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Address and Lyric Commerce

Don Paterson

in Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address

This chapter examines how Don Paterson's addresses scrutinize poetry's structuring in the British poetry industry. Speaking to a range of money-minded historical and modern yous, Paterson tests out ... More

This chapter examines how Don Paterson's addresses scrutinize poetry's structuring in the British poetry industry. Speaking to a range of money-minded historical and modern yous, Paterson tests out the relationships between art and commerce; literary invention, dissemination, and reception. This is work that returns to, circles round, and brings into contact the compromised politics of negotiating one's writerly status in public—in Ancient Greek and Roman court culture, in the violent addresses of the medieval Arabic patron system, and in the contemporary poetry industry. Poetry and money emerge as conversational partners. Writing addresses ‘to those undecided shades in Waterstones, / trapped between the promise and the cost’, Paterson asks gentle readers and still gentler purchasers to ‘shake yourself awake, and please stay patient’. Ensuring readers cannot forget their own hand in ascribing value to the poem, you are reminded how taste is negotiated with ‘live’ readerships, critics, publishers, prize-givers, and academicsLess

Introduction

Natalie Pollard

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This introductory chapter begins with an assessment of Don Paterson's work. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to bring together chapters focusing on his poetry, aphorism, editorial work, ... More

This introductory chapter begins with an assessment of Don Paterson's work. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to bring together chapters focusing on his poetry, aphorism, editorial work, literary criticism and theory, as well as his presence on the UK poetry scene, and his interests across the arts — including music, photography, painting, analytic psychology, and architecture. Included within the book are also two interviews. This book is organized into two parts. The first section considers the relationship between sound, shape, and semantics, and engages a series of discussions about lyric form and structure in Paterson, and the literary-historical precedents of semantic and aural organization. The second section consists of chapters that are topic-focused, and dwell at more length on the social, political, and economic dimensions of Paterson's writing and other activities as a contemporary literary figure.Less

On Spirituality and Transcendence

Jo George

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter focuses on Paterson's treatment of organised religion, spirituality, and death, and considers how they alter through his career. Raising issues of belief, it examines how the poetry ... More

This chapter focuses on Paterson's treatment of organised religion, spirituality, and death, and considers how they alter through his career. Raising issues of belief, it examines how the poetry draws on autobiography, especially Paterson's own early loss of faith, and explores a number of alternatives to Christian theology and Western philosophy, including tenets of Buddhist thought and practice, and anti-humanist work, such as John Gray's Straw Dogs. The chapter also considers the influence of classical order, organisation, and harmony on Paterson's sense of the mutability of scholarly and aesthetic achievements, and the random vicissitudes of a godless world, especially his poetic deployments of literary, archival and historical error. It argues that Paterson's agnostic worldview allows him to gather seemingly contradictory facets of spiritual and philosophical traditions without judgement or an insistent urge for unification.Less

Punching Yourself in the Face: Don Paterson and his Readers

Peter Robinson

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter examines the lexicons of violence in Paterson's work, and what these have to do with the politics of reader-relations in contemporary poems. It considers how Paterson's work deals with ... More

This chapter examines the lexicons of violence in Paterson's work, and what these have to do with the politics of reader-relations in contemporary poems. It considers how Paterson's work deals with the singularity of each mind that enters into relations with his printed language. Placing his aphorism in a tradition that takes in Marcus Aurelius, G. C. Lichtenberg, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Adam Phillips and many others, the chapter also considers the punchiness of Paterson's prose. It reads Paterson as competitive with literary historical figures, especially in the way his work seeks audience. It argues that Paterson is often as guilty of certain kinds of estrangement and alienations of the reader as he charges them with being, and presents the poetry of Denise Riley and Lee Harwood as examples of reader-relations that overlap with those Paterson claims for the mainstream.Less

Scotland, Britain and The Elsewhere of Poetry

Gerard Carruthers

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter analyses Paterson's work in terms of national identity, inheritance, and literary history, considering the poet's engagement with Scottish forebears. How resistant is his work to being ... More

This chapter analyses Paterson's work in terms of national identity, inheritance, and literary history, considering the poet's engagement with Scottish forebears. How resistant is his work to being read primarily in the context of the Scottish literary tradition? It begins by analysing Paterson's handling of these issues as an editor: his production of the slim anthology of Scotland's ‘national bard’ creatively, and cannily, rethinks the totemic status of Robert Burns. It examines whether the goading, guiding tone of Paterson's critical introductions are editorial strategies that underline the impossibility of completely consensual certainty in interpretation, even editorial interpretation, or whether his brooking of disagreement and his heckling prose reveal a more straightforwardly quarrelsome inability to renounce ‘forceful opinion’. The chapter considers Paterson's poetry in the light of these questions. It also poses questions about Paterson's depictions of the current UK scene and its schisms in prose and poetry.Less

