘To what good purpose may one be putting writing in sentences?’ (p. 9). Such questions of aesthetics are inextricable from their historical context, for even as Scott stretches language to its extreme limits, she is surveying the political life of an America facing the election of two new presidents: ‘While history’s horrors […]. Spooling out behind’ (p. 163). In the coda, Scott permits the reader a sense of the motive behind her experimental mode of enquiry: ‘Inventing purposefully indeterminate, meandering sentences. Sparking thinking in multiple, contrapuntal directions. Mirroring poetry. Whose formally ajar enjambments. Likewise offering space for affect + excess’ (p. 163).

Much of what is under review in this years’ work in poetics is formally ajar and offering space for affect + excess. The following review considers nine more books of poetics and one journal article. This consideration unfolds in six parts: first, I consider the rigorous rethinking of national literatures in Eric Schmaltz’s Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-Gardism in Canada, 1963–1988 and Erin Wunker’s The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry; second, I attend to the relationship between innovative poetry and the academy, in Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University, as well as the role of the lyric in Tim Dejong’s ‘Brief, Undeniable: Lyric Address in Mark Strand’; third, I return to the anthropocentric lyric mode as affirmed or contested by Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness and Judith Rauscher’s Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry; fourth, I discuss the collaborative enquiry into atmosphere and mood accomplished by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno in Tone; fifth, I celebrate the radical Black ontologies in Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe and Against the Carceral Archive by Damien M. Sojoyner; and, in the sixth and final part, I devote attention to the last published work of Lyn Hejinian’s lifetime, Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday. I will return to the outsize influence of Hejinian on poetics as a field in the conclusion. Her rigorous attention to the possibilities of language as enquiry forms the basis for this review’s attention to the dialectical, rhizomatic, and intimate modes of thinking reflected in this year’s work.

1. The Intermedial Note of National Poetics

Eric Schmaltz’s Borderblur Poetics: Intermedia and Avant-Gardism in Canada, 1963–1988 investigates the ‘expansive, liberated intermedial poetic’ that experimental Canadian poets bill bissett and bpNichol call ‘borderblur’ (p. 1). The poetries included in this avant-garde are ‘concrete poetry, sound poetry, and kinetic poetry’ (p. 6). Schmaltz advances that these poetries are distinct from ‘the singular media of Canada’s dominant literature’ (p. 8). This is not the ‘Canadian literary imagination’ (p. 15) advanced by well-known scholars of the national literature, such as Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood. Schmaltz does acknowledge that in Canada, as well as the United States, even the avant-garde tradition ‘is typically bound’ (p. 58) to exclusionary narrativizations, such as the ‘white, masculinist cultural rebellion that excludes women and writers of colour’ (p. 59). Despite this, he does not heed the call by Canadian scholar Pauline Butling to abandon the term altogether in favour of ‘rewriting cultural scripts and reconfiguring literary/social formations’ (qtd. in Schmaltz, p. 59). In what feels like a distinctly Canadian concern—to preserve the small nation’s ties to larger constellations of artistic, cultural, and political practice—Schmaltz does not wish to ‘disconnect Canadian borderblur poetics from historical and concurrent avant-garde movements’ (p. 59). He retains the term, just as Kimberly Quiogue Andrews will in The Academic Avant-Garde, in order to claim that Canadian intermedial poetics are ‘representative of both aesthetic and the sociological arms of avant-gardism’ (p. 59). Yet Schmaltz also means to demonstrate that these poetics possess ‘distinctive qualities’ (p. 59) that may permit their distance from the international avant-garde’s ‘exclusionary logics’ (p. 59). Whether it is lyric, avant-garde, or even poetry, the poetics scholar discovers both the limitations and possibilities of definition.

This openness is necessitated by a book like Schmaltz’s, for many of the poems it studies are not very often accepted as poems at all. For instance, Nichol’s ‘Blues’, which is reproduced by Schmaltz on a full page, is presented by Susan Holbrook, in her How to Read (and Write About) Poetry, as a poem her students respond to as ‘avant-garde toilet paper’ (p. 1). Nichol’s poem is a prime example that ‘in poetic language, form matters and is inextricably entwined with content’ (p. 2). In Schmaltz’s chapter ‘Concrete Poetry’, Nichol’s poem becomes ‘a compelling case study of Canadian concrete’s relationship to capitalism and the conditions of consumerist culture that reaches beyond national borders’ (p. 84). The poem is a rearrangement of the letters in the word ‘love’ and its inverse ‘evol’. Such attention to the materiality of language ‘transforms the idea of love, an emotion that is often referenced in the capitalist marketplace to compel consumers to purchase products to increase their chances of gathering affection’ (p. 84). As explored by Nichol, love ‘embodies the core principles of borderblur: a means of overflowing a space, of transcended borders—genre, meaning, media, and materials’ (p. 85). Schmaltz wrests accusations of unfeelingness or coldness away from avant-garde and intermedial poetries. They produce, above all, affect: frustration, yes, but also love. In the book’s third chapter, ‘Sound Poetry’, Schmaltz explicitly studies ‘the emergent role of affect’ in poetries that foreground ‘an ongoing commitment to voice, action, connection, and process’ (p. 120).

Schmaltz defines sound poetry as writing that ‘explores a range of linguistic […] and extralinguistic soundings […] that are projected from the inner and outer surfaces of the poet’s body’ (p. 121). In discussion of the Four Horsemen, a quartet including Nichol, Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, and Steve McCaffery, Schmaltz turns to a recording of the poem ‘Mischievous Eve’, ‘wherein relation and affect are strongly foregrounded’ (p. 149). The recording contains laughter that spreads from one poet to the others, until ‘it sounds as though the audience has also joined in the revelry’ (p. 149). The laughter is demonstrative of the ways that borderblur poetries ‘transgress the borders of the body’ (p. 150). Many of these transgressions, however, are performed by exclusively male voices. At the very end of the chapter, Schmaltz turns to the poetry of Penn Kemp, whose project was one of ‘sounding a woman’s body’ (p. 161). Though Schmaltz’s focus on Kemp is minuscule in comparison to his treatment of Four Horsemen, it ends with the hope that ‘finding common ground between better-known (among avant-garde networks at least) sound poetry groups […] and lesser-discussed practitioners’ (p. 163) will permit an expansion of considerations of Canada’s national literature.

