Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn: Serve Your Own Sentences

The first full-length study of the poet, artist and activist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), this book consolidates Mendelssohn's reputation as one of the most important avant-garde British poets of her generation and explores her contribution to the powerful tradition of women writing enclosure and escape. Mendelssohn was herself incarcerated in Holloway women's prison between 1971-76, and her bold and inventive poetry foregrounds and subverts, but does not triumphantly overcome, conditions of constraint. Informed by extensive original archival research, this book reads her highly experimental lyric alongside the poetry of her forerunners and contemporaries, including Nancy Cunard, Muriel Rukeyser and Denise Riley, restoring to view a lost network of radical, Jewish and feminist modernism. With chapters on the poetry of the Spanish Civil War, the legacy of the Holocaust, the Women's Liberation Movement, the transformation of HMP Holloway in the 1970s and prison abolitionism, Incarceration in the Poetry of Anna Mendelssohn illuminates the historical, political and literary contexts that shape this work and argues that Mendelssohn advances a poetics not of emancipation, but of abolition. Cover Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘I understand the trap of systems’ – against an emancipatory poetics Words won’t break these walls Anna Mendelssohn: A brief biography Enclosure and escape A note on method: Poetry’s makers 1 ‘Reading me through Guernica’: Lyric afterlives of the Spanish Civil War Part 1: Spanish backdrops to British Sounds Part 2: Nancy Cunard and the long epic on Spain 2 ‘Nowhere short of Nuremberg’: A post-concentrationary poetics Part 1: An nn. Part 2: Muriel Rukeyser and the poetry of witness 3 ‘Feminized, although not without dissent’: Gender, lyric subjectivity and constraint Part 1: Bromide feminists and male power socialists Part 2: Denise Riley and lyric constraint 4 ‘Serve your own sentences’: Carceral poetry in the era of the therapeutic community Part 1: Long flowing sentences Part 2: Psychiatric sentences Part 3: Domestic discipline Conclusion: Towards a poetics of abolition Bibliography Index