Alice Oswald

The myth of Amphion not only helps us read, interpret and "place" vast quantities of early modern lyrics from Spain, France and England; it also offers a way to read some powerful twenty-first century poetry that might be understood to emerge from the legacies of the deep imbrication of lyrics and imperial projects in the early modern period.

Now and then, Homer is born again. There are many theories, also conspiratorial ones, about Homer’s past existence, provenience, and work. Was there really a Homer or were there a few bards who cooperated, a collection of voices? Many points that make up a complete pointillist picture? Homer must be proof of the existence of reincarnation. There are at least two Homers, to my knowledge, living nowadays in Canada. One took the name of Anne Carson, the other of Margaret Atwood. Another one has recently received a Nobel Prize in literature and we remember well the fine poem on Achilles, who even though not being a god, almost a god, triumphs - not with death, though. Yet another one, was born in a small town of York and travelled all the way to the USA where he wrote “The Shield of Achilles”, an ode to a picture, ekphrasis in stanzas. There is one more Homer writing now in the English language, this particular one comes from Devon and took the name of Alice Oswald.

This article examines how Alice Oswald’s book-length poem Dart complicates and extends debates about the local and global. Aspects of environmentalism that focus on a physical connection with a local environment have been criticised by those such as Ursula K. Heise and Val Plumwood, who argue that such a connection is insufficient and stress the need for a greater understanding of global interconnectedness. Whilst Dart has a distinctly local emphasis in that it focuses on the river Dart in Devon and the landscape that it flows through, the poem’s envisioning of this specific geographical feature is far from being static or isolated. In addition to combining different spatial and temporal elements, Oswald’s poem transcends the physical through its engagement with the river’s spiritual and mythological aspects. The ‘fragmented’ structure used to achieve this is read as a literary example of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘bricolage’ since the idea of bricolage is also relevant in relation to ideas of the self. Michael Leyshon and Jacob Bull’s work on ‘the bricolage of the here’ is used to examine the relationship between place and the identities of Dart’s characters. This enables the ‘local/global’ debate to be seen in the context of the relationship between self and world as discussed in the work of Charles Taylor and David Borthwick.

This book explores the representation of the gods in Greek hexameter poetry in its many forms, including epic, hymnic and didactic poetry, from the archaic period to late antiquity. Its twenty-five chapters, written by an international team of experts, trace a broad historical arc, reflecting developments in religious thought and practice, and ongoing philosophical and literary-critical engagement with the nature and representation of the divine and the relationship between humans and gods. They proceed from the poems ascribed to Hesiod and Homer and the so-called Cyclic epics, via the Hellenistic poets Apollonius, Callimachus, Aratus and Moschus, to the poets and poems of the third to sixth centuries CE, including Quintus of Smyrna, Triphiodorus, the Cynegetica, Nonnus, Eudocia, Colluthus, the Argonautica of Orpheus and the Sibylline Oracles. An epilogue explores the reception of the Greek "epic" gods by the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid, and by the English poets Tennyson, Walcott and Oswald.

Alice Oswald's two books of Homeric verse, Memorial and Nobody, excavate the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively, for sounds other than those man-glorifying songs of war and adventure made classical by literary tradition. They stress what Oswald calls the fluid, fleeting "livingness" of oral poetry that literary culture arguably deadens in its efforts to standardise and monumentalise Homer' s heroic narrative. To adjust the poetic balance between livingness and lastingness, Oswald distils Homer's narrative to its evanescent and/or atmospheric elements and she foregrounds those diluvial clamours which repeatedly drown out the hero's boasts and shouts, dampen his immortal aspirations and dissolve his bronze-clad psyche. This essay shows how Oswald's recovery of Homer's oral poetry in modern English verse concerns our approach to Anthropocene turbulence wherein we, her readers, might find ourselves adrift. It examines Oswald's strategy of stressing Homer's aquatic fluency at the expense of his heroic-anthropocentric-narrative and in view of Anthropocene philosophy that calls for a shift from imperial, instrumental thinking about water as an exploitable global resource to empathic thinking with water as a companion, supra-human, species.

