Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.

The thesis comprises an introduction and annotations to Collected Poems of Richard Outram, Volume One (1957–1988), a planned critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram (1930-2005), Canadian poet and printer. It tells the story of Outram’s published oeuvre, beginning in 1957, when he published his first work in collaboration with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), up through 1988, when Outram and Howard published the last of their hand-printed, letterpress collaborations. Jernigan asserts that Outram’s oeuvre is characterized by a reiterative poetics, in which the poet “reads” individual poems into the public record of his work on multiple occasions, allowing the poems’ meanings to be shaped by the changing context of an unfolding oeuvre, as well as by changes in material context and addressed readership — an assertion reflected in the structure of her edition. At the same time, she speaks to the collaborative context of Outram’s published work, all of which was made in explicit or implicit conversation with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926 – 2002), while also being shaped by the sorts of communal forces famously noted by D.M. Mackenzie. Both the introduction and the annotations demonstrate the close link between composition and publication for Outram, poet-printer. In her introduction, Jernigan considers how this link complicates the traditional dichotomy between genetic and bibliographic approaches to textual criticism. Throughout, Jernigan establishes an updated bibliographical and biographical context for Outram’s work, enlarging upon the seminal scholarship of Peter Sanger, and contributes to the existing scholarship on Outram’s personal and publishing life with new archival research in the Gauntlet Press fonds at Library and Archives Canada, the Richard Outram papers at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the Allan and Nancy Fleming fonds at York University, and the Macmillan and Key Porter fonds at McMaster University. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The thesis comprises an introduction and annotations to Collected Poems of Richard Outram, Volume One (1957–1988), a planned critical edition of the poems of Richard Outram (1930-2005), Canadian poet and printer. It tells the story of Outram’s published oeuvre, beginning in 1957, when he published his first work in collaboration with his wife, the artist Barbara Howard (1926–2002), up through 1988, when Outram and Howard published the last of their hand-printed, letterpress collaborations. Both the introduction and the annotations demonstrate the close link between composition and publication, for Outram, and show the deep effect on Outram’s poetics of his longterm collaboration with his wife. The annotations map the interaction, through three decades, of Outram’s commercial- and private-publishing practices, and cast new light on his lifelong practice of reiteration: his habit of reading his own, older poems into the record of his unfolding work again, in new contexts, linking old work to new, and enriching the meanings of both.

How we approach a poem changes it. Recently, it has been suggested that one readerly approach - a bodily orientation characterised by distance, suspicion, and resistance - risks becoming reflexive, pre-conscious, and predominant. This use-oriented reading allows us to destabilise, denaturalise, dissect, defend, and define poetic texts through its manifestation in contemporary literary critique, yet it is coming to be regarded as the sole manner and mood of intelligent, intellectual engagement. In this thesis, I demonstrate the need to pluralise this attentive orientation, particularly when it comes to contemporary lyric poetry. I suggest how an overlooked mode of response might foster a more receptive mode of approach: the 'co-creative' response. Lyric poems mean to move us, and they come to mean by moving us. Recent 'simulation theories of language comprehension', from the field of cognitive neuroscience, provide empirical evidence that language processing is not a product of a-modal symbol manipulation but rather involves 'simulations' by certain classes of neurons in areas used for real-world action and perception. As habituation and abstraction increase, however, these embodied simulations 'streamline', becoming narrow schematic 'shadows' of once broad, qualitatively rich simulations. Poems, I suggest, seek to reverse this process by situationally novel variations of language, coming to mean in the broadly embodied sense in which real-world experiences 'mean'. Readers are asked to 'enact' the poem, to 'co-create' its meaning. Where critique traditionally requires that readers resist enactive participation in the aim of objective analysis, the co-creative response - a response 'in kind' by imitation, versioning, or hommage - asks readers to receive and carry forward the enactive unfolding of a poem with a composition of their own. I assert that, by thus responding with - rather than to - poems, we might foster an attentive stance of active receptivity, thereby coming to understand poems as the enactive phenomena they are.

No description available.

The aim of this thesis is to arrive at a characterisation of twentieth century poetry and science by means of a detailed study of the work of four poets who engaged extensively with science and whose writing lives spanned the greater part of the period. The study of science in the work of the four chosen poets, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978), Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), Edwin Morgan (1920 – 2010), and Miroslav Holub (1923 – 1998), is preceded by a literature survey and an initial theoretical chapter. This initial part of the thesis outlines the interdisciplinary history of the academic subject of poetry and science, addressing, amongst other things, the challenges presented by the episodes known as the ‘two cultures' and the ‘science wars'. Seeking to offer a perspective on poetry and science more aligned to scientific materialism than is typical in the interdiscipline, a systemic challenge to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is put forward in the first chapter. Additionally, the founding work of poetry and science, I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), is assessed both in the context in which it was written, and from a contemporary viewpoint; and, as one way to understand science in poetry, a theory of the creative misreading of science is developed, loosely based on Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The detailed study of science in poetry commences in Chapter II with Hugh MacDiarmid's late work in English, dating from his period on the Shetland Island of Whalsay (1933 – 1941). The thesis in this chapter is that this work can be seen as a radical integration of poetry and science; this concept is considered in a variety of ways including through a computational model, originally suggested by Robert Crawford. The Australian poet Judith Wright, the subject of Chapter III, is less well known to poetry and science, but a detailed engagement with physics can be identified, including her use of four-dimensional imagery, which has considerable support from background evidence. Biology in her poetry is also studied in the light of recent work by John Holmes. In Chapter IV, science in the poetry of Edwin Morgan is discussed in terms of its origin and development, from the perspective of the mythologised science in his science fiction poetry, and from the ‘hard' technological perspective of his computer poems. Morgan's work is cast in relief by readings which are against the grain of some but not all of his published comments. The thesis rounds on its theme of materialism with the fifth and final chapter which studies the work of Miroslav Holub, a poet and practising scientist in communist-era Prague. Holub's work, it is argued, represents a rare and important literary expression of scientific materialism. The focus on materialism in the thesis is not mechanistic, nor exclusive of the domain of the imagination; instead it frames the contrast between the original science and the transformed poetic version. The thesis is drawn together in a short conclusion.