In The Routledge Introduction to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Canadian Poetry, Erin Wunker uses her scholarly text to stage an intervention into readers’ understandings of concepts such as the canon, the nation, and poetry while aiming to avoid ‘the fallacy of a singular narrative of national identity tied to a linear understanding of literary production in Canada’ (p. 5). To do so, she takes efforts to consider the paucity of settler response to Indigenous literature. In Schmaltz, a similar effort arrives in the book’s coda, ‘Intermedial Poetry in Canada Today’, through attention to Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel, whose concrete poetry demonstrates the impact that settler-colonial literature has on ‘shaping settler-Indigenous relations by presenting, for example, Indigenous people and nations as “savage others” while presenting white European settlers as romantic heroes’ (p. 223). In Wunker, this begins in the first chapter, wherein she is adamant that the ‘wildly popular travel narratives’ of the settler-colonial period are not simply past documents, for they ‘contributed to the pernicious tropes of Indigenous Peoples that persist well into the twenty-first century’ (p. 7). These are the tropes that the Indigenous poets of the fifth chapter, ‘Indigenous Poetics’, steadfastly undo through their literatures by foregrounding ‘Indigenous experience’ (p. 106). At the end of this later chapter, Wunker returns to a claim that has been central to the book as a whole: ‘plotting a linear trajectory of poetry is the work of scholars, not the work of poets’ (p. 127). As a settler-scholar, one line of common flight Wunker observes in these Indigenous poetics is the more-than-human entanglements with land: ‘Land is intimately connected to Indigenous cultures, communities, histories and futures’ (p. 126).

Like Schmaltz, Wunker turns to Abel as an important touchstone for contemporary Indigenous poetics. She describes his writing as ‘a dizzying visual and aural soundscape where settler violence is placed squarely in the present’ (p. 129), thus aligning his poetry with the intermedial avant-gardes studied in Schmaltz’s Borderblur. At play here is another attempt to redefine poetry and its traditional dominance by the lyric: ‘Abel reorients the lyric circuity away from a longed-for person or thing’ (p. 131). By defeating settler attempts to erase Indigenous presence, Abel electrifies the voice and image of an always-already present Indigenous poetics. This affirms the paradoxical nature of innovation in Indigenous poetics, with which Wunker ends the chapter: ‘And while it is undeniable that Indigenous poets are at the vanguard of innovation, it is more likely that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson articulates the current moment of Indigenous poetics within the title of her book: As We Have Always Done’ (p. 132). By situating this chapter on Indigenous poetics outside of the chronology otherwise mapped by the book, Wunker also calls attention to racist constructions that characterize Indigenous presence as past, never present or future.

Wunker ends her book with a consideration of the ‘significant group of smaller and micro-presses’ (p. 177) that are emerging in the contemporary moment. Both Schmaltz and Wunker conclude with attention to poet Dani Spinosa, co-founder with Kate Siklosi of Gap Riot Press. Wunker quotes the two publishers, whose aim in running their small press is to ‘open more spaces for folks to get published, more conversations between our works, and more use of our limited resources’ (p. 178). With their rhizomatic approaches to national literatures, which puncture closed and linear narratives of self and community, both these books on Canadian poetry contribute to displacing ‘the conventional narrative of Canada’s literary history […] beyond the confines of cultural nationalism’ (Schmaltz, p. 217). These books demonstrate that consolidations of cultural nationalism in the service of literary criticism have become less desirable as methods, and that practitioners of poetic production have become more and more emphatically plural.

2. The Vanguardist Note of the Academy

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’s book The Academic Avant-Garde examines the relationship between the university and innovative poetry. Mobilizing the contested term ‘avant-garde’ for a discussion of creative writing with ties to academic institutions, Andrews relies on a dialectical method of literary criticism that aims to expose, rather than settle, contradictions and ruptures. Andrews’s argument is two-pronged: first, ‘that various facets of academic inquiry […] can be widely and radically generative for poetry’ (p. 207); and second, that ‘academic avant-garde poetry crystallizes the form of literary studies in a way that literary studies itself cannot’ (p. 207). This argument is developed through the book’s five chapters, which pair detailed analysis of American poets with enquiry into their attachments to the university.

Andrews begins by demonstrating the resistant responses of many poets to the university by the example of Wallace Stevens’s successful but ‘misspent’ (p. 19) years as an undergraduate student at Harvard. In this first chapter, Andrews must acknowledge the canonization of Stevens, which marks the appellation of ‘avant-garde’ in connection with his work ‘a stretch’ (p. 21). What Andrews claims as ‘avant-garde’ in Stevens’s poetry is the ‘crystallization […] of something that in later decades becomes a culture of class feeling’ (p. 22). Recall that Andrews is not investigating a set of poets necessarily aligned with the aesthetic avant-garde, but with the academic avant-garde: ‘highlighting the reciprocally sustaining relationship between the two modes of writing [creative writing and literary criticism] that would more explicitly come to characterize an era in which both, for good and ill, are “really a profession” within the structure of the academy’ (p. 25). What keeps a critique of the ‘constrained quarters’ (p. 38) for creativity in the university from fully dismantling Andrews’s vanguardist claims is that there is virtually no audience for poetry outside the English department, despite the tension that exists between literary studies and creative writing.

