Having sex with capitalism: parodic in-citation in the prose poem sequence

In his Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose [Little Prose Poems] Baudelaire (1869) forges an instrument of supple and radical potential, declaring the prose poem a ‘dangerous’ hybrid, which he wills elastic enough and staccato enough, to register the flows, jolts and distractions for the flâneur in the increasingly industrialised Paris. Here,by the mid-19th century, plate glass and gas lighting enable conspicuous consumption. Itis most strikingly the romantic-erotic and the relation between poet and his delicious, execrable wife, his inescapable, pitiless Muse (Baudelaire 1989: 177] that provides the nexus for radical questioning of the whole socio-political economy. Departing from Johnson’s Défigurations (1979) and using Irigaray’s (1984) hypothesis that the economy of sexual difference is the founding trope for the discursive and thus political economy of differences – of culture, ethnicity and class – this article first looks at theway Baudelaire activates the heterosexual relation as a site for social critique. It examines how Perec continues Baudelaire’s prose poetry experiment, offering, pre-May 1968, a revolutionary critique of desire by exploiting formal constraints to deconstruct still further the consumer subject of capitalism. It then investigates Brossard’s ‘hologrammatic’ challenge (1991) to patriarchal regimes of representation and the forms of desire they outlaw. Finally, it suggests how new work by Walwicz (2015)develops and displaces this radical inheritance.

The literary dawn: re-reading Louisa Lawson's poetry and politics

Scholarship on Louisa Lawson and the Dawn has necessarily often focussed on the important and wide-ranging achievements of her feminist work for women's legal, social and political rights. Indeed, as Audrey Oldfield notes, "Louisa Lawson was one of the most important figures in the New South Wales woman suffrage movement" (261). However, I want to focus here on the periodical publishing context of the Dawn as a means of pointing to further discussions of Lawson's significance as a poet. Megan Roughley has noted that the Dawn "was a forum for political causes, especially the movement for the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and, as importantly to Louisa, the temperance movement" (ix), with influential articles appearing on a wide range of important issues including divorce reform. Yet, Lawson's construction of the Dawn was also highly literary from its first issue, with editorial choices and literary references reflecting her awareness of political and feminist literary culture. In addition to references such as the above quotation from Tennyson, Lawson included an epigraph from Joseph Addison's play Cato in the list of contents: "A day, an hour, in virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage." Citing Addison, a significant figure in the American Revolution, demonstrates Lawson's linking of radical class politics with feminism, as well as highlighting the importance of literary dialogues to Lawson's publishing work. Likewise, the concerns of Lawson's poetry are clearly situated within a continuing female tradition, and Lawson's poetry, when examined in the feminist literary context of the Dawn, reveals a radical and sophisticated poetics.

Exhumed [book of poetry]

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references: William Carlos Williams, Nabokov, Stevie Smith and Emily Dickinson are paired with ‘Happy Meals’, Hill’s Hoists, Bonds t-shirts and the Moonee Valley Bistro. Divided into two parts – ‘Inter’ with its play on intertexts and ‘Disinter’ where the references are unearthed, these prose poems are fractured moments centred on love, betrayal, abandonment and death. Atherton’s appeals to l’humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.