'Notes on "Lichen"' develops a lichenised homage to Susan Sontag's 'Notes on "Camp"', rewilding Sontag's essay to suggest a poetics of Lichen, a poetics associated symbiotically with the manifestos ...of Donna Haraway. This Lichen poetics engages with questions of symbiosis and solidarity, mutualism and collective voicing, sketching the turn away from humanist poetics as a critical characteristic of contemporary ecopoetics. From Conceptual Art to contemporary pop, lichen perspectives are gleaned. The attempt is made to rewild earlier conceptual formations, to recycle and repurpose shifts in contemporary taste and their associated politics. New faultlines in contemporary biopolitics are outlined. A chorus of micro-political shifts and transpositions are sketched, revealing emergent and potential turning-points in the rewilding of textual practice.
POETRY AFTER HIROSHIMA? Milne, Drew
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
07/2017, Volume:
22, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This essay explores the faultlines, poetic pressures and social structures of feeling determining poetry "after" Hiroshima. Nuclear bombs, accidents and waste pose theoretical and poetic challenges. ...The argument outlines a model of nuclear implicature that reworks Gricean conversational implicature. Nuclear implicature helps to describe ways in which poems "represent" nuclear problems implicitly rather than explicitly. Metonymic, metaphorical, and grammatical modes of implication are juxtaposed with recognition of social attitudes complicit with nuclear problems. Mushroom and lichen metaphors are analysed and distinguished. There are brief accounts of The Chernobyl Herbarium, The Nuclear Culture Source Book and poems by Aidan Semmens, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg and Gerry Loose. The argument attempts to keep open the fragile agency of writing in poems that confront nuclear power. Poetry after Hiroshima is also contrasted with Adorno's provocative questions about poetry after Auschwitz, amid Cold War arguments that have distorted recognition of the reality of nuclear production. The essay concludes by considering the emergence of poetry within E.P. Thompson's theoretical account of "Exterminism," sketching ways in which poetics and theory might inform both the nuclear imagination and the difficulties of nuclear song.
A Veritable Dollmine Milne, Drew
Caroline Bergvall's Medievalist Poetics,
11/2023
Book Chapter
IN THE ABSENCE of a more developed review culture, readers of this recent book by Caroline Bergvall might wonder about the status of its intimacy and public address. This is work which flaunts its ...poetic affiliations with some panache. The opening epi graph from Duchamp—“Arrhe est … art ce que merdre est … merde”—suggests the workings of a cosmopolitan wit, suspicious of the superiority of “art” over other games, and happy with a whiff of eau de toilette from the Dada urinal. The text parenthesizes a “Homage to Louise Bourgeois,” and gives succour to impressions that this is a post-Dada, post- Surrealist poetics, one that pooh-poohs the boy’s own paper heroics otherwise familiar from various admirers of Bataille and Deleuze. If the epi graph also arouses expectations that the book will play with the poetic, idiomatic, and vulgar potential of dropped con-sonants and arty franglais, then readers are in for a treat. A certain Eurolinguaphilia is needed to appreciate the verbal play: “slip on a slap on a chatte Cat upfront to sleep with broad Loot Outbroads LaBonkings.” Pleasures from what one might find on the tip of one’s multilingual tongue are much to the fore.The italicized statement on the book’s second page indicates the exploratory prem-ise of the book: “Anybod’s body’s a Dollmine.” “Bod” evokes the abbreviations of con-temporary sexuality, “nice bod” etc. Tensions between bod, body and “corps” prompt the questions of fantasy and desire suggested by “Dollmine.” Asking whose “any” reveals more political dimensions in our collective participation in imaginary dolls:To take advantage of the interior mechanism run through the thoughts retained of little girls as a panorama deep in the belly revealed by multicoloured electric illuminationIf this locates illumination as a problem, the poems themselves use puns to illuminate lewd qualities in familiar idioms, for example “Such Heir Hair Air Errs” or “La bour La bour La bour / Wears god on a strap / Shares mickey with all your friends.” The poetic sexuality of nursery rhymes is always close to the surface, but adult retrospection moves deftly between cultural allusions and the double entendres of “fanny face” and “ex / Creme / ental / eaT / ing.”Future parts of Goan Atom may reveal the relevance of the political geo graphy of Goa and an-atom-y.
POETRY AFTER HIROSHIMA? Milne, Drew
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
09/2017, Volume:
22, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This essay explores the faultlines, poetic pressures and social structures of feeling determining poetry "after" Hiroshima. Nuclear bombs, accidents and waste pose theoretical and poetic challenges. ...The argument outlines a model of nuclear implicature that reworks Gricean conversational implicature. Nuclear implicature helps to describe ways in which poems "represent" nuclear problems implicitly rather than explicitly. Metonymic, metaphorical, and grammatical modes of implication are juxtaposed with recognition of social attitudes complicit with nuclear problems. Mushroom and lichen metaphors are analysed and distinguished. There are brief accounts of The Chernobyl Herbarium, The Nuclear Culture Source Book and poems by Aidan Semmens, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg and Gerry Loose. The argument attempts to keep open the fragile agency of writing in poems that confront nuclear power. Poetry after Hiroshima is also contrasted with Adorno's provocative questions about poetry after Auschwitz, amid Cold War arguments that have distorted recognition of the reality of nuclear production. The essay concludes by considering the emergence of poetry within E.P. Thompson's theoretical account of "Exterminism," sketching ways in which poetics and theory might inform both the nuclear imagination and the difficulties of nuclear song.
NUCLEAR SONG Milne, Drew
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
07/2017, Volume:
22, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The argument of 'Nuclear Song' is pursued at various extremities of the damage done to poetic imagination by what the poem never quite names as 'the' nuclear. 'Nuclear Song' opens with an epigraph ...asking how far human agency, even the resources of poetic song, are complicit with anthropogenic radioactivity. Is there a poetic grammar for representing nuclear plumes and umbrellas, the yellow cake and toxic clouds of nuclear trauma that radiate from Japan through the English language? Can poetry even be written after and in the light of Fukushima? What future-proof forms of memory stewardship and signage can survive the ruins of nuclear wastelands? What happens to the lyric stanza when it is irradiated, its very atoms split and fused in new compounds? This song of the nuclear anthropocene attempts to find nodes and notes of resistance to the metaphorical radiation emanating from the dark ecology of nuclear horizons. Amid the ruins, alternative ecologies of mourning and reconciliation with nuclear pains are imagined: imagination dead imagine. The unnatural history born witness to concludes with glimpses of wild boars in the radioactive environs of Fukushima, boars in search of the truffles of scarred art with which the poem begins.
Nuclear representation is torn between the global society of the nuclear spectacle and the micro-threads of lived experience, between the heroic if morally poisoned scientists and the damaged ...Plutonium knights of the nuclear workforce. There is scarcely a viable theoretical framework capable of mediating the sciences of the nuclear and implications for the humanities. Literary forms struggle to mediate hybrid forms between the extremes of what is nevertheless an industrial project, an ecological miasma and a living nightmare. When the possibility of an issue of Angelaki addressed to the nuclear was first discussed, there were some suggestions that the nuclear was an anachronism, a throwback to the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, but the crises of the nuclear regime have persisted and deepened. The moment of Derridean nuclear criticism had suffered its own half-life into relative critical indifference, seemingly to be replaced by extinction criticism.
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