What gets replicated in the creative writing workshop is ‘the poetry of personal intimate experience’ (p. 40), such as that popularized by Robert Lowell in the mid-twentieth century. Paradoxically, however, the personal, intimate ‘I’ is not the voice valued by the artist at the front of the workshop nor by the critic in the adjacent department of literary studies. In her chapter on Susan Howe, ‘Archival Authorizations’, Andrews quotes the poet: ‘I do not like confessional poetry. […] By now it’s totally boring’ (p. 173). Andrews places this quotation amidst an investigation of the autobiographical impulse as it exists in Howe’s archival poetics, admitting: ‘the difficulty in writing about the first-person subject in avant-garde poetry is the way in which so many claims about the latter are predicated upon a repudiation of the former’ (p. 173). By way of confessional poetry, Andrews is treading into the lyric debate. Scholarly opinion differs on whether this debate was ended or reinstated by Rei Terada, who urges literary criticism to disabuse itself of the term entirely: ‘If “lyric” is a concept that will help us think, it’s because it helps us think about something besides lyric’ (‘After the Critique’, p. 196). Terada blames New Criticism for the overwhelming dominance of the lyric in academic discussions of poetry, whereas Andrews makes the claim that New Criticism’s enthusiastic response to the innovative and vanguardist poetics of writers like Ashbery ‘marks the very beginning of the academic acceptance of avant-garde work’ (Andrews, p. 53). This confluence of the lyric and the avant-garde lends further credence to Terada’s claim ‘that lyricism’s specialness and its emptiness are the same’ (p. 197). Andrews acknowledges the difficulty of claiming any of these insider poets for the vanguard, but Ashbery in particular, for Terada, is representative of the almost silencing effects of ‘lyric power’ (p. 197).

Andrews claims her project as one with the aim to ‘both broaden the scope of the poets under consideration and to look closely at the poetry itself’ (p. 217 n. 25). Broadening the scope means returning lyric poets such as Stevens and Ashbery to the vanguard, while also investigating the lyric habits of poets typically placed outside its sphere for their ‘thinkiness’ (Orr, qtd. in Andrews, p. 93). Andrews seeks to unsettle the oppositional stance between difficulty and lyric by reclaiming the unlyric qualities of Stevens and Ashbery and the lyric qualities of new practitioners in the academic avant-garde.

In ‘Brief, Undeniable: Lyric Address in Mark Strand’, Tim Dejong addresses the ‘resistance to the dissolution of lyric into culture Terada encourages’ (p. 101). Dejong claims the ‘lyric self-critique’ of Mark Strand as a form capable of ‘revealing both the universalizing tropes attendant to lyric and an awareness that their situatedness must temper these instincts’ (p. 102). Like Stevens’s and Ashbery’s, Strand’s writing involves ‘an articulation of the writing subject worked out in and as language’ (p. 103). The contemporary lyric poet is figured by Dejong as someone for whom ‘aloneness is a condition to be endured, maybe mourned, or at best temporarily assuaged’ (p. 105). Interestingly, the distinctive reflexivity Dejong mounts as foundational to Strand’s poetry is also the central mechanism of the reading with methodology at the heart of the academic avant-garde, as Andrew sees it, wherein the poet consciously or unconsciously creates the conditions whereby he is in the company of a ‘special kind of reader’ (Ashbery, qtd. in Andrews, p. 52).

Andrews’s object of study, the academic avant-garde, constitutes ‘a return to poetry outside the lyric’ (Dejong, p. 102), even while it resituates the lyric as the dominant form of the creative writing workshop. The chapter ‘Poetry in the Teaching Machine’ revisits this tension in the form of attention to Jorie Graham, whose critically acclaimed poetry ‘might fare poorly under the examining eyes of the workshop’ (Andrews, p. 90). Graham becomes a case study in Andrews’s examination of ‘the fact that the teaching of creative writing is fundamentally characterized by a contradiction: one that asserts that it cannot be taught even as it is being taught’ (p. 91). This contradiction thrives because ‘while the critic takes it upon herself to answer or complicate the questions poetry poses, the workshop leader (and pupil participants) asks why the poem itself doesn’t already supply the answers’ (p. 94). Andrews’s book is most fully itself in these moments, wherein it is a dialectical examination of how innovative craft and academic criticism form self-sustaining and necessary tensions.

Whereas the creative writing workshop encourages the crafting of a personal voice, this seems out of step with characterizations of the poetry under examination, including that of Stevens, Ashbery, Graham, and the poets in the next chapter, John Keene and Claudia Rankine. In a turn to ‘the difference race makes in conceptualizations of cutting-edge artistic production’ (p. 121), the chapter ‘Citational Coding’ examines how a growing number of Black poets ‘signal their relationship to the academy by explicitly invoking a scholarly network’ (p. 121). As practitioners within the ‘endlessly proliferating’ (p. 125) field of Black studies, Keene and Rankine write a poetry that continues the ‘discursive lineage’ (p. 126) of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Hortense Spillers ‘to build an alternative literary mode’ (p. 126). For instance, it is through the tools of ‘ironized fictionality and analytical impersonality or distance’ (p. 149) that Rankine creates a new form of the ‘I’, one that radically differs from the ‘creative writing “I”’ that, for Black poets, carries the affective history of the ‘slave narrative’ (p. 123). In Rankine’s alternative formation, for instance, there is an ‘ethical movement outward’ (p. 153) in order to embrace ‘a far-ranging “I” that sees itself as part of a vast network of thinking agents’ (p. 153).

In the end, one could fault Andrews’s academic avant-garde for replicating the ‘generic openness’ (Terada, p. 196) of the lyric. But this openness is exactly what Andrews is interested in, for hers is the work of exposing the pluralities at work in poetry of the academy. To this end, in the book’s coda, ‘Toward an Aesthetics of Disciplinarity’, Andrews calls for a proliferation of forms. While Andrews foregrounds the new cultural discourse as it circulates in poetry, her concluding statements proffer that what is at stake is also a new ‘aesthetic dimension of critical work’ (p. 212). Interestingly, this second part of Andrews’s argument, the influence of innovative poetics on literary studies, is perhaps better proven not by Andrews’s own academic prose but by the innovative forms at work in the poetics of scholars like Rachel Zucker.

