Elise Brault-Dreux, Université de Valenciennes
“I started to feel unreal” – transitions in Deryn Rees-Jones’s “Elephant”.
In Deryn Rees-Jones’ “Elephant” (2023) (a quasi-prose poem), the reader follows the I-voice throughout the corridors of a sanitized hospital, at night, during the covid pandemic – that stage in our civilization that prompted a global transition towards a new awareness of our extreme vulnerability. As she wanders around the corridors, takes the lift (that transports her and the reader throughout several floors, four stanzas and different layers of memory), the persona “start[s] to feel unreal”. As she then puts a surgical mask on, with “a long tube fixed to its front”, her head feels like that of an elephant. Half-human, half-animal, she breathes through the mask as she breathes through the poem. While air starts transiting through the tube and her lungs, the memory of a picture of her mother with a gas mask comes back to her. The poem ends with her cradling her daughter (actually or imaginatively, this question must be addressed), her “supple trunk” around her child’s body.
I propose to analyse the various forms of transition in this poem: formally (prose poem); physically (through horizontal corridors and vertically in the lift); in time (time present and time past); in her lineage (as she embodies the transition from her mother to her daughter); ontologically (life and death co-exist in this unsettling atmosphere); biologically (hybrid woman-elephant). Yet all these forms of transitions somehow subtly stammer as they are caught in the “up and down” movements of the lift, in the “deep and low” sounds and memories, and in the “ebb and flow” of her breath, constantly taking in air (to live fuller and further) and each time expiring a little.
Michèle DRAPER, Université Gustave Eiffel michele.draper@univ-eiffel.fr
Transitioning from Romanticism: Hopkins’s new poetics
When exploring Hopkins’s poetic theory,it is clear that the Romantics play a key role in the elaboration of his thought.Wordsworth is often Hopkins’s Romantic interlocutor in his prose writings about poetry or in his correspondence. On the other hand, although Hopkins does not quote Coleridge as he may have done other poets, Hopkins’s reflection bears the strong influence of his writings. Among a large number of common points, one could quote: his theory of the imagination, with the duality of primary and secundary, the knowledge of Greek philosophy, and even the reading of theology, including a certain affinity with Duns Scotus. From the point of view of ideas, one could mention the will to integrate philosophy into a general reflection on language and on poetry. Hopkins’s own sprung rhythm may appear as a transition from Coleridges’sPreface to ‘Christabel’ to a new freer kind of rhythm.
This paper will explore the ways in which Hopkin’s poetics integrates Romantic thought, and how Hopkins’s own elaboration of his poetic theory came in part as a response to the Romantics, in particular of the first generation. Through readings of a number of his fundamental texts of the Oxford Essays or of his Letters, we will show Hopkins transitions from Romanticism to the creation of his own poetics. Some of Hopkins’s poems will serve as illustations of his dialogue with Romantic poets, Wordsworth in particular.
Marton Farkas, Université Paris-Dauphine marton.farkas@dauphine.psl.eu
Transitional parallels – Catching Hopkins’ prosody
‘Parallelism is of two kinds necessarily – where the opposition is clearly marked, and where it is transitional rather or chromatic’, writes Gerard Manley Hopkins of art, in general, and of poetry, in particular. My paper will offer an account of transitional parallelism in his theoretical work. If Hopkins’ prosodic theory was subject to dismissal by his early critics, his concept of sprung rhythm became a source of enduring obsession by the second half of the past century among linguists, structuralist and new critical readers and other academic devotees of the poet. Largely relegated to an underdog position in Hopkins criticism, it is all the more necessary to recover the critical and historical discourse that he conjured up around parallelism and Hebrew poetry. For, as Hopkins’ own critical discussion as well as his poetic word testify, the poetological consequences of parallelism go far beyond being a historical precedent for sprung rhythm. I argue that for Hopkins, in a departure from Robert Lowth’s concept of parallelismus membrorum, the parallelism of Hebrew poetry appears as a way of being for poetic language. As my reading of a Hopkins sonnet will eventually suggest, parallelism is hard to catch but without it there is no poetic language.
