Paul Magee - Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought

Suddenness and
the Composition of
Poetic Thought

Performance Philosophy

Series Editors: Laura Cull Maoilearca, DAS Graduate School, Academy of Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts, Will Daddario, Independent Researcher, Asheville, NC, USA, and Alice Lagaay, Professor of Cultural Philosophy and Aesthetics, Design Department, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany

Performance Philosophy is an emerging interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice and scholarship. The Performance Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices operating across multiple art forms and everyday life, including dance, choreography, movement and somatic practices; music, sound and silence; drama and theatre; performance art; sport; meditation and spiritual practices. It also includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance.

Books in the series both contribute to and critique the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance raising important questions about the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts; and advancing debates on philosophical method by examining performance as both object and medium of philosophical enquiry.

Comprising texts written by philosophers, researchers from multiple disciplines, and international arts practitioners, the series offers both academic and non-academic audiences the opportunity to engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed, from the ancient to the contemporary. The series supports diversely situated authors who consider ideas and practices coming from various geographical and cultural contexts, particularly in solidarity with wider projects to address the Eurocentrism of Philosophy and the decolonization of knowledge-practices more generally.

Titles in the Series

Rancire and Performance, edited by Colette Conroy and Nic Fryer

Experiments in Listening, by Rajni Shah

Art Disarming Philosophy: Non-philosophy and Aesthetics, edited by Steven Shakespeare, Niamh Malone, and Gary Anderson

The Critical Introduction to Salomo Friedlaender-Mnyona: 20th Century Performance Philosopher (forthcoming), edited by Detlef Thiel and Alice Lagaay By Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona

Performance in the Age of Ecological Crisis (forthcoming), by Tuija Kokkonen

Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought, by Paul Magee

Suddenness and
the Composition of
Poetic Thought

Paul Magee

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com

6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright 2022 by Paul Magee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Magee, Paul, 1970- author.

Title: Suddenness and the composition of poetic thought / Paul Magee.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [2022] | Series: Performance philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Employing an extensive archive of interview materials with major Anglophone poets, this book uncovers how they think in the moments of composition, providing a lucid account of the links between poetic composition and live performative thinkingProvided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022000037 (print) | LCCN 2022000038 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538153529 (cloth) | ISBN 9781538153536 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Poetics. | PoetryAuthorship. | Performance poetry.

Classification: LCC PN1042 .M23 2022 (print) | LCC PN1042 (ebook) | DDC 808.1dc23/eng/20220110

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000037

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000038

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

you Tiresias
if you know
know damn well
or
else you
dont.

Ezra Pound, note in pencil on the carbon typescript of The Waste Land.

Ilona, Nina, Rupert and Trudy, what beautiful names. Thanks for sharing home with me.

Paul Collis, Adam Dickerson, Nick Gartrell, Lena Isayev, John F. Leonard, Susy Macqueen, Lucy Neave, Andrew Sartori, Russell Smith, Lillian Smyth and Denise Thwaites have been particularly generous interlocutors. Thank you for the ideas you have helped me think.

The Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra has allowed me the freedom to teach, research and wander. To my colleagues, for interpreting the work of writing in such open ways.

At the Australian National University, the School of Literature, Language, and Linguistics has provided numerous, welcoming forums for me to try out chapters of this work. The idea came about as the result of the responses to a paper Elizabeth Minchin invited me to give in the Centre for Classical Studies biennial Homer Seminar. The seminar has been a mainstay of this writing in the years since then. Will Christie hosted me for a semester in the universitys Humanities Research Centre in 2017, a year the HRC dedicated to the theme of The Stranger. The value of the questions raised and the leads offered there delayed this book by at least three years. Thanks to all the strangers.

Andrew Sartori, Amy Lehrner and Izzy Sartori looked after me for weeks on end in New York, making the interview research in this book possible, sharing their lives. Lena Isayev hosted me in London and Exeter, introducing me to whole other worlds, including new ideas for what collaboration and writing can do. Thanks to Edith Southwell for letting me stay in a home dedicated to beautiful things. In Shanghai, Yao Yunfan was a consummate host.

To the poets whose voices are captured here, and the three scholars. For the generosity of your words, on and off the page.

Numerous anonymous reviewers. For your commitment to a whole other economy of thought.

Most of all, I would like to thank my mother, Anne Connellan, for her tireless scouring of the manuscript, her encouragement in the literal sense of the word, and her love of poetry.

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce extracts from the following:

Annotation excerpts from The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Copyright 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

Corrections, additions and marginal comments on The Waste Land. By Ezra Pound, from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright 1971 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.