This paper investigates the concepts of 'poets with history' and 'poets without history' as proposed by Marina Tsvetaeva, in the context of British contemporary poetry. Furthermore, it explores elements of poetic craft in Alice Oswald's 'Falling Awake' and Hollie McNish's 'Nobody Told Me.'

THE USE OF THE GAP IN ALICE OSWALD’S POETRY - Masters dissertation informed by my interview with Oswald in 2013, examining the structural, metaphorical and epistemological uses of gaps in Alice Oswald's poetry, with reference to Lacan, Wyatt, Homer and David Jones.

This chapter considers the role played by myth in contemporary poetry in confronting two fundamental and connected crises. Following Weber’s analysis of disenchantment (Entzauberung der Welt) in capitalist societies, I endorse the view that a similar sense of alienation may be found – albeit on a smaller scale – throughout human history, and is an essential component of the human condition. I contend that our disenchantment is exemplified by the twin crises of the threat of global ecological catastrophe, and the spiritual vacuum in public debate represented by the hyperbolic opposition of rationalist atheism and fundamentalist theism. At the same time, there is an emergent current of the poetry of re-enchantment which finds its source both in the myths of ancient cultures and in the observation of the natural world. Modern poets are renegotiating the position of humans in the world, exploring the connections between nature writing, the primordial, and reinterpretations of myth. The second part of the chapter focuses on two book-length poems by Alice Oswald: Dart and Memorial. The former is a poetic record of voices which populate the eponymous river, while the latter radically retells Homer’s Iliad as a lament for the dead, merging the numinous and the natural in its epic similes. Oswald negotiates the mythological theme of humanity’s relationship with the divine, revealing the natural world as the site of poetic re-enchantment. I conclude that, by drawing on mythical traditions, Oswald’s poetry serves to harmonize the opposition of mortal and divine, and to recover from the worst excesses of the crises of capitalism.

Candidate's Name: John Levack Drever B. Mus, M. Mus Title of Thesis: Phonographies: Practical and Theoretical Explorations into Composing with Disembodied Sound This is PhD submission is both practical and theoretical. The practical element consists of nine electroacoustic compositions. The dissertation acts as a discursive accompaniment to the compositions, addressing many of the contextual and philosophical issues that have arisen during the compositional process and the perfannance of the works. It charts out discourse surrounding the different genres of electroacoustic music that the works relate to as well as examining models of work in the respective genres (i. e. sonic art, text.. sound, acousmatic composition, inusique concrite and soundscape composition), and places them into a broader cultural and historical context. Chapter 2 is concerned with the impact of the advent of, and subsequent rapid development of electroacoustically mediatized sound on society and the indiv...

The planes of consistency and organisation in Deleuze's usage are complex concepts. In a simplistic way the, the former is the plane of intuition, in which information has not yet been 'seived' and organised. The latter is the level of rational and, as the name indicates, organised, evaluative thought. In the case of art, Deleuze calls the plane of consistency also 'the plane of composition', both also being synonymous with the plane of immanence, see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 258.

The article, as part of ongoing research, is a theoretical account of the workings of affect and affectivity in the process of reading poetry, closing with an illustrative reading. It takes heed of the criticism of the terminology employed in affect studies and the employability of affect in critical discourse as an operative category. The study shows that the difficulty in the applicability of affect in discursive situations lies in its nature – in its being at once experienceable, yet impalpable. As a consequence, the article proposes the need to relocate the perspective within the reading for affect as an empty term and foregrounds the ways in which concentrating on Deleuzian sensation and sense, rather than affect alone, allows it to become operative.

Magda Heydel
What speaks when no one speaks. Alice Oswald’s poetic practice
as translation

The paper looks at two book-length poems by Alice Oswald’s: Dart (2002) and Memorial (2011) as translation projects, with an aim to understand both the nature of Oswald’s poetic practice and her concept of what is the meaning and goal of translation in creative work. I claim that translation, in the special sense the poet gives to this term, is at the very core of her work. In my analysis I concentrate on the physical aspect of Oswald’s poetic practice, the role of the body, movement in space, muscular effort, rhythm and memorization of poetry in her projects. I also look at the ways of crossing the divide between the human and non-human, linking language to the voice of the natural world and returning to oral poetry in her work.

