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Many poetry readings since the Beat poets read at the Six Gallery have radiated a belief in poetry's revolutionary cultural power. Poets certainly become uneasy when they do occasionally reflect on poetry readings. Performance degrades cognitive apprehension of poems because the educated inward ear can do more with the rhythms, vowels, syncopations, and stresses of any poem than the amateur human voice can do. Current performance writers stress the importance of the unique location in history, space, and interaction for the significance of the poem, a condition that is paramount in performance. Poetry readings are often justified as opportunities to hear the poem uttered by the reader who understands its sounding best. Authorship and intersubjectivity collaborate with the implicit allegorisation of poetry's potential and actual place in everyday life.

This chapter presents the idea of “aural ellipsis”, a term used to define certain effects of indeterminacy in writing, reading, and listening to contemporary poetry. It also discusses the effect of the “aural ellipsis” in poetry and how in certain readings of poetry, the author is hearing something parallel but otherwise mysteriously inaccessible, compared to what he was listening to when listening to becomes listening for. The chapter also emphasizes the distinction that can be made between written works, those that can be appreciated by means of ordinary silent reading and those in which each word should be heard read aloud. The complex nature of the relationship between thinking and listening is at the heart of the experience of listening to poetry. The aural ellipses of the contemporary poem ensure that there will be spaces for invention on the part of the listener.

The critical approach followed in this chapter is pluralistic and takes into consideration the diverse literary and critical traditions present in Ramanujan’s scholarly work and their different conceptualizations of poetry and poetics. These multiple components are not placed in a hegemonic relationship, but treated as a network of ideas that feed into Ramanujan’s ‘outer’ poetics. It relates his professional involvement with several Western critical disciplines and Indian traditional poetics and their impact on his poetic thought, covering the mother-tongue (Tamil Sangam, Tamil and Kannada bhakti) and father-tongue traditions (literature in English, Sanskrit poetics), and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western and Indian poets and their use of the past. The description of these literary traditions and schools draws attention to the scholar’s characteristic interpretation of their systems of poetry in the light of his own critical notions and ideals.

The introduction provides a theoretical and critical framework for this study, situating the book’s argument alongside recent critical studies of the everyday in literature. The chapter traces the evolution of the poetics of everyday life, especially the intensification of avant-garde interest in the quotidian following World War II. It argues that poetry has come to be defined as a form of attention, and it explores how gender, class, and political and cultural forces inflect the representation and experience of everyday life. Contrasting different approaches to the everyday in American poetry, the introduction identifies skeptical or experimental realism as an influential mode, which finds expression in experimental strategies and forms, including the long poem, constraint-based projects, appropriation, fragmentation, collage, resistance to epiphany, and radical mimesis.

This chapter demonstrates that John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, and Alan Warner were not only reviewing human relationships with nature, but also the role that writing has to play in exploring and strengthening that relationship, helping to determine the ecological ‘value’ of poetry and fiction. It argues that contemporary poetry and lyricism in Scotland constituted an ecological ‘line of defence’, providing a space in which reader and author can examine their relationship to the world around them. It notes that while these writers do not form a conscious ‘school’ or affiliation, they share in common a lucid and intelligent lyrical vision which seeks to re-centre and redefine concepts of nature and rural environments — an outlook which is crucial in an age of growing ecological crisis.

Brazilian poetry's scope, domain, and operational space experienced an expansion that considered the United States' literature and language. It is important to note that there are no distinct cuts in the separation of the different art forms and artists in lyric since poets are able to consider popular diversion figures that are often perceived as mass culture. Brazil's contemporary poetry entails much creative content and conduct that concerns other forms of media and expressive culture. The interface in which outreach is used to resolve insularity is manifested in different ways, and becomes evident in how poetic texts integrate lexemes, mythemes, semanthemes, and graphemes related particularly to popular music and film. This chapter gives specific focus to movies, jazz, blues, rock music, cinematic figures, and their corresponding players.

Chapter 5 explores—from the direction of non-mainstream poetics—the politics of embodiment and reception in Denise Riley’s poetry. Its focus is her late-twentieth-century avant-garde pamphlets and small press publications. What is at stake in Riley’s poetic emphasis on the punctured, uncertain, and wounded textual-corporeal body? Why do her poems invite readers to witness the traces of their physical making/printing? The chapter examines what Riley’s use of unmarked space can teach readers about their role in the politics of production and reception. It explores how sparse type energizes gaps between words (giving them a fugitive figuration) and draws attention to the conflict involved in acts of listening and receiving, inking and uttering. The chapter considers whether such effects are compromised when larger, more commercial houses republish the works.

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.

This chapter argues that Bernadette Mayer develops a groundbreaking, influential mode referred to as “the poetics of the maternal everyday”: a feminist aesthetic that explores how daily experience is shaped by gender, represents the lived realities of being a woman and a mother, and insists that motherhood is always political. Mayer’s model of everyday poetics has been highly influential for contemporary poetry. To demonstrate and explore the aesthetic and political impact of her career, this chapter pairs Mayer’s poetry with the work of some of her most interesting descendants, including Hoa Nguyen, Claudia Rankine, and Laynie Browne. By focusing on Mayer and her poetic “daughters,” this chapter aims to revise discussions of poetry and the everyday, and to question some of the gendered assumptions that still sometimes structure those discussions.