Cleaving Nothing from Nothing: Post-Romantic Negation and Affirmation in Don Paterson

Michael O’Neill

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter considers the Paterson's attraction to lyric nothing as indicative of an affirmative stance towards reality. Nothing, in Paterson, gives succour by associating itself with failure. It ... More

This chapter considers the Paterson's attraction to lyric nothing as indicative of an affirmative stance towards reality. Nothing, in Paterson, gives succour by associating itself with failure. It comes to seem a paradoxical guarantee of authenticity or literary integrity. The chapter explores the lyric power of generating ‘nothing from nothing’, arguing that the poetry's value and distinction derive from its exploration of the challenges posed by, and the frail but durable value latent in, ‘nothing’ and its associations. If, in Paterson's poetry, nothing keeps trying to convert itself into an imaginative and near-religious (and post-Romantic) something, that uneasy slippage is key to the poetry's precariousness and its success.Less

No-Score Drawing: Postmodern Games in Don Paterson

Edward Larrissy

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter explores the paradoxes and slippages of quantifying terminology (‘nil’, ‘zero’, ‘double’) in his work. Such play keeps leading back to postmodern, and postmodernist, questions about ... More

This chapter explores the paradoxes and slippages of quantifying terminology (‘nil’, ‘zero’, ‘double’) in his work. Such play keeps leading back to postmodern, and postmodernist, questions about whether there are objective principles grounding ideas of meaning and value. It raises the possibility that Paterson's poetry expresses the impossibility of raising the literary score above zero, or unlocking aesthetic language from stalemate. The chapter focuses especially on Paterson's first volume, Nil Nil, and the sense of perpetual draw, attending to the processes of measuring and numbering hinted at by Paterson's title. It then turns to God's Gift to Women, Landing Light, Rain and the books of aphorism. It also explores experiences of temporal order and disorder in Paterson, contrasting mundane, quantifying clock-time with time experienced through art and love.Less

Don Paterson’s Ars Poetica

Derek Attridge

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter considers the ambitious theoretical project of Paterson's forthcoming book, which attempts to establish a new basis for the current discourse about how poems work in terms of sound, ... More

This chapter considers the ambitious theoretical project of Paterson's forthcoming book, which attempts to establish a new basis for the current discourse about how poems work in terms of sound, patterning, and meaning. It focuses on Paterson's essays ‘The Lyric Principle’ and ‘The Domain of the Poem’, addressing such topics as what techniques make language memorable, the function of language patterning, and the links between aural organizations and originality. It attends especially to Paterson's analysis of sounds, sound-clusters, and their link with meaning, including the ‘phonestheme’, a term debated in stylistics since it was coined by J. R. Firth in 1930. Paterson's arguments about ‘trope’, ‘integration’, the play of ‘conceptual domains’ and the ‘thematic domains’ entered into in negotiating poetic meaning are also covered.Less

Golden Means: Music, Translation and the Patersonnet

Hugh Haughton

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter explores Paterson's derivations from and implementations of fourteen-line form, in the light of his quasi-mathematical explanations for its ubiquity. Paterson has paid special attention ... More

This chapter explores Paterson's derivations from and implementations of fourteen-line form, in the light of his quasi-mathematical explanations for its ubiquity. Paterson has paid special attention to the ‘golden ratio’ derived from the Fibonacci sequence, and his association of this with the sonnet has undergone many derivations through his career. It examines Paterson's claim that we ‘arrived at the sonnet as we arrived at the wheel, out of evolutionary necessity’. It considers his craving for flexible symmetries and disrupted sonnet ratios, with particular reference to music and poetry, literary form and translations or variations.Less

Hiding in Full View: Dark Material and Light Writing

Natalie Pollard

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter focuses on a rarely analysed text of Paterson's, in which photography's ability to tease, conceal, and blur the viewer's gaze — as well as capture a human subject — is key in the ethics ... More

