11781 W. Sunset Boulevard
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Kent
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 8498
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Shearsman Books
- ISBN
- 9781848613225
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The sequence ‘11781 W. Sunset Boulevard’, poems from which were disseminated through publication in the USA (FENCE magazine), India (Molossus magazine) and the UK (Tears in the Fence), is a poetic inquiry into linguistic nuance and difference for the speaking subject in the specific place of Southern California and its political context of the beginning of Barack Obama’s campaign for re-election, and the overthrow of President Gaddafi. The writing is, therefore, grounded in both practical and theoretical research. The poems were written daily, with the aim to extend the genre of the travelogue, taking The Journals, a book of poetry by Paul Blackburn, written in his last years and months, as their starting point for a poetic method. Other practitioners of the genre are key to this writing including Joanne Kyger and Philip Whalen. The broader theoretical research has taken the form of extensive reading in philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches to the state, industrialization and the media in relation to fractured subjectivity. The works of Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire and Jacques Lacan on subjectivity form the theoretical background. Grounded in ongoing archival research on Blackburn, undertaken at UCSD in November 2011 and April 2012, the sequence was also influenced by personal circumstances and the urgencies of the near fatal illness of a loved one – resident at that time in Los Angeles – the locus of its insights being ‘trying to get things down’, and of time running out to sharpen and clarify every fragment or particle of experience. The physical ‘site’ of the poetry in Los Angeles takes its orientation and process from specific road trips on the San Diego Freeway, using the ‘poetic eye’ as a kind of camera, such that the poems are a form of reportage, registering the impact of sensory data on the speaking subject.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