Adrian Grafe, Université d’Artois, adrian.grafe@univ-artois.fr
Hopkins’s Leap of Faith: ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’
Hopkins’s Pindaric ode ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ (1875-6) exploded the hidebound, moribund forms of Victorian poetry into the rhythmic and semantic freedoms of proto-Modernism—unbeknownst to him, ironically enough, or to anyone else around him at that, since the poem was not published until 1918, the (almost) heyday of Modernism. Hopkins remains as F. R. Leavis called him, ‘the only influential poet of the Victorian age and the greatest.’ The paper will try to inquire into the multiple leaps and bounds carried out by the poem—from the title to the epigraph to the first stanza and Part the first, from Part the first to Part the second, from the first stanza of Part the second to the account of the wreck, from elegy to confession and back to elegy, and thence to prayer, from semi-standard metre in Hopkins’s previous poetic practice to sprung rhythm, from historiography to mystical encounter. The poem was Hopkins’s transition from poetic silence and prose journal-writing to the explosion of poetry and meaning that is ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. How do the leaps of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ reflect the poet’s adherence to saltationism? And how does Hopkins transit from his ode to, say, either the extreme brevity or, conversely, the epos, of his sonnets?
Adrian Grafe is Professor of English at Université d’Artois and, along with Claire Hélie, co-founder of Loop and co-director of the Poets and Poetry panel. He has published broadly on poetry, literature and popular music. He sits on the boards of scholars of several international journals including Hopkins Quarterly, and is a member of the doctoral college of the University of Parthenope (Naples), where he was a Visiting Professor in 2024. In addition, Adrian enjoys writing poetry, fiction and songs.
Pauline Jaccon, Université Paris-Est Créteil, pauline.jaccon@u-pec.fr
Du texte à l’immédiat : Anne Carson à la poursuite de l’écriture transitoire
Les travaux d’Anne Carson, hybrides, intergénériques, interlinguistiques, se définissent d’abord par leur traductivité : une transition entre deux langues, entre deux voix, entre deux subjectivités, entre la Grèce Antique et l’anglais contemporain, et, de plus en plus, entre plusieurs formats. Dans ma présentation, je me propose d’abord d’analyser cette traductivité, c’est-à-dire l’élan érotique qui sous-tend le geste artistique chez Carson. Eros est une poursuite inachevée, et donc toujours renouvelée, toujours transformative, mais toujours frustrée (Carson 1992). Il entraîne une révélation artistique (Carson 1999), il offre une alternative à l’écriture enfermée par l’achèvement (Carson 2013), il ouvre un nouvel espace de création où le texte continue d’exister et de se transformer (Jaccon 2022). Il est au cœur des mécanismes à l’ouvrage dans la transition marquée des travaux de Carson, laquelle commence en 1992 un travail uniquement textuel, quoi que déjà expérimental (traductions, palimpsestes, poésie), et qui, aujourd’hui, propose des œuvres de plus en plus multimodales, souvent performatives et collaboratives (quoi que jamais coextensives). Dans un deuxième temps, j’expliciterais cette évolution, ses influences (Cage 1963, Sontag 2009, entre autres), ses paramètres. Enfin, je démontrerais en quoi l’œuvre de Carson fait montre d’une recherche sans fin de l’auto-réécriture, animée à la fois par la poursuite de la création et la fuite de son achèvement, entre le désir de symbiose (un transfert vers autrui tel que Lacan le définit) et l’impossibilité de son parachèvement.
