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Biographical note:  

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857738
ISBN:  9781876857738
Author:  Salt Publishing
Title:  The Salt Companion to Maggie O'Sullivan
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-11
Extent:  256pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  15 mm
Weight:  384 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 14.99
Price:  USD 21.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  This companion forms the best introduction to the work of one of Britain's leading experimental writers. Maggie O'Sullivan has an international reputation as a poet both on the page and as a mesmerising performer. Influenced by Bob Cobbing, Barry MacSweeney and Susan Howe, to name just a few — her work breaks through traditional boundaries of performance and writerly practice and, along with Geraldine Monk, she can be seen as a profoundly important player in the early feminist avant-garde in the UK that emerged during the 1970s. She continues to be a major influence on new women’s writing to this day and this volume of essays rightly locates (and relocates) her influence, methodologies and artistic practice within a thriving alternative British poetry.

Main description:  Maggie O’Sullivan has been a significant force in the alternative British poetry scene since the 1970s. Her international reputation has continued to grow and she is widely regarded as one of the foremost feminist avant-garde writers working in Britain today.

This new volume of essays and interviews locates O’Sullivan in the wider context of contemporary British poetry and draws to light the wide-ranging influences which inform her work and her own influence upon a new generation of feminist avant-garde writing.

Tackling textual, visual and sound elements in her work her poetry is complex, challenging and rewarding. O’Sullivan is also a compelling performer of her work. Thematically she is capable of tackling animal vegetable and mineral ideas in her writing, drawing on mythological and even shamanistic components that are provocative and sensual.

This volume contains contributions from Charles Bernstein, Mandy Bloomfield, Ken Edwards, Romana Huk, Peter Manson, Nicky Marsh, Peter Middleton, Maggie O'Sullivan, Redell Olsen, Marjorie Perloff, Will Rowe, Robert Sheppard, Scott Thurston and Nerys Williams.

Table of contents:
Ken Edwards: Introduction
Charles Bernstein: Colliderings: O’Sullivan’s Medleyed Verse
Mandy Bloomfield: Maggie O’Sullivan’s Material Poeticsof Salvaging in red shifts and murmur
Romana Huk: Maggie O’Sullivan and the story of
metaphysics
Peter Manson: A Natural History in 3 Incomplete Parts
Nicky Marsh: Agonal States: Maggie O’Sullivan and
a feminist politics of visual poetics
Peter Middleton: ‘Ear Loads’: Neologisms and Sound
Poetry in Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles
Marjorie Perloff: “The Saturated Language of Red”:
Maggie O’Sullivan and the Artist’s Book
Will Rowe: Preface to In the House of the Shaman
Robert Sheppard: Talk: The Poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan
Scott Thurston: States of Transformation: Maggie O’Sullivan’s ‘Busk, Pierce’ and Excla
Redell Olsen: Writing / Conversation with Maggie O’Sullivan
Nerys Williams: “My tend sees errant, Vulnerable Chanceways”: Maggie O’Sullivan’s House of Reptiles and recent American Poetics
Maggie O’Sullivan and Scott Thurston

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Excerpt from book:  

from Introduction

Ken Edwards

I am a veteran of poetry readings – attending them, and, less frequently, giving them or introducing them – but that doesn’t mean I always enjoy them that much. They have a social usefulness, of course. At their best they also serve to contextualise the work of a poet I have admired or seek to admire: providing auditory clues as to how to read their work, how it’s intended to be paced, what surrounds it in terms of the quality of the aesthetic space or the social context. Then I can go back to reading it on the page.

More rarely, a reading offers direct, visceral pleasure in the sound of language shaped, much as I get from music; and this has more than once been the case for me when listening to Maggie O’Sullivan perform her poetry. I recall, for instance, leaning back on one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs in one of a succession of (usually dreary) London pub rooms that hosted the SubVoicive reading series during the 1980s, listening to Maggie and thinking at one point when I was coming out of a reverie of attention, “Ah, this is what poetry is.”

No, it doesn’t happen very often.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. A reader unacquainted with Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry but glancing at a book title or two – In the House of the Shaman, for instance – might be led to assume that her performances are affairs of swooping, vatic utterance, overwhelming the audience with mystical power. Nothing could be further from the truth. Her performance style is measured, exact, you might even say controlled. She rarely if ever hesitates or stutters, but there is no rush. She lets the language do the work; the power is already in there. As I wrote on a previous occasion: “In the house of Maggie O’Sullivan the marks on the page and the vibrations of the vocal folds combine into a harmonious whole … . Her poetry describes and enacts the multitudinous torrent of the human, animal, vegetable and inanimate worlds, but always from within a still centre of attention and calm.”

The scholars assembled for this volume have identified many of the influences on Maggie’s work, including the poetries of such as Barry MacSweeney, Basil Bunting and Susan Howe, and the methodologies of Joseph Beuys. But it is worth emphasising that the work was first formed in the context of the poetic experimentation that was going on in London from the 1970s onward, and in particular sound-text writing and performance under the tutelage of Bob Cobbing. Sound and text, inextricably bound up together, neither predominating, neither complete on its own.

Cobbing was, of course, a giant as a poet and as an influence. If my memory serves me, I first met Maggie in around 1978 when she attended a day-long workshop given by him as part of a series of Saturday courses I had a hand in organising at Lower Green Farm, Orpington, just outside London. Cobbing did not theorise; he taught by example. I always struggled with the relationship of the visual and the aural in his work: how precisely those abstract patternings functioned as visual scores for aural performance remains something of a dark matter to me. I found no such difficulty in Maggie’s work as it developed (the little of her poetry that was published at that time had been much more straightforwardly semantic) – perhaps because she was not and is not actually a sound poet. Nor is she a concrete poet in the classic sense. Rather, she is a lyrical poet with a painter’s sensibility. (She is a visual artist too.) Her texts look amazing on the page; and they take on new life when spoken.