Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities PDF
Preview Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities
Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze Related Titles in the Continuum Literary Studies series: Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida Edited by Ruben Borg Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze Transformative Intensities Jon Clay Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Jon Clay 2010 Jon Clay has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identifi ed as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-2424-2 (hardcover) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group For Kate Oliver This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Chapter One ‘Crowned anarchy’ – Deleuze’s univocal concept of being and the simulacrum: non-representational modernism and poetic innovation 12 Chapter Two Sensation and a Deleuzian aesthetics: reading innovative poetries 43 Chapter Three The signifi cance of sensation: innovative poetry as social thought 76 Chapter Four The signifi cance of sensation: the self 102 Chapter Five The signifi cance of sensation: the composition and force of innovative poetic space 133 Chapter Six The signifi cance of sensation: the politics of contemporary innovative poetry 152 Conclusion 181 Notes 185 Bibliography 198 Index 205 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the AHRC for funding the research that produced this book: it would almost certainly not have been completed without their generous assistance. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Dr Carol Watts, of Birkbeck College, London, for her absolutely invaluable advice, criticism and belief. I would like to thank everybody involved with Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, which has, among other things, helped me to feel much less alone in my obsessions during this project. I would like to thank Professor Robert Hampson and Dr John Hall, for the combination of rigour and kindness with which they presented vital advice. I would like to thank both sides of my family for their support. Finally, I would like to offer infi nite thanks to my partner, Kate Oliver, for her support, help, advice, patience and love over the years. Introduction The Picador poetry anthology Conductors of Chaos1, published in 1996, was for a reader like myself, revelatory. Previous contact with contemporary poetry had been minimal and largely confi ned to what was an almost standardized poetry written by famous poets. It was a poetry that seemed to attempt to repre- sent me to myself; as such, it held little interest for me. It raised a response of brief acknowledgment and was gone. In Conductors of Chaos, however, was a poetry that was doing something totally different from this; something that I did not understand, could not have explained, but was excited by. Each of the 36 poets was doing something unlike the other 35, even though they obviously, in some way, belonged together. They were not what I understood contemporary poetry to be. One of the most immediately striking works was Her Weasels Wild Returning by J. H. Prynne, consisting of seven interconnected poems. It is dense and suggestive, using an unusual blend of vocabularies from a wide variety of discourses; it is authoritative but has no obvious referential basis for that authority, something that puzzled me for a long time. In fact, the sense of authority is the result of an aesthetic force that is not so much accessible as undeniable. It is not the authority of a truth faithfully represented but the authority of a thing in the world forcefully claiming its own absolute – and dynamic – existence. If it represented anything, if any meaning was signifi ed by Her Weasels Wild Returning, then that meaning was obscure and beyond my understanding. There was no doubt, however, that it was doing something aesthetically that was very powerful. That aesthetic force I immediately felt to be signifi cant, although what the signifi cance was also remained obscure. However, there seemed little doubt that it was in some way at odds with ‘stan- dard’ contemporary poetry; and it should be clear that standard here means ‘ordinary’, ‘proper’ and ‘normative’: legitimate. The poet Keston Sutherland has stated that Prynne ‘is the most illegitimate poet alive’;2 this is a statement that, when I fi rst read Her Weasels Wild Returning, I would have understood in terms of the poetry’s sheer distance from the work of the famous, standard poetry I was already somewhat familiar with.
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