Notice biblio-biographique
Pauline Jaccon est maîtresse de conférences en langues et littératures anglophones à l’Université Paris Est-Créteil. Elle enseigne la traduction et l’écriture créative. Ses travaux, à la croisée de la traductologie, de la littérature américaine et de la recherche-création, explorent la pratique de l’écriture palimpsestique et traductive, notamment dans l’œuvre de la poétesse contemporaine Anne Carson. Elle travaille également à développer une méthode d’enseignement de la recherche-création en écriture traductive, en collaboration avec le laboratoire LanguEnact et l’université Concordia. Elle est aussi traductrice littéraire.
Andrew Mckeown, Université de Poitiers andrew.mc.keown@univ-poitiers.fr
“Twinkle, twinkle little bat! How I wonder what you’re at!”: Poetic Transitions.
When is a poem not a poem? When it’s an imitation of another poem? Poems transitioning into mimic versions of other poems do so in a number of ways.
The first type of transition I will consider is parody. Lewis Carroll’s Alice books contain several wonderful parody poems, poking fun at Victorian sentimentality regarding children and the poems of edification that complemented the mawkish vein.
A close cousin to parody is pastiche, where mockery becomes emulation, and respect, not sarcasm, becomes, arguably, the motivating force. Here I will discuss Philip Larkin’s The North Ship, a collection of verse that Larkin himself recognised as being indebted to Yeats, a condition he jocularly dubbed “Celtic fever.”
Finally, at the litigious end of transitioning, comes plagiarism. Here I will discuss two recent scandals. One involving an alleged pirating of Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’; another taking place in Somerset’s otherwise sleepy poetic hallows, involving the Exmoor Society’s 2011 Hope Bourne Poetry Prize and a poetry plagiarism sleuth from Tyneside.
I will end my discussion with a return to parody poems in popular culture and will offer some thoughts on the benefits accruing from verse transitions.
Andrew McKeown teaches English at the University of Poitiers, France.
John Sannaee, Université de Vincennes, john.sannaee@hotmail.com
A Shift in Poetic Consciousness: Voicing and Thinking Human and Nonhuman Together
The seismic realisation of climate crisis has been a motor for an increased eco-consciousness in English-language poetry. Building on and going beyond traditional representations of the nonhuman, innovative approaches to the poetic speaker in this context have proliferated, notably with and since Alice Oswald’s Dart and A Sleepwalk on the Severn. In recent years, works by poets such as Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo (Venus as a Bear; Like a Tree, Walking), Jason Allen-Paisant (Thinking With Trees) and Alycia Pirmohamed (Another Way to Split Water) have broadened the ways in which voice is given to the nonhuman, and an eco-consciousness is expressed through poetry. Drawing both on research into ecopoetry(Fiona Becket, Nicole Jashapara, Tom Bristow…) and my own work on post-migratory modes of writing by poets from minoritised groups, this paper approaches ideas of transitions in three (or more) interrelated ways.
Firstly, the period of transition that we have come to call the ‘Anthropocene’ is an ongoing process towards an uncertain future, represented by these poets in different ways and from different both human and nonhuman viewpoints. Secondly, their work marks a poetic transition in terms of how poetry represents the nonhuman and human-nonhuman relationships, both in their present situation of crisis and in their longer, historical entanglements. This varies between modes of thinking-with (or writing-with) and thinking-as (or writing-as) the nonhuman. These subjectivities have often been marginalised, and the third transition I will examine is to a postmigratory world with postmigratory poetics. The three poets whose work I focus on are British-based BAME writers, writing in an overlapping context of increasingly established canons of ecopoetry, postcolonial and British BAME writing.
By analysing selected poems, my paper will examine the following questions: to what extent do these elements overlap and create specific, distinct poetics? Is it possible to see creative, poetic solidarities between minoritised humans and nonhumans, and how might this change our thinking of climate crisis?