3. The Confessional Note of Motherhood

Rachel Zucker’s The Poetics of Wrongness takes its title from its opening lecture-essay, which immediately unfolds as something that will be ‘impossible’ (p. 1) for Zucker to complete, recalling the ‘generative instability’ (du Plessis, p. 11) of I’mpossible collab. The reason for this is in Zucker’s admission: ‘I am always wrong’ (p. 1). The author provides evidence for this claim in the complaints of her children, husband, mother, and editor. To be wrong, the book will prove, is not inherently detrimental to thinking or writing. Zucker gathers a number of tenets for and about poetry which are decidedly wrong. The first announces: ‘John Keats is wrong […] Beauty is not truth but closer to anti-truth’ (p. 7). Strand, the figure on whom Dejong predicates his theory of lyric’s self-reflexivity, appears here as another wrong figure. Zucker recalls Strand saying ‘all art is beautiful’ (p. 8). She is against such a proposition, so she asks ‘What if I want to make art that isn’t beautiful?’ (p. 8) to which Strand, according to Zucker, replies ‘for art to succeed it had to transcend ugliness and become beautiful’ (p. 8). Though Zucker, like Strand, is undeniably a lyric poet, her embrace of the ‘poetics of wrongness’ leads to an articulation of a different lyric self, one that ‘rejects flawlessness’ (p. 8).

As this first lecture continues, Zucker develops four additional tenets: readers and writers are wrong to think poetry should be ‘obscure’ (p. 17), ‘short’ (p. 22), ‘timeless’ (p. 30), ‘universal’ (p. 31), or ‘close to godliness’ (p. 36). This final point begins with the surprising claim: ‘The poetics of failure is anthropocentric’ (p. 36). Zucker is trying to wrestle poetics away from restrictive religious ideology to dismantle oppressive hierarchies that place God over man, and man over woman. Unnecessarily, however, Zucker further enmeshes her poetics in a different hierarchy, wherein humanity is placed over other forms of animate life. This is in direct contradiction to the work of Judith Rauscher in Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry. Rauscher seeks to ‘reimagine human–nature relations’ (p. 14) through exploring ‘what it means for people on the move to encounter and engage with the more-than-human world’ (p. 15).

In one demonstration of the ways ‘ecopoetic place-making’ (p. 16) serves ‘as a restorative or constitutive practice for more-than-human communities and human-nature relations in a particular place’ (p. 16), Rauscher turns to the poetry of Juliana Spahr. Rauscher contends ‘that Spahr’s poetry examines how human and nonhuman mobilities of varying scales—from the movement of chemicals between bodies and ecosystems to the large-scale migrations of people, plants, and animals—shape human–nature relations’ (p. 88). Unlike Zucker, a confessional poet, Spahr ‘is known as an experimental ecopoet who has emphatically rejected traditional nature poetry along with the traditional lyric and, instead, embraced ecopoetics as a more self-reflective and politically engaged form of writing’ (p. 88). Both Zucker and Spahr are concerned with ‘cultural positioning’ (p. 88), but only Spahr takes into account her positioning in a more-than-human world. Spahr’s poetry brings to life that undeniable fact that ‘life in the Anthropocene’ entails ‘entanglement’ (p. 88) with the more-than-human. Experimentation is not what Zucker values in her poetry; instead, Zucker strives to make transparent the ‘affective weight’ (Andrews, p. 123) of the confessional tradition.

Zucker places the origin for the term ‘confessional’ in a 1959 review by M.L. Rosenthal of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. Those intimate lyrics would go on to form the basis of the modern lyric self as encouraged in the creative writing workshop. Where Zucker’s lecture-essay becomes most absorbing is in its search for why certain poets, like herself, have the label ‘confessional’ foisted upon them, while others are denied the label altogether. Those who are denied the space of the confessional include the queer and Jewish Allen Ginsberg, the Black women poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton, and other young writers of colour. By the end of the lecture, Zucker redefines confessional poetry’s essential characteristics in order to invite in those who have been othered by the white, cis, and straight stranglehold on the genre. Into this canon Zucker ushers in the poems of June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, Morgan Parker, Danez Smith, ‘and so many others’ (p. 80).

Zucker’s final lecture is an essayistic practice in wrongness. The poet foregrounds her failure to ever productively grapple with her object of study (motherhood) beyond the confines of mostly white, cis, straight womanhood. The reader ascertains that, for Zucker, the poets of motherhood include Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Alicia Ostriker, and Toi Derricotte. Their works, like the very lecture that is not being written, include ‘lists and questions and domestic details, sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring, like what people ate, what the children were doing, what the children were saying’ (p. 119). The act of not writing a lecture on the poetics of motherhood involves being a wife, a mother, and a teacher. Zucker describes the difficult affective state of the wife-mother-teacher who is not writing: ‘she was triage triage triage clenching her jaw and not sleeping and feeling alone in the midst of too many’ (p. 125). The too many include her sons, who feel that Zucker is not present enough; her husband, with whom she is no longer sleeping in the same bedroom; and her students, whose demand for office hours implies she can never give them enough of that commodity she herself has so little of: time.