Keywords: Alice Oswald; poetry; translation; poetry translation; nature;
the body; rhythm; Homer; oral poetry.

Alice Oswald’s self-described “Excavation” of the Iliad in her poem Memorial (2011) is crucial to any discussion on the modern reception of Homeric similes. In discarding the epic’s narrative, leaving a text almost entirely ‘made of similes’, the poet advocates the self-sufficiency, vitality, and significance of Homer’s imagery. Oswald’s treatment of the similes ranges from strict translation to what she calls ‘a translucence’, or retrieval of ‘whatever it is that shines through’ the Iliad, demonstrating the variety of practices encompassed by reception. This provides a unique opportunity for the scholar interested in the reception of images and similes to track the movement from ancient source to modern, received form.

This paper will examine the simile in Homer and Oswald not merely as a descriptive ornament, but as a transformative device impacting on the fundamental identity of its tenors and vehicles. Analysis of the poets’ similes – side-by-side and separately – will reveal a common awareness of this function, although each employs it in a distinct, and sometimes opposing, manner.

Both Homer and Oswald are poets concerned with the nature of humanity, and inspired by the non-human nature of the surrounding world. Their similes constitute a whole host of passages in which men are compared intricately to inhuman vehicles, and in which the world of nature is set up alongside, inextricably linked to, and jarringly contrasted with, the world of men. These features are therefore essential to the ancient and the modern poets’ discussion of humanity and nature, and enable both to imagine a fluid inter-relationship between the two. However, whilst Homer’s similes engage in the question of whether war reduces man to an inhuman beast, Oswald’s similes imprint the natural world with the trappings of humanity.

This is PhD submission is both practical and theoretical. The practical element consists of nine electroacoustic compositions. The dissertation acts as a discursive accompaniment to the compositions, addressing many of the contextual and philosophical issues that have ...

At 5am on the 6th April 2012, Alice Oswald and John Levack Drever set out on a walk departing from Alice’s home at the time, in Ashprington, Devon. Alice retraced a walk by the side of the river Dart. She had made this walk by herself many times, a walk which had played a formative role in her practice including the devising and setting to memory of Memorial (2011). On the morning of their walk, whilst the river was experiencing a particularly high tide, they enjoyed a candid discussion finding commonalities between their respective art practices of poetry and soundscape composition (i.e. composing with field recording). John recorded their chat accompanied by the springtime dawn soundscape emanating from the banks of the Dart and the reed beds.

Alice Oswald’s Dart is a book-long exploration of the soundscape of the eponymous river in Devon. It blends the human and the non-human into what the preface describes as a ‘songline from the source to the sea’. Yet, in the poem’s sonic flow, the reader often loses track of any kind of source of the poetic voice and, despite its obvious allusion to the romantic tradition of nature poetry, the lyrical subject is characterized by discretion and a process of self-effacement in favour of ‘the river’s mutterings’. However, the model of the speaker-walker persists and informs the geographic conception and trajectory of the book. One is therefore left with a continuous sense of uncertainty as to who or what is speaking. This paper first proposes to read Dart in the light of this apparent paradox, before focusing on the relationship to memory and myth that persists in a poem characterized by movement and instability. I will then make a comparison between Dart and recent anthropological explorations beyond the human, in particular Eduardo Khon’s 2013 seminal study How Forests Think. Finally, I will suggest that Oswald’s interest in lyrical discretion in favour of collective or communal voices, could be related to a conception of the poem as a site-specific event.

"Figures of Memory addresses the important, but neglected, link between poetry and memory. Through incisive readings of ten English and Irish poets from Romanticism to the present, it shows how poets have engaged imaginatively with both the possibilities and pitfalls of memory.

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