Two books of poetry: Beneath (Bristol: Shearsman, 2015) and The Slip (Swindon: Shearsman, 2020)
- Submitting institution
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De Montfort University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 27026
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
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- Brief description of type
- A creative writing collection: 2 books of poetry
- Open access status
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- Month
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- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- These 160 poems represent two-thirds of a practice-as-research project of ten years, involving extensive trips to copyright libraries to study the Archilochus fragments. Alongside immersion in debates over their significance for lyric poetry, the project necessitated a multi-layered creative process. Each collection cultivated a distinct poetic persona for two figures to whom history has granted no voice. These voices had to be creatively, yet authentically, grown from the source fragments, and respect the ideas and imagery of the ancient world. Each volume became a distinct research vehicle interrogating a key theme (eros in Beneath, animal fables in The Slip).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Beneath and The Slip are the second and third volumes of the Archilochus trilogy I have been researching for a decade through visits to copyright libraries. My study was the complex reception of the surviving fragments of the poet the ancient world regarded as second only to Homer. The books constitute the first systematic practice-as-research interrogation of the roots of lyric poetry in ancient Greece. Their form is central to their mode of investigation. Each book of 80 lyric poems has a different speaker and situation through which to negotiate a part of the 'story' (thus innovatively combining lyric and narrative modes to write a long poem). This buried narrative simultaneously concerns a legend concerning the power of poetry to curse, the biography of Archilochus, and the emergence of Lyric contemporaneously with colonialism. Archilochus was also a soldier, and took part in the earliest colonial conquests. His reputation was a byword for savouring unacceptable emotions and subject matter, and for deflating Epic heroism. Each book creatively gives voice to characters from the margins of the 'story' that sealed Archilochus’s infamous reputation; that, being jilted, he used his poetic power to curse the whole of the rival family into committing suicide. Beneath is spoken by Neobulé, the woman Archilochus was to marry. It creates a voice for her that provides a counter-narrative to the gender politics of the longest fragment in Archilochus (only discovered in the mid-1970s). The Slip is narrated by Lycambes, the father who inexplicably called off the engagement. It re-appropriates the use Archilochus makes of animal fables to expose the complicity of lyric prowess with the misuse of power. The creation of these personae is anchored in a detailed research-intertextual engagement with the imagery and contexts of the Archilochus corpus.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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