It is in the creative writing classroom that Zucker achieves the closest version to a complete lecture. A series of mini-lectures given to the creative writing class begins to articulate a definitional sense of a poetics of motherhood, such as in the claim that ‘in the 1970s there was an emergence of mother-voices and an awareness and exploration of the consequences of the historical paucity of mother-voices’ (p. 138). As the reader receives a clearer view of who is included in this poetics, Zucker begins to articulate her concern that she is ‘observing a poetics of white cis-hetero motherhood’ (p. 140). She elaborates: ‘She was afraid to write the lecture on the poetics of motherhood because too many of the women she was talking about were white’ (p. 140). I can deeply empathize with the paralysing qualities of a fear such as this one, and I understand that due to the limitations of time (especially for a wife-mother-teacher who is also, even in the act of not writing, a writer) the solution of including a wider variety of voices is not a practical one. Of course, Zucker herself will say a page later: ‘Not having time was no excuse at all. At the same time, not having time was perhaps the single most unifying aspect of the poetics of motherhood’ (p. 141). A generous reading of this could ascertain that the lack of diversity in this poetics is, like the material-collage of domestic duty that is the essay’s form, a concrete void that both stands for this critical absence and acknowledges the shared position of mother as overburdened and out of time. A less generous reading might recommend supplanting the apologies on behalf of the white, straight, cis, female self with snippets of those othered voices denied theorization.

4. The Moody Note of Collaboration

In Tone, Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno write from a collective voice they name ‘the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere’ (p. 5). What emerges from this unusual volume is no dogmatic set of characteristics the reader can ascribe to tone, but a series of further enquiries. In the opening chapter, ‘Front Matter, or the Zone of Our Mutual Sensitivity’, the authors claim the senses as the terrain for their study of sound, odour, and light. Alongside critical assessments of the mood or atmosphere in the novels, short fiction, and hybrid texts that form their study, Samatar and Zambreno also foreground the role of their body, imagined as a collective body, and its relations to the world in receiving and understanding tone. This is nowhere more present than in ‘Guest Lecture, or Reports to an Academy’, wherein the body is left feeling lonely in a performance of the very ‘lecture tone’ (p. 86) that made Zucker’s lecture on motherhood impossible. As the lecturer investigates how to alter the ‘distance and exposure’ (p. 88) characteristic of their place ‘in front of’ (p. 88) an audience, they move outside the space of the lecture hall in order to occupy ‘the undercommons’ (p. 89). What such a shift in location allows for is an intense focus on the book of study as a social location in itself.

After the Committee leaves the lecture room for the undercommons, they are confronted with the question: ‘What is tone?’ (p. 99). This question is broached in the book’s penultimate chapter and elicits the response: ‘We don’t know […] that is why we’ve launched this committee’ (p. 99). This may feel frustrating to one asking that a single-authored study of an academic subject present a comprehensible series of questions and direct responses. Somehow, by multiplying the body of the author into a committee of two or more, the authors convincingly elide this responsibility. As the title of the second chapter announces, their methodology moves like ‘Fog, or a Gradual Accumulation’ (p. 7). Just as something resembling a conclusion arrives, there is the threat and actuality of its dissipation.

Like Zucker, Samatar and Zambreno are interested in the generative wrongness possible in literary study. Zucker’s lecture on motherhood never materializes, and Samatar and Zambreno’s scholarly book on tone never arrives; at least, it never arrives at a conclusion. This is characteristic of a certain mode of experimental writing, as observed by Geneviève Robichaud in Exit Text: ‘The book, in a way, ruins our ability to think about the book (The Book), about the ways it might test the limits of its own sovereignty and what is wrestled with there. Arrested. Rested. Bound. Tied. Fastened. Wrapped. Despite, this, exiting’ (n.p.). Here, Robichaud names the ineffable task of the writer to project into the future what has already transpired, what has already passed into the atmosphere, leaving only a trace odour. This is the odour of a ‘glandular literature’ with ‘a particularly intense relationship to the body’ (Samatar and Zambreno, p. 67). Despite the ‘odorless form’ (p. 67) of the print or electronic texts we read when we encounter literature, stories such as Mieko Kanai’s ‘Rabbits’ are permeated by a ‘strange animal smell’ (qtd. in Samatar and Zambreno, p. 67). Just as the Committee is not one voice, but two or more, the senses impacted by this odour are similarly multiple. The result is ‘a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone’ (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, qtd. in Samatar and Zambreno, p. 68). In such a formless world, the Committee is free to further explore ‘how tone involves the nonhuman’ (p. 69). What Samatar and Zambreno catch on the air is ‘a way of thinking that is multiple as well as symbiotic’ (p. 72), or a way to ‘think between species’ (p. 72). They call this quality of their chosen literary texts ‘frayed’ (p. 77): as though the books in their hands, such as their copy of Bhanu Kapil's Humananimal, have roughed themselves up in trying to escape the delimiting definitions of human and animal to become, as Kapil’s book title proposes, a hybrid of both.

What Samatar and Zambreno resist in their unusual approach to literary scholarship is the ‘distance’ (p. 17) established by so much literature and criticism. They describe tone ‘as skin tone, which covers a surface and renders it opaque’ (p. 18). While the opacity ensures a certain distance, the transformation of mood into atmosphere that settles on the skin ensures a new kind of intimacy. The object of study is closer than ever, even as it enacts its ‘solitude’ (p. 19). Though Samatar and Zambreno characterize literature as the expression of solitude in ‘the—at least desired—empty room of one’s consciousness’ (p. 19), they also insist that its mood and atmosphere cannot be ‘contained’ (p. 20). Tone is ‘something indefinite, not clear, vague, subconscious, little, wearing down’ (p. 21, italics in original). Ultimately, tone is aligned with ‘the communal’ (p. 99), described by the authors as ‘a window that one looked out of’ (p. 99). Tone becomes inextricable from ‘ecological thinking’ (p. 106), for it is the atmosphere of sound, sight, and odour.

5. The Extraordinary Note of Black Archives

In Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, she writes: ‘The “past” fails to stay in the past’ (p. 29). This remark appears in one of the numbered notes that compose the book, ending ‘Note 19’, in which Sharpe visits the Whitney Plantation and its ‘sculptures of enslaved children’ (p. 27). They serve ‘as an entry point into the past—as a point of empathy’ (p. 27). But to this point, Sharpe wonders ‘about the curatorial decision to absent adult figures from the grounds and buildings’ (p. 28). Though much of Sharpe’s text is elliptical, it provides its answers before long: ‘To move visitors, these sculptures could not be adults. The curatorial decision had followed the affective principles that coalesce around Black presence, in which adults won’t generate sympathy in the past as they don’t into this future’ (p. 28). Sharpe resists the logic that denies ordinary Black lives sympathy and resituates Black children, men, and women as worthy of notice, observation, and—most importantly—care.

