Elements in Poetry and Poetics – serie

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White explores the relation between text, author, and reader - a nexus theorized as the 'apparatus' in Cha's study of cinema - by tracing two key literary intertexts in Dictée: Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner,' a submerged literary resonance in Apparatus, Cha's anthology of film theory, and the writing of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a primary intertext at the heart of Dictée. In Cha's film theory, black and white is the flicker of the cinematic apparatus, and the Elements readings consider this contrasting palette in self-reflexive portraits in black and white. This study reads flashes of identification, often in punishing self-encounters, and it dwells on the figure of the martyr to arrive at the death of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the patron saint of artists and scholars fascinated by her art and her suffering.

This Element examines how contemporary poets reimagine virtuosity as a mode of poetic performance. It sees virtuosity not as a fixed attribute but a strategic choice - one a poet may enter at specific moments, in specific forms, to heighten the reader's experience. Certain forms are themselves virtuosic, inviting expectations of difficulty, display, and compositional drama. Through readings of Paul Muldoon, Tyehimba Jess, and Joyelle McSweeney, the Element explores how poetic virtuosity stages not just skill, but stakes: a charged interplay of technique and expressivity. These poets embrace formal extravagance and linguistic excess, making visible the labour of composition while risking the charge of style over substance. Drawing on a nineteenth-century lineage of debates in music and art, the Element traces how poetic virtuosity confronts crisis. In doing so, it rethinks poetic form as an aesthetic of risk, outpouring, and resistance.

This Element develops a close reading of 'Britain's leading late modernist poet', J. H. Prynne. Examining the political and literary contexts of Prynne's work of the 1980s, the Element offers an intervention into the existing scholarship on Prynne through close attention to the ways in which his poems respond to the social and political forces that define both modern Britain and the wider world of financialized capitalism.

Radical Tenderness argues for the importance of poetry in negotiating political and social catastrophes, through a focus on the unusual intimacies of committed writing. How do poets negotiate between the personal and the public, the bedroom and the street, the family and class or communal ties? How does contemporary lyric, with its emphasis on the feelings and perceptions of the individual subject, speak to moments of shared crisis? What can poetry tell us about how care shapes our experiences of history? How do the intimacies found in protest, on strike, in riots, and in spaces of oppression, transform individual lives and political movements? Through a series of focussed readings of four twenty-first century poets - Caleb Femi, Bhanu Kapil, Juliana Spahr and Anne Boyer - Radical Tenderness reflects the perspectives provided by intimate poetries on the shared political emergencies of poverty, war, ecological catastrophe, racism, and illness.

Poetry has always courted suffering. Poets sing their suffering, we've been told, and there can be no poetry without suffering. Louise Glück wasn't too sure about that. Suffering features centrally in her poetry and she discussed its role in poetry in her critical writing, where she often retained the language of poetry as martyrdom. However, she was keen to stress that suffering's part in composition has been misplaced and misunderstood, its function idealised and fetishised. Surveying a wide range of texts about poetry's relationship to suffering, and drawing surprising links between very different voices, this book situates Glück both in the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke's lyrical suffering and in the tradition of T. S. Eliot's impersonal approach to poetry. Glück's most powerful and characteristic discussion of suffering, it argues, takes place in her 1992 volume, The Wild Iris.

Radical Tenderness argues for the importance of poetry in negotiating political and social catastrophes, through a focus on the unusual intimacies of committed writing. How do poets negotiate between the personal and the public, the bedroom and the street, the family and class or communal ties? How does contemporary lyric, with its emphasis on the feelings and perceptions of the individual subject, speak to moments of shared crisis? What can poetry tell us about how care shapes our experiences of history? How do the intimacies found in protest, on strike, in riots, and in spaces of oppression, transform individual lives and political movements? Through a series of focussed readings of four twenty-first century poets - Caleb Femi, Bhanu Kapil, Juliana Spahr and Anne Boyer - Radical Tenderness reflects the perspectives provided by intimate poetries on the shared political emergencies of poverty, war, ecological catastrophe, racism, and illness.

Poetry has always courted suffering. Poets sing their suffering, we've been told, and there can be no poetry without suffering. Louise Glück wasn't too sure about that. Suffering features centrally in her poetry and she discussed its role in poetry in her critical writing, where she often retained the language of poetry as martyrdom. However, she was keen to stress that suffering's part in composition has been misplaced and misunderstood, its function idealised and fetishised. Surveying a wide range of texts about poetry's relationship to suffering, and drawing surprising links between very different voices, this book situates Glück both in the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke's lyrical suffering and in the tradition of T. S. Eliot's impersonal approach to poetry. Glück's most powerful and characteristic discussion of suffering, it argues, takes place in her 1992 volume, The Wild Iris.

Identifying ourselves, others, writers, with their opinions-and taking the form of the opinion as the epitome of political engagement-we assert a picture of the self that ought to be scrutinized. Mass print generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, as well as the development of specialized forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying any vision of a cogent public sphere: disinformation is not a purely 21st century, internet phenomenon. Poetry helps us understand this situation. Appearing in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as virtual. As such, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry makes perceptible other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance becomes virtualized. Sometimes, by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world events to the need to self-assert; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices that challenge the idea that we are the authors of our own opinions.

Identifying ourselves, others, writers, with their opinions-and taking the form of the opinion as the epitome of political engagement-we assert a picture of the self that ought to be scrutinized. Mass print generated, along with the railways, telegraph, information-relays national and global, as well as the development of specialized forms of technological, scientific, economic, and medical knowledge, a sea of discourse belying any vision of a cogent public sphere: disinformation is not a purely 21st century, internet phenomenon. Poetry helps us understand this situation. Appearing in verse, claims about reality have been characterized, or have self-characterized, as virtual. As such, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry makes perceptible other ways in which, in other precincts, utterance becomes virtualized. Sometimes, by the psychological turbulences of the citizen-as-creature, appropriating world events to the need to self-assert; sometimes, as a result of affective matrices that challenge the idea that we are the authors of our own opinions.