By Sam Buchan-Watts and Lucy Mercer.
On 10 May 2024 we held a closed, eight-person symposium in a seminar room at MayDay Rooms entitled ‘Poetry and Indiscipline’. An ‘archive, resource space and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories’, Mayday Rooms – with its wide windows that open onto the sunlit dust falling onto the quiet churchyard of St Bride’s, and at the back the corporatised imperial architecture of Fleet Street, the demolished buildings and half-built capital projects, the shuttered lawyers’ offices and narrow passageways – felt an apt interstitial space to hold a meeting of poets and scholars to talk about indiscipline, its calm optimism infecting us all.*
The workshops attempted to open up discussion in response to a research question: what is the relation of poetry to indiscipline? As poets and critics we are drawn to W.J.T. Mitchell’s observation that ‘[his] real interest [as a critic] … has been not in interdisciplinarity so much as in forms of “indiscipline”, of turbulence or incoherence at the inner or outer boundaries of disciplines’.[1] Mitchell’s comments arise in his discussion of visual culture – a disciplinary field he has himself helped to define, particularly with regard to studies of word and image – as what he calls ‘an “interdiscipline”, a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines’. Mitchell’s formulation strikes us as a suitable analogy not only for visual culture but for contemporary poetry too – and not only given poetry’s visuality and historical relation to visual arts practices. Are poetry and its related practices not in some deep ontological way tied to breakages and ruptures, a distorting assimilationism, intractability, uncertainty and questioning of systems of evaluation? Yet as the ongoing attacks on the arts and humanities (universities, funding, conservative reading practices) continue, poets and writers are increasingly dependent on an idea of interdisciplinarity that is sold by institutions as a cohesive and unifying force intended to bridge disciplines or often to further professionalise – and make legible the value of – our activities. A practice which, as Jonathan Kramnick has noted, occurs in a system which has overseen the ‘remaking of established disciplines as open-ended clusters matched to demands that need filling and problems that need solving.’[2] This idea of interdisciplinarity pervades applications of all kinds: books, impact agendas and academic research…
But, then, as with its correspondence with visual culture, poetry is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary: its capacity to make through processes of gathering, muddying and metaphorising is almost limitless. It can move between objects, theories and disciplines in an unruly way. If this unruliness, ambiguity, breakage and challenge are hallmarks of what might be termed poetic thinking, they could also be said to be indisciplined in their indisciplinarity, a word defined in the OED as: ‘absence or lack of discipline; want of the order imposed by constituted (esp. military) authority upon a body of persons amenable to it; want of the order and method acquired by training.’[3] A paradox emerges: to train oneself in the discipline of writing poetry, with all of the Foucauldian institutional associations that come with ‘discipline’, is to do so against hegemonic ways of thinking and of knowing. More specifically, does writing poetry involve a lack of a certain kind of order and method – the prevailing homogenising order or methods of the day, conventional writing practices? Poetry itself is far from – nor should it be, in the spirit of indiscipline – a unified field. What we find ourselves speaking of here is often also the poetry that interests us, perhaps too in heterogenous ways.
The ‘Poetry and Indiscipline’ symposium began with a presentation by the investigators (SBW and LM) who outlined the provisional framework of the project in three clusters. The first cluster, ‘Indiscipline and Institution’, asks, ‘In what context does indiscipline occur?’ To do so it seeks to historicise the position of indiscipline in terms of the post-nineties university patronage of radical poetics via Creative Writing PhD programs and the ‘creative-critical turn’ in English Studies. This has also coincided with the ongoing rebranding of arts and culture as ‘creative industries’ since the Thatcher era. We also acknowledge transnational currents between grassroots and academic UK/USA publishing and the rise of UK interdisciplinary platforms – like Prototype Publishing – that publish poetry with/alongside/as hybrid and art writing works. The second cluster, ‘Indiscipline and Form’, asks what happens when different disciplines, fields and materialities are brought into poetic relation. How can we account for these complex forms in critical writing? The final cluster, ‘Indiscipline and Concepts’, relates to the correspondence between indiscipline and other key concepts affecting poetic interdisciplinarity. Such correspondence may be identified through divisions between practice/theory, materialities, ekphrasis, word/image and the intermedial (evoking the basis of Mitchell’s own thinking), neurodivergence, decolonialisation, trans-radical poetics and translation. And how best can we draw out such concepts from – and associate them with – the works in question without reducing them to disciplinary ‘types’, limiting the works’ complexity?
