Kirjahaku

In 1966, John Ashbery wrote: 'The English language is constantly trying to stave off invasion by the American language; it lives in a state of alert which is reflected to some degree in English poetry.' This book shows how the work of a major post-war American poet has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange, by reading crucial episodes in Ashbery's oeuvre in the context of an 'other tradition' of modern English poets he himself has defined. This line runs from the editor of Ashbery's recent Collected Poems, Mark Ford, through Lee Harwood in the late 1960s, F. T. Prince in the 1950s, to 'chronologically the first and therefore most important influence' on his own work, W. H. Auden. Through detailed close readings of the poetry of Ashbery and these English poets, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented. The biographical slant of the book is highly significant, as it reads these writers' poetry and correspondence together for the first time, suggesting how major poetic innovations arose from specific social contexts, from the particulars of relations between poets, and also from a broader climate of Anglo-American exchange as registered by each poet. The book's presentation of the process of poetic influence is attentive to actual exchanges between contemporaries as evidenced in correspondence, as opposed to speculative relationships with dominant figures, and as such represents a departure from many other studies of Ashbery's work. Key themes include 'Englishness' as a national imaginary, the concept of the 'minor', reciprocal influence, and the poetry of coteries. The result is that both Ashbery himself, and the landscape of post-war English poetry, are presented in significantly new lights.

A brilliantly inventive book of poems from a fierce poetic voice, whose work John Ashbery called "exciting, necessary, and new."Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard's third collection, emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract "the ore / from boredom," as memory --personal, familial, social, historical--and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential. The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. By way of satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing "through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in skeptical company."

Oli Hazzard’s Blotter consists of five sequences, each constructed using a different process. In `Graig Syfyrddin’ notes on hillwalking in the Welsh marches – the poet’s former home – alternate with found text taken from an online walking forum. `Blotter’ is a shepherd’s calendar of sonnets composed of Russian spambot script – a mix of lifestyle advice, gaming tips, authoritarian propaganda, bucolic fragments and apocalyptic messages. `Within Habit’ is a series of prose poems collaged from numerous sources. `March and May’ comprises parallel columns of verse. `Or As’ is a family of 81 seventeen-syllable poems, each one an erasure of the corresponding page in a different book the poet was writing alongside Blotter. The poems are preoccupied, above all, with the passage of time, and how that passage can be differently registered or disturbed: the working day, the distorted seasons, the timestamp of a text message, the jottings of a daybook, the formal structure of a shepherd’s calendar, the double exposure of a photograph, the reverse-flow of a Twitter feed. The title, Blotter, connects these concerns, suggesting at once a police blotter, a journal, a thing for drying wet spots, and, in its painterly connotation, a way of rendering the world in a manner that is vague, blurred, or out of focus.

Oli Hazzard's third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract 'the ore / from boredom', as memory—personal, familial, social, historical—and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential. The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book's dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. Through satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing 'through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in sceptical company'.

Lorem Ipsum, the debut novel from poet Oli Hazzard, consists of a single, 50,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction addressed to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, which means ‘following the brush’.This playful, disruptive and digressive novel is written out of and towards a moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely.Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent and a child, of dreams, work, fantasies, reading, happiness, secrets, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict, and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of 'shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives, and what happens when they are shaken.