Elise SCHRAMM-HSIA elise.schramm@hotmail.fr
Towards a Poetics of Transition and the In-Betweenness: the diasporic voices of S. Howe and M. J. Chan
Something sets us looking for a place. For many minutes every day we lose ourselves to somewhere else. Sarah Howe – “Crossing from Guangdong”, Loop of Jade From the beginning of her collection Loop of Jade, poet Sarah Howe conceptualizes the self as a being in perpetual transit: always in movement, always in-between. As a diasporic writer, she is concretely echoing her personal familial history but also the metaphorical space from which she writes – both inside and outside of canons and cultures, both here and there, and eventually never really anywhere; but rather in-between. For this paper, I would like to explore the poetry of two British poets from the Hong Kong diaspora (Sarah Howe and Mary Jean Chan) and the transitional nature of their works. Diasporic poetry is, by nature, one of transitions – spatial and cultural transitions. In their poems, Howe and Chan relate their experiences as diasporic subjects in the United Kingdom, evoke their parents’ journeys and tribulations through space and time, the injunctions they faced to assimilate – to transition into what was labeled as “us” and not “other”. Interestingly enough, the journey itself becomes the focus of their poetry – whether it is the boat which takes Howe from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, or the Chan’s journey of acceptance of their sexuality and gender identity. By exploring ideas of mobilities, of the self in-transit, Howe and Chan questions the limits of the poetic subject and of the self. They push against fixed labels and norms and develop a vision of a fluid, porous subject, perpetually realizing him/her/them-self. Chan’s collections directly draw from their queer experience as a non-binary lesbian, and as a diasporic writer in England. They treat of what is expected of them, what is projected onto them and how they find their way in-between. Altogether, the diasporic voices of Howe and Chan highlights the transition which has been occurring in British poetry these past few years. Distancing themselves from a Eurocentric patriarchal and horizontal model of transmission and heritage, they partake in rethinking the anglophone literary canon as rather rhizomic and transversal – evolving, transforming, transitioning from marginal voices.
Brief bio
I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Orle ans, France. In 2019, I graduated from a master’s degree in Anglophone studies at Sorbonne University, during which I wrote two thesis: the first one studying Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (and its television adaptation) and focusing on the oppression of female characters and the reframing of femininity; the second one on the subject of public bathrooms, and how they crystallized the fight for civil and minorities rights in the 20th-century United States. In 2020, I obtained my agre gation in English and taught in high school for two years. I joined the University of Orle ans and the REMELICE laboratory in September 2022. My PhD thesis is supervised by Pr. Kerry-Jane Wallart and focuses on the anglophone poetry of the Hong Kong diaspora. I study the poems of Mary Jean Chan, Sarah Howe, and Phoebe Wang. My work falls within the scope of different study fields – such as postcolonial theory, feminist and queer theories, as well as contemporary anglophone poetry and diasporic literature(s) -, and is articulated through a spatial approach, exploring the margins they write from, the spaces in between and the hybrid “contact zones” evocated and produced by their poetry.
Claire Garnier-Tardieu, Sorbonne-Nouvelle
A lover’s glossary to Kathleen Raine’s works: a subjective genre of literary criticism
Claire Tardieu is professor emeritus of English Didactics at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris and carries out her research in the Prismes-Sesylia research centre. She works on didactic terminology, language evaluation, peer review and (tele)tandem. She is the author of a number of articles and books in the field. She is also a specialist in the work of Kathleen Raine, a twentieth-century English poet to whose work she has devoted her PHD dissertation as well as translations and critical essays. She has recently co-edited a book published by Peter Lang entitled Kathleen Raine; A Voice for the Twenty-First Century (2024).