We were met with a constellation of deep thought that was also practice or material-led. Such insight engaged with questions of institution and structure while reflecting closely on its own form(s) of articulation. Our participants – Denise Riley, Jess Cotton, John Wedgwood Clarke, Rey Conquer, Lavinia Singer and Hugh Foley – are variously philosophers, editors, translators or critics, but united they also share a commitment to poetic practice, often as a form of critical thought.
Our speakers gave presentations that have since transformed and condensed into the creative-critical pieces that we are pleased to debut on creative-critical.net. Some are adapted versions of the contributions made at the workshop: Jess Cotton mediates on how we account for the place or time from which lyric speaks when ‘poetry in discipline seems to demand a defence’, while Denise Riley situates poetry memorably as a ‘stain between two poles’. Others offer standalone texts that realise the propositions laid out in their talks in suggestive ways. In the case of the latter, we have provided some critical context below for the talks in which these texts originated.
Rey Conquer began with an account of a novel they recently composed provisionally entitled How to Live Together, which considers the enmeshment of selves across quotidian processes of reading and cohabiting with humans and animals, as a process in some ways analogous or connected with the ‘inner lives’ that works of literature – especially poems – contain. Conquer invoked Friedrich Schiller’s ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ as a way of understanding the contemporary poet’s relation to poetry, to the institution of poetry criticism and to the world, in which the ‘naïve’ poet possesses an untroubled relationship to nature – is part of nature – whereas the ‘sentimental’ is at a distance from the natural, a one-way process, a fall into self-consciousness, which Conquer suggested was akin to (paraphrasing Stephanie Burt) a ‘fall into lyricisation’. Conquer, quoting Schiller, wondered about the “border-disturbing” potential of naivety in contemporary poetics – for all that modernity precludes naivety as a mode. Conquer’s ‘A dialogue between the naïve poet and the sentimental poet’ presents an extension of this thinking. The opening reference to a blackbird’s song is a provocation for the speaker to implicitly weigh up naive and sentimental inclinations in their listening, a response that maps onto their farewell exchanges with former students. If the naive is a ‘pre-institutional’ way of relating to the world, the speaker’s associative flow of ideas presses on the in/organic encroachment of police sirens and ChatGPT, in contrast to the nightingale, which bypasses sublimination.
Denise Riley’s ‘Staining, egging, binding.’ proposes that an alternative model for interdisciplinarity could be established in terms of the actions of her title. For instance, a ‘stain’ (a suitably indisciplined, temporal form of mark-marking) might be a mutual characteristic spreading between visual arts and poetry, and between writing and drawing. With a characteristic deep attention to materials, philosophy and poetry, Riley offers a fresh and happily-beguiling stain, ‘Lone star clattering’ – a poem by Riley that is saturated ‘satirically-brightly’ with the ‘martyred self’. Reflecting on her own practice as one that is parasitic on the visual arts rather than conventionally ekphrastic, seeking the affective in theory which is torn out and re-glued, Riley’s swerve from interdisciplinary toward these ‘actions held in common’, which together cohere as paintings or poems, is a suggestive bouquet for writers.
Jess Cotton’s ‘Lyric’s Impossible Objects’ is also inspired by decay, turning to John Ashbery’s refusal to close a poem, and so to the potentialities of lyric time. Instigating a doubleness of an attending subjective experience, lyric time offers a sliding ahistorical and provisional timespace that can allow for the sensation of stepping outside of time. Cotton’s seasons, John Clare’s clay clocks, Lyn Hejinian and Emily Dickinson, what is not seen or heard – and therefore possible – swarm over our hyper-disciplinarian Cartesian models of time and space.
