Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Poetry and Work offers a timely and much-needed re-examination of the relationship between work and poetry. The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely. The book interrogates whether poetry and avant-garde and experimental writing can provide models for work that is less alienated and more free. In this major new collection, sixteen scholars and poets draw on a lively array of theory and philosophy, archival research, fresh readings, and personal reflection in order to consider work and poetry: the work in poetry and the work of poetry. Individual chapters address issues such as the many professions, occupations, and tasks of poets beyond and around writing; poetry's special relationship with 'craft'; work's relationship with gender, class, race, disability, and sexuality; how work gets recognised or rendered invisible in aesthetic production and beyond; the work of poetry and the work of political activism and organising; and the notion of poetry itself as a space where work and play can blur, and where postwork imaginaries can be nurtured and explored. Front Matter ....Pages i-xix Introduction: Working Late (Jo Lindsay Walton, Ed Luker)....Pages 1-68 Front Matter ....Pages 69-69 Show Your Workings: Other Forms of Labour in Recent Poetry (Peter Middleton)....Pages 71-104 Bird-Song by Everyone, for Everyone: Poetry, Work, and Play in J. H. Prynne’s Prose (Lisa Jeschke)....Pages 105-119 “The Stitching of Her Wake”: The Collaboration of Pamela Campion and Ian Hamilton Finlay (Lila Matsumoto)....Pages 121-137 Basil Bunting and the Work of Poetry (Annabel Haynes)....Pages 139-164 Art Takes All My Time: Work in the Poetry and Prison Writing of Anna Mendelssohn (Eleanor Careless)....Pages 165-193 Queer Labour in Boston: The Work of John Wieners, Gay Liberation and Fag Rag (Nat Raha)....Pages 195-243 Without the Text at Hand: Postcolonial Writing and the Work of Memorisation (Aimée Lê)....Pages 245-262 Body Burdens: The Materiality of Work in Rita Wong’s Forage (Samantha Walton)....Pages 263-290 “Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies (Lytton Smith)....Pages 291-307 “What Gives Pause or Impetus”: The Double Bind of Labor in Rodrigo Toscano’s Poetics (Jose-Luis Moctezuma)....Pages 309-326 Distributed and Entangled Posture in Catherine Wagner’s My New Job and Nervous Device (Holly Pester)....Pages 327-352 Front Matter ....Pages 353-353 The Exploit: Affective Labor and Poetry at the University (Catherine Wagner, with David Boeving, Sylvia Chan, Alex Cintron, Emily Corwin, Rachel Galvin et al.)....Pages 355-369 Floating On—If Not Up—Ward (Tyrone Williams)....Pages 371-373 Extract from the Poetic Labor Project (Amber DiPietra)....Pages 375-380 Back Matter ....Pages 381-396