The expression “dictionnaireamoureux” originally refers to a collection of works in the form of ABCs created in 2000 by Jean-Claude Simoën for the French publisher Plon. More precisely, the books published in this collection offer a form of writing on a given subject – wine, rugby, Venice, Marcel Proust, etc. – that is both expert and non-academic.Indeed, the term ‘amoureux’ refers to a subjective genre ofliterary criticism that transitions from the academic norm to the expression offeelings and intimacy (Assouline, 2016). This paper will examine a selection of entries from what the author more modestly calls a ‘lover’s glossary’ to the works of Kathleen Raine, the twentieth-century British poet. The entries are informed by Raine’s autobiography – a subjective literary genre, as well as by her poetry – the expression of her creative mind. The glossary adopts a certain stylistic unity (Bakhtine, 2004 [1935]) in that the same pattern is to be found for each entry composed polyphonically as follows: The first part provides a brief definition of the word in the first-person pronoun as if Raine herself were speaking; the second one is a real quote by Raine borrowed from one of her works; and the third one is a comment made by the author of this Lover’s glossary to the works of Kathleen Raine.
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the very making of alover’s glossary as a type of subjective literary criticismand to analyse the decisions made: Why choose one word over another? Which letters raised the most problems in terms of choice (excess or scarcity of words beginning with a particular letter)? How do we move from an intimate style of writing to a more academic one and vice-versa? These three questions will be addressed in the aim of exploring the writing of subjectivity (Buchs, 2011) and empathy through the notions of editing, hybridity and polyphony with reference to a text paying homage to Kathleen Raine.
References
Assouline, P. (2016). Dictionnaire amoureux des Écrivains et de la Littérature. Plon.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M..Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, 1981.ProQuest Ebook Central,
Buchs, A. (2011) . Critique et subjectivité Sainte-Beuve lecteur de Flaubert. Poétique, n° 167(3), 305-318. https://doi.org/10.3917/poeti.167.0305.
Raine, K. (1973). Farewell Happy Fields. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Raine, K. (1975). The Land Unkown. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Raine, K. (1977). The Lion’s Mouth. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Raine, K. (2019 [2000]). Collected Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Virginie Traschler, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, virginie.trachsler@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
‘We liken ourselves to tadpoles’: animal metaphors and metamorphoses in the poetryof gender transitioning
Though they differ completely in approach and style, Victoria Kennefick’spoetry collectionEgg/Shell (Carcanet, 2024) and Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids (Graywolf Press, 2022)both make use of animal metaphors and the trope of metamorphosis to explore the experience of gender transitioning, seen from the inside or the outside. Feminist and queer poets have been reclaiming animalising comparisons flung at women and minorities and aimed at dehumanising them, thus also claiming a kinship with non-human animals: ‘likening’ themselves ‘to tadpoles’ (but also snails or swans), these two poets seem to writealong the same lines.
The Irish poet’s second collectionEgg/Shellhas been described as a diptych. In its second half, the poet explores her spouse’s gender transition. The recurrent images of eggs, swans and other creatures are a lens through which the poet can observe (and write about) her spouse’s transition with profound respect and reserve. They also create a thread in the collection, linking that specific journey to other human experiences, including the poet’s(miscarriage, secondary infertility and early parenthood are among the themes also evoked through these metaphors).
InWe Are Mermaids, by the American transgender poet and academic Stephanie Burt, the speakers — and their community, created through the frequent use of the pronoun ‘we’ — are in turn airplanes, flowers, mermaids, of course, etc.The collection explores transgender identities by describing transformations which help the subject reach their perfect state, asin ‘Cabbage Whites’, where the poet evokes a time ‘when we were caterpillars’, in contrast with the present in which they ‘live out in the open’ as butterflies.
In these two collections, animal metaphors play a structuring role. They will be my starting point to study how these images allow for an expansion of the lyrical self and the reappropriation of animalising comparisons, to widenthe scope of thispaper to recent Anglophone poetry on gender transitioning.
Biography
Virginie Trachsler is preparing a PhD under the supervision of Professor Clíona Ní Ríordáinat the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Her research project focuses on the writing of objects in the poetry of six contemporary Irish women poets.She completed both herBachelor’s and Master’s Degree at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon andspent a year as a Language Assistant at Trinity College Dublin and one as a French Lectrice in Oxford. Sheis an ATER at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She also works as a literary translator.