Hugh Foley’s contribution engaged with the way that poetry does or does not fit into the institution of academia through the notion of the schoolroom (via W. B. Yeats and Allen Grossman). He drew a connection between the instructional form of poetry in the context of the schoolroom – the discipline of knowledge itself – and the fashionable essayistic contemporary English language poem, with its turn away from disciplinary boundaries and towards expository prose. He asks what bearing this has on the ‘legibility of experience’ that is poetry’s imperative (and also its burden) and how such poetry reflects subjecthood in the context of the contraction of HE institutions. Poems now must incorporate their own critical apparatuses. For his text, ‘Essay of the essay poem’, Foley alludes to Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism – in content and form – as a ‘schoolboy poem’ that nonetheless questions the conditions of its own legibility and the ‘banality of knowledge’ of the schoolroom that poetry exceeds. In doing so Foley wrestles with the extent to which (in his memorable formulation) poetry remains ‘the form truth takes until it breaks’. Pope’s remarkable rhyming couplets – in a gesture that recalls the sentimental poet – reveal a reflexiveness of their own process and limitations, a quality that Foley extends to modern essayistic poems, too. While the various discourses and contexts from which poetry draws and in which it occurs differ, these poetries share a capacity to make a kind of thinking in song.
John Wedgwood Clarke drew for his contribution from his writing residency at refuse centres in Scarborough and York as a means of considering the indiscipline of damaged places, building on the work of his collection Landfill (2017), which takes up rubbish as material for poems that melt divides between ecology and culture. To foster such a refuse poetics involves a way of inhabiting forms and culture that Clarke feels is more often commonly accepted as the domain of visual artists – we might think of other rubbish dwellers like Mike Nelson – but that this needn’t be the case. He presents poetry – and the lyric ‘I’ – as a heap of mingled things, a makeup that might ‘question the givenness of ourselves and our culture’. His poem ‘****’ applies modernist strategies to elliptically compress the detritus of material and linguistic matter, and to implicitly ask how poetry’s technology might subtly alter the system’s proliferation of ‘hideous sublimity’. The poem – and Clarke’s residency – propose that poetry occurring in the institution does so in an expanded field, to resist the institutional pressures (whether refuse centre or higher education) to become ‘un-heap-like’.
Lavinia Singer’s highly visual presentation began by drawing from her experience in publishing over the last decade and by talking through examples of poetry and the ‘transmutation’ of manuscripts into books. Where institutional pressures – from HE, for example – increasingly demand that poets publish, Singer offered valuable insight on the pressures facing publishing institutions – along the lines of typesetting, metadata, format, printing, sales – when they seek to publish poetry which resists the conventions of publishing. Indeed, poetry emerges as an indisciplined medium within the field of literary publishing. Singer then offered an account of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre, a book to encompass all books: a heterogeneous multi-form work that was never published – a fact that was indeed integral to the project. Rather, the project would be realised as a series of fragments that would gesture towards the totality of the whole. Evoking Mitchell’s concept of indiscipline, Le Livre ‘compulsively performs a revelation of its own inadequacy’. There were however, attempts: most recently, the first edition in English, published by Exact Change in 2018, edited and translated by Sylvia Gorelick. Singer’s text takes up Mallarmé’s proposition not on the level of the book but the poem, manipulating the pangram ‘The quick brown fox…’, used in printing to display all characters in a typeface, to incorporate a conventional poem shape while overlaying characters in an alphabetical circle to render space legible in non-linguistic terms, an infinite carousel, a keyhole to another world.
The event and these contributions have been funded by a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.
If you would like to know more about the project or discuss any of the issues raised, please contact sam.buchan-watts@newcastle.ac.uk and l.mercer@exeter.ac.uk
*Please support MayDay Rooms, a generous and much-needed radical space and project.
[1] WJT Mitchell, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture’ in ‘Inter/disciplinarity’ in Art Bulletin December 1995 Volume LXXVII Number 4, pp. 540-544. P.541.
[2] Jonathan Kramnick, ‘The Interdisciplinary Fallacy’, representations, volume 140, issue 1, 2017, pp. 67-83., p.73
[3] Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “indiscipline (n.),” June 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8899422124.
