ECHOES AT THE EDGE: EXPLORING THE BOUNDARIES OF LISTENING
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61841/0xmf1749Abstract
To be listening, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, is ‘is always to be on the edge of meaning’. How do we listen to a poem’s edge? To the end of the line? This essay thinks about line endings and how they invite our listening. It explores the acoustics, dynamics, and somatic experience of line endings in the works of a number of poets, including Alice Oswald, Kathleen Jamie, William Wordsworth, and Jen Hadfield. It draws on Nancy, Denise Levertov, and Rita Dove’s thinking about line endings, and offers a series of amplified close-listenings which open up wider thinking about how we read and experience poetry. This is part of a larger exploration of what it means to listen to a poem — to the sounds a poem remembers, to the sounds a poem makes — on the page, in the air, in the ear — but also to the spaces, to the gaps and pauses, to the white space at the end of a line.
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References
[1] Jean Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. by Charlotte Mandel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), p. 7.
[2] Alice Oswald, ‘Lines: Professor of Poetry Lecture’, 2020. <https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/lines-alice-oswald>
[accessed 20 July 2023].
[3] Alice Oswald, ‘Wood not yet out’, Woods etc (London: Faber, 2008), p. 9.
[4] Rita Dove, ‘Breaking the Line, Breaking the Narrative’, 2012, [accessed 2 May 2023].
[5] Written in Germany in November 1798 (DCMS 19), later revised and published in Lyrical Ballads and then
incorporated into book V of The Prelude.
[6] William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798-1799, ed. by Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977), pp. 127– 128. The quotation is from the manuscript version of ‘There was a Boy’, transcribed from
manuscript ‘JJ’ contained within DCMS 19.7 held in the Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage.
[7] William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), V, ll. 379-88, in The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. by Jonathan
Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (New York and London: Norton, 1979).
[8] Christopher Ricks, Christopher Ricks, ‘A Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines’, Essays in Criticism, 21
(1971), 1–32.
[9] Jen Hadfield, ‘Lichen’, Byssus (London: Picador, 2014), p. 1.
[10] Kathleen Jamie, ‘Kathleen Jamie: Judge’s Report’, Poetry London, 61 (2008). [accessed 4 May 2023].
[11] Kathleen Jamie, ‘Fianuis’, The Bonniest Companie (London: Picador, 2015), p. 38.
[12] Kathleen Jamie, Findings (London: Sort of Books, 2005), p. 39.
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