Sharpe’s In the Wake opened by thinking of ‘“care” as a problem for thought’ (p. 6). Ordinary Notes unfolds care as a method for attending to the ways Black lives are represented in museum exhibits, photographs, and books. Books are of paramount importance to this project. Below ‘Note 207’ and ‘Note 211’, in photographs taken by Hilary Lo, are Sharpe’s ‘well-loved, well-read’ books (p. 298): first, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is splayed open. Marginal notes and post-it notes are material evidence of Sharpe’s care; in the second photo, the book is shut and placed alongside A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand. Exclamatory notes are visible above and below the titles. In these photographs and in the long list of books that ‘produced a feeling you wanted or needed to feel’ (p. 290), Sharpe demonstrates how literatures deliver us into other possible worlds.

In ‘Note 51’, care becomes a way of seeing the world—that is, a way of seeing Black life as beauty. Sharpe begins by quoting Saidiya Hartman, for whom beauty is ‘the love of too much’ (qtd. in Sharpe, p. 79, italics in original). Readers might be tempted to accuse Sharpe’s book of being too much—hybrid, transnational, intermedial—but Sharpe wields beauty as a method that ‘might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible’ (p. 79). This method is first learned from Sharpe’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated. The final note, ‘Note 248’, declares: ‘This is a love letter to my mother’ (p. 351). The book does not end there, but becomes a further vessel for beauty, containing photographs taken by the author and a final drawing by Cauleen Smith of the mother’s hands. Sharpe is writing to her mother, despite the maternal instruction: ‘Don’t write about me’ (p. 106). This is an instruction that both Sharpe and Zucker resist. Zucker defends herself for denying her mother’s request not to publish an earlier memoir by instantiating a poetics of wrongness. Sharpe builds methods of beauty and care, wondering if her mother’s request was not simply an impasse but a ‘recognition of the difficulty of narrating a life’ (p. 106). Integrating the ‘lists and questions and domestic details’ (Zucker, p. 119) of a poetics of motherhood, Sharpe creates a vessel for the ‘Black maternal’ (p. 167).

In a photograph of her mother taken in Philadelphia in 1922, Sharpe is arrested by the elegance of her mother’s hands. Sharpe is arrested, too, by ‘wonder that they existed against the period in which this photograph was taken. Existed against race riots, lynchings, segregation, little or no work, poor housing, the prison, and every other form of violence and privation’ (p. 175). But what is wonder in Sharpe would become cruelty in a white spectator such as Roland Barthes. He would ‘misread it’ (p. 178), Sharpe insists, providing as evidence his misreading of a Black portrait in which he describes the family’s elegant appearance as ‘an effort […] to assume the White Man’s attributes’ (qtd. in Sharpe, p. 178). Barthes misreads the photograph because ‘the ordered hierarchy of the plantation […] conditions all his seeing’ (p. 178). Ultimately, Sharpe refuses the ‘universal taxonomy’ (p. 183) of photography that Barthes proposes in Camera Lucida. His book is a testament to ‘the condition by which Barthes comes to (not) see himself—to insert his look as universal’ (p. 184). Sharpe insists: ‘Not mine. His look. Not a look or the look’ (p. 179). Sharpe intervenes in the accepted taxonomy of the photograph. This is Sharpe’s look. An ordinary look. The caring and beautiful look.

In ‘Note 164’, Sharpe asks: ‘If one began from Black, what would an entry on civilization, or claim, or archive or memory or life look like? How would it sound?’ (p. 234). In Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice, Damien M. Sojoyner answers in the form of radical archival resistance to ‘the carceral archive project’ (p. 3). Sojoyner’s slim volume foregrounds five archival collections at the Southern California Library (SCL) to draw attention to ‘the life-affirming social visions emanating from Black communal epistemes’ (p. 7). The resulting work is a call to abolition: ‘It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral’ (Sharpe, p. 262). The reader is confronted with the ways in which carcerality ‘bleeds through’ (Sojoyner, p. 7) all aspects of Black life.

Like Lyn Hejinian, Sojoyner is invested in the ways that intellectual life is not outside ‘public life’ (Hejinian, Allegorical Moments, p. 223). Sojoyner speaks to the inextricable connections between ‘rigorous study’ (p. 2) and communal action, in order ‘to both circumvent state action and actively work against the reproduction of violence’ (p. 2). Carceral archives, by a separation of ‘time, people, and space based upon racialized markers of distinction’ (p. 22), relegate Black life to the nonhuman. One reason for the carceral state, then, is that ‘Black ontological practices continue to be a foil to western epistemological directives that seek to suppress life’ (p. 23). Thus, the carceral state insists upon its naturalness and necessity by invoking the need to protect human progress: ‘making and remaking […] their existence as vital to the function of a healthy democratic society’ (p. 26). But whose society?

In the second chapter, ‘Police and the Carceral Archive Project’, Sojoyner examines the language of state and police collusion to reveal not only the degree to which policing is a form of ‘state terror’ (p. 36) but that ‘the notion of police reform within the current epoch of the carceral archive project’ is a carceral one (p. 38). It is simply another ‘means to (re)assert state authority and legitimacy’ (p. 38). This is reminiscent of the ‘structural antagonism’ Sharpe discerns in ‘police policy’ (p. 305), as she listens to an episode of the podcast This American Life in ‘Note 213’. The episode presents a scene of policing that interrupts the life of a Black man. When the event ends without violence, however, the scene is ‘played for laughs’ (p. 306), revealing for Sharpe ‘the ways in which white people position Black people within/in situations that display a total disregard for how Black life is shrivelled and Black movement restricted’ (p. 305). What emerges is further evidence that white narrativizations are dependent on ‘arranging Black life as a site of negation’ (p. 305). This is the result of ‘the critical mechanisms and inner workings of racial capitalism’ (Sojoyner, p. 40).