This chapter focuses on a rarely analysed text of Paterson's, in which photography's ability to tease, conceal, and blur the viewer's gaze — as well as capture a human subject — is key in the ethics of author-audience engagement. The book Hiding in Full View was produced in collaboration with the painter Alison Watt, following her joint exhibition with Paterson at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh in 2011–12. It is a tribute to the American photographer Francesca Woodman, and explores the uses and abuses of self-representation in text and image, as well as the advantages of partial vision, shade and shadow, and disguise and concealment. Attending closely to Paterson's poems and Woodman's photographs, the chapter analyses how, in setting up pages and persons as chameleon visual relations, the work of both forms a set of carefully constructed visual and spatial moves that knowingly defies both the familiar association of violated/viewed, and the idea of a photographed subject captured in flat, deathly fixity.Less

The Publishing of Poetry

Don Paterson and Matthew Sperling

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter presents an interview with Paterson, focusing on the contemporary British poetry scene. Paterson responds to questions such as the story behind his association with Picador, where he has ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Paterson, focusing on the contemporary British poetry scene. Paterson responds to questions such as the story behind his association with Picador, where he has been Poetry Editor since 1997; the typical manner in which a new poet comes across his radar; how the complexion of the Picador list has changed in the fifteen years that it has been running; how the pressures of market viability affects him as an editor; his claim that ‘overpublication as a serious problem, as it just makes the good stuff all the harder for the casual or innocent reader to get to’; and whether poetry is still resistant to digitisation.Less

Milking the Cow of the World: Displacement Displaced

in Poetry and Displacement

This chapter examines the work of ‘New Generation’ poets. These include poems by Michael Donaghy, Sarah Maguire, Jamie McKendrick, Don Paterson, Lavinia Greenlaw and Carol Ann Duffy.

Form in Poetry

Don Paterson and Derek Attridge

in Don Paterson: Contemporary Critical Essays

This chapter presents an interview with Paterson on the subject of sound, metre, and the meaning of lyric. Paterson responds to questions such as what he believes is the reach of his theorising in ... More

This chapter presents an interview with Paterson on the subject of sound, metre, and the meaning of lyric. Paterson responds to questions such as what he believes is the reach of his theorising in his essays; whether his account of the short poem is applicable to Shakespeare's sonnets, Keats's odes, Dickinson's verses, etc.; the amount of training a reader needs to be able to read a poem as a poem and not something else; how he determines the success of a poem is by holding it at arm's length and looking at the disposition of vowels and consonants; and his claim about the different function of vowels and consonants.Less

Epilogue: New Images: Contemporary Poetry and Old Norse Myth

Heather O’Donoghue

in English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

The epilogue considers the work of four contemporary poets who have used Old Norse myth in their work: Pauline Stainer, Kathleen Jamie, Ian Duhig and Don Paterson. Stainer continues in the tradition ... More

The epilogue considers the work of four contemporary poets who have used Old Norse myth in their work: Pauline Stainer, Kathleen Jamie, Ian Duhig and Don Paterson. Stainer continues in the tradition of David Jones in her insistently religious themes and lexis, her blending of the “signs” of Christian and pagan religious systems and the dense allusiveness of her work. Kathleen Jamie reworks Norse themes into modern myths. Ian Duhig’s work is split between an irreverent jokiness and a serious exploration of the place of Old Norse myth in literary culture. Don Paterson’s early Norse-influenced poems use mythic allusions in a playful, arcane, post-modernist way, but later work shows a profound engagement with Old Norse mythic symbols. If one definition of myth is of material which is so significant that it demands re-telling, then a history of its influence on poetry in English can have no conclusion.Less

Verse Chronicle: Trampling Out the Vintage

William Logan

in Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry

This chapter reviews C. K. Williams's Wait, Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Keith Douglas's Simplify Me When I'm Dead, Don Paterson's Rain, Derek Walcott's White ... More

This chapter reviews C. K. Williams's Wait, Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Keith Douglas's Simplify Me When I'm Dead, Don Paterson's Rain, Derek Walcott's White Egrets, and Anne Carson's Nox. Williams is described as a bleaker and more lurid version of Frost, with a dash of self-loathing. The title is Hoagland's book is considered the funniest thing about it. His new poems celebrate that great American religion, shopping, and that great American temple, the shopping mall. Douglas's poems vary wildly, a job lot of gestures and rhetoric more borrowed than invented. Paterson's poems are nervy, prickly, sometimes elliptical, and Scottish. He likes the binding obligation of rhyme and meter, but wants license to shake things up now and then. Walcott's poems reflect his usual command and authority, despite being weakened by the terrible roil of age and the “quiet ravages of diabetes.” Carson is considered a queer fish, an unconventional. One is never sure what she'll do next, only that it will be riveting and fatiguing by turns, or perhaps both at once.Less