A Wasteland of Malaysian Poets single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 A Wasteland of Malaysian Poets
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'It is close to midnight. The poet that I’ve been working with has just died, aged eighty-seven. I spent a month or so in his living room recording his entire oeuvre—around seven decades—for my Wasteland audio-exhibition of Malaysian poetry. His face next to mine reading and reading for hours on end, his voice strident, searing through one ear and into the brain, painting an eloquence of words out of syllables and silence. I have spent many years of my career (and a few university degrees) searching for these moments. This experience now feels like an illicit swan song for an audience of one. No other record exists. This poet’s legacy now lives in my laptop’s hard drive. Between deadlines, I don’t have space to think.'  (Introduction)

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  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Cordite Poetry Review Cordite + Liminal no. 107 1 December 2022 25499437 2022 periodical issue

    ‘Criticism is committed … to helping us to understand poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure that in its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost of blindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world.’ (Veronica Forrest-Thomson)

    'I take my title and epigraph from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s separatist manifesto, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published posthumously in 1978, Poetic Artifice is more than what its unassumingly vague subtitle suggests. In addition to being a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, it is also: an ABC of reading, an extended argument with the critic William Empson, a critical genealogy of technical innovations from John Donne to Dada, and a fanatically clear-sighted insistence that poems use language other than to exchange facts and observations about the world outside themselves. The ‘Artifice’ in Forrest-Thomson’s title is the name for the total process by which a poem marks language – adding emphasis through typography and lineation, rhyme, metrico-rhythmic patterning, etc. – so as to hijack its ordinary communicative usages and arrive at a meaning that is as much about itself as it is about the world at large, a meaning that subsumes thematic content under a larger concern about the efficacy of its own meaning-making structures.' (Bad Naturalisations: James Jiang, Introduction)

    2022
Last amended 2 Dec 2022 09:44:59
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