Sojoyner’s third chapter draws on the period of America’s ‘War on Drugs’, in order to clarify the relationship between the state and its Black subjects: ‘A multifaceted violent system, the state, through technological archiving projects, had mapped war onto Black communities, and Black subjects were the targets’ (p. 46). Far from being part of the advancement of humankind, science and technology become ‘a lever of modern humanism [that] has been instrumental in the maintenance of repressive hierarchies’ (p. 46). Carcerality is maintained by the distribution of such data and technologies but it is also, according to Sharpe, further reinforced by what institutions and individuals withhold. In ‘Note 43’, reflecting on her visit to the Legacy Museum and its lynching photographs, Sharpe wonders about the unnamed white faces and asks: ‘What if the project that white people took up was to locate each of the white people who appear in the crowds of those lynchings, those who posed for photographs and those others who appear in the background?’ (p. 66). The anonymity upholds whiteness as outside the carceral archive.

In the fourth and fifth chapters, Sojoyner reveals the far-reaching effects of ‘racial capitalism’ (p. 71): from resource extraction to health and safety. The ‘carceral epoch’ (p. 75) was never something that Black communities ‘pretty much accepted’ (Sharpe, p. 305)—to borrow the dubious phrase from This American Life to describe white Americans’ response to police violence—but something that the radical Black archives of the SCL demonstrate to have been ‘from the beginning, actively resisted on multiple fronts by those subjected to it’ (p. 305). Sojoyner’s archival research is significant not only for its blistering demonstration of ‘the sheer madness unleashed upon Black people during the buildup of the carceral epoch’ (p. 75), but for its reminder of the presence of Black communities that have been mounting projects of resistance to the rendering of Blackness as a ‘nonhuman subjectivity’ (p. 77). In the face of such an impasse, Sojoyner reaffirms study itself as a means for liberation. In Sojoyner’s understanding, ‘liberation carries with it a process, an undoing, a building to something’ (p. 87). Like poetry and poetics, it seeks to name and rewrite word- and world-structures.

6. The Eternal Note of Generosity

In ‘The Sad Note in a Poetics of Consciousness’, Lyn Hejinian writes a tribute to Barrett Watten, through an account of his life work in four spheres: creative writing, literary study, pedagogical practice, and editorial work (p. 242). Hejinian demonstrates Watten’s commitment to ‘public life’ (p. 223), which is central to poetics, as conceived of by both Hejinian and Watten: ‘We should speak of poetry and public life in a way that links them inextricably together, so as to be assured of poetry without contextual loss’ (p. 223). This permits Hejinian to attend to the historical context of Watten’s life work, in a manner directly contradictory to T.S. Eliot’s ‘historical sense’ (p. 240). While Eliot ‘renounces collectivity, the social, even, paradoxically, tradition’ (p. 241), Hejinian and Watten actively rewrite tradition through a new emphasis on the social networks of poetics.

Similar portraits of Hejinian are being written in light of her recent passing in order to commemorate ‘her continuous social and intellectual engagement’ (Shaw, n.p.). I will return to a consideration of the impact of Hejinian’s life work in the conclusion to this review. For now, I examine Hejinian’s generous portraits of the life work of others, including her brother, Doug Hall. Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday is a rhizomatic grappling with the elusive category of allegory, which Hejinian posits ‘as a dynamic presence rather than an objectified figure, producing trajectories of motion toward potential new possibilities and resisting the instantiation (and probable petrification) of ideals’ (p. 155). What is paramount to this definition is that the allegory is dynamic, in motion, and resisting. Attention to Hall’s performance art and large-scale installations allows Hejinian to demonstrate the ways in which art functions to reveal a void: ‘it matters to art that the compulsion to seek knowledge derives its intensity from the near certainty that the quest will draw us into an epistemological abyss, refusing to provide us with understanding of even, perhaps, anything to understand’ (p. 158). At first, however, Hall’s works appear to contradict this emphasis on absence. He is, the sister writes, ‘an artist of situations and their things’ (p. 159). Unlike an abyss, characterized by its emptiness, his is art in which the sublime is ‘a commanding presence’ (p. 159). Yet this is where Hejinian’s theorizing doubles back on itself. What is a commanding presence is also in the act of ‘commanding presence’ (p. 159). It is this ‘paradoxical character’ (p. 159) of the artwork—as both presence itself and a demand for presence—that enables the elusive spirit of the allegory. Even highly referential pieces like The Inner Space Simulation Module, exhibited only six months after the United States’ Apollo 8 mission, become ‘a project addressing inner, not outer, space: a work about isolation, alienation, and an awareness of powerlessness’ (p. 165). Wresting images from public consciousness, such as a national flag or a space shuttle, Hall creates art that, in its allegorical function, works with the ‘eternal present’ (p. 168).

As a writer-theorist-teacher-editor invested in the public life of poetry, Hejinian is interested in the ways the everyday ‘defies both metaphysical conceptualization and ontological specificity, even while it comprises the grounds for concrete existence and proffers life’s requisite materials and contextual relationships’ (p. 1). It is everyday life that Hejinian animates in what is her most well-known work of poetry: My Life. In ‘What’s Missing from My Life’, Hejinian takes up the original book’s aim ‘to follow the social and linguistic construction of a person’s life and to foreground the ongoing processes of subjectification and cultural placement that occur along the way’ (p. 114) in order to reflect on which aspects of the historical context were elided. This essay in Allegorical Moments contains both an auto-critical theorization of My Life’s ‘ongoing project’ (p. 117) and a new expanded version of the ninth section of My Life in which the excluded within are brought to the surface.

