A Transnational Poetics

Anticolonial poetics: forging solidarities and imagining futures

“…Collage or bricolage provides a formal language which can express disjuncture and discord, which can articulate 'intercultural collisions and juxtapositions', 'epistemic instabilities and decenterings'. 17 The temptation to see modernism as a European or Western form of the early twentieth century, and therefore the employment of modernist techniques by non-Western poets and artists as an instance of cultural learning, imposition or alienation, is an oversimplification. 18 First, the modernism developed by European artists and poets drew precisely on non-European forms.…”

‘The Woman Gardener’: Transnationalism, Gender, Sexuality, and the Poetry of Blanaid Salkeld

“…This broader conceptualization may help make recognizable the analogous 'experimentation' of postcolonial poets. 24 Indeed, 'various' is a recurring word across Salkeld's career as are repeated exhortations to, and declarations of, change and transformation, often juxtaposed with a stultifying monotony or rigidity of thought or imagination. This could indeed be said to be a configuring tension in her work: a sense of duty and community chafing against the need for playful shape changing and remaking.…”

“…Eliot and Ezra Pound but the supposedly "anti-" or "post-modern" generation of the confessionals, the New York poets, the Beats and the Black Arts poets. 25 He argues further that the actual influences were much more permeable than the tendency to think in schools allows us to imagine:…”

“…Auden -still trod the earth in the second half of the century, so too a few influential poets of the colonized world, such as the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore'. 26 Salkeld exists exactly at this juncture -her life spans the early part of the twentieth century and she published her final, and most formally experimental collection, in 1955. A particularly sympathetic and sensitive review of Experiment in Error pays close attention to this, and sees it not as chaotic or promiscuous, but as evidence of this poet's 'steady growth':…”

“…This view of modernist style would likewise leave aside the work of most postcolonial poets, whether metrical or unmetered, monoglot or heteroglot, realist or surrealist. 37 Salkeld's work is metrical and unmetered, patterned and free, sometimes together -much to the frustration of some of her reviewers. Some of this frustration is specifically linked to her gender and in the following review of Hello Eternity!…”