This expansion requires naming the ‘social locations’ (p. 117) from which the work emerged, such as ‘the San Francisco Bay Area of 1949–50—the putative period that is “covered by the poem”’ (p. 118). This chapter’s return to the excluded within is reminiscent of Zucker’s attempts in The Poetics of Wrongness to reconcile the exclusions within her poetics of motherhood. A student asks Zucker to consider how experience ‘is not evenly distributed across all mothers and how, historically, the labor of women of color/denial of their roles as others (especially black women) has made possible the ability of white mothers to inhabit the category of motherhood’ (p. 141). This is a critical intervention in the teacher’s thinking and permits questions about ‘[t]he denial of motherhood as a category to black mothers’ (p. 141). One question inevitably leads to another until Zucker’s lecture is once again proven impossible. Zucker, like Hejinian, is a generous poet and teacher, but her generosity targets a different series of affects. She shares her intimate self with the reader in the mode of the confessional lyric. Hejinian, as a practitioner and theorist of Language poetry, searches the reaches of language, its materials and its textures, for a new mode of expression. Zucker fears that strategies such as these can lead to ‘poems addressed to no one and about no one in which nothing is at stake’ (p. 75). But in ‘the work of memory’ (Hejinian, Allegorical Moments, p. 119) that constitutes My Life, the self that Hejinian shares is no less sincere or sentimental than Zucker’s.

Hejinian unearths from the social location of the poem the ‘xenophobic ethos’ (p. 119) of the United States in the 1950s, in order to excavate what has been even further elided from public consciousness: ‘an obfuscating autophobia that impedes clear understanding at a cultural level of either other or self’ (p. 120). The historical context against which Hejinian writes and rewrites her poem is one in which:

The United States as a nation repeatedly takes the other into itself, but often instead of generating a productive experience from this, the incorporation generates obfuscation. The nation can’t conceptualize itself clearly because, even while it is fixated on the otherness of the other, that otherness is hidden away inside itself—it either gets ‘naturalized’ or it gets imprisoned. (p. 120)

In a move that follows Christina Sharpe’s call that liberatory practice ‘imagines and enacts other ways of living’ (p. 262), Hejinian imagines other ways for the ‘family romance’ (p. 128) of 1950s America to play out by refusing as natural and normative the whiteness structuring the nation.

One of the first new sentences in the expanded version of My Life’s ninth poem is this: ‘Somewhere elsewhere often and once there was an African parent, but how tall she was and whether she wandered I cannot say’ (pp. 131–32). This is a profoundly allegorical moment: ‘drawing interpretation out of meanings’ discontinuity, not to establish meaning as discrete and autonomous but to identify interpretation as a dynamic force propelling both everyday and aesthetic flow and recognizing meaning as something always to be made and always on the way’ (p. 2). The dynamic, in motion, and resisting portrait in Hejinian’s new sentence refuses ‘a single story of blackness as catastrophe, self-inflicted, utterly beyond reason’ (Sharpe, p. 95). Instead, the new sentences place us at the open door of the home, in which the dialectic between self and other is being rewritten. This opening is also ‘an irresolvability, an impasse’ (p. 265), as Hejinian writes in the book’s final chapter, ‘Wild Captioning’. There is no one direction by which one might enter the eternal present of the allegorical moment. With characteristic generosity, Hejinian ‘retains the confusion, difficulty or problem’ (p. 264) of the figure—allegory, self, other—in order to permit its projection into new social locations and temporalities.

Conclusion

In her introduction to A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998, Lyn Hejinian describes the field of poetics in the 1980s to 1990s ‘as a contemporary genre of writing and artistic-intellectual practice [that] was (and is still) just beginning to discover its possibilities’ (p. 1). Poetics, as a discipline, always seems to be just beginning, for each exploratory new work in the field appears to necessitate the creation of ‘new modes of inquiry or creative approaches’ (p. 1). Poetics Journal was conceived of by Hejinian and Barrett Watten as a venue for ‘establishing dialogues between different theoretical and practical approaches to questions of language’ with a particular emphasis on ‘the interdisciplinary character of the discussion’ (p. 3). The journal would publish far-reaching issues on postmodernism and historicity, poetry and philosophy, narrative and non-narrative, and women and language. Only one of Hejinian’s own articles is collected in the guide; it is an essay later published in the scholar’s landmark book of poetics, The Language of Inquiry. ‘The Rejection of Closure’ is an oft-cited work that defines an operative term for twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics: ‘the open text’ (‘The Rejection of Closure’, p. 43). In defining a form of poetry that ‘invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies’ (p. 43), Hejinian also defined a form of poetics infiltrated by poetry’s forms. The openness of Hejinian’s scholarly work influences, I strongly suggest here, the open enquiry and political consciousness of this year’s work in poetics.

There is no sufficient way to close a reflection on the ongoing influence of a writer-theorist-teacher-activist like Hejinian; rejecting closure, then, I revisit the works written in the field that owe so much to her stewardship. Schmaltz and Wunker, in their rhizomatic surveys of discrete periods in Canadian poetics, provide a portrait of a nation’s poetry that does not cohere to borders or page-bound genres. Andrews and Dejong demonstrate the longevity of contested terms like avant-garde and lyric for a field that is always just beginning to define its vocabulary. Zucker and Rauscher bring attention to the human and more-than-human scales of poetry’s possibilities. Samatar and Zambreno expand poetry’s implications into the rooms of fiction’s poetic atmospheres. Sharpe and Sojoyner bring ordinary lives into extraordinary relief through politically searing calls for care. And Hejinian, in her most recent and final work, reminds the reader of the role of poetry and poetics in the everyday. Poetics is a field united by its efforts to rewrite our understanding of identity, nation, and the ecological through emphasis on local and material realities. The social locations of each scholarly text are announced in attention to the body of the critic, the unequal distributions of labour in the institution, and the absences of others in our logics of the commons, and our common (everyday, shared) field.

Books Reviewed

Journal Articles Reviewed

References