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In this article, I focus on the way in which grief can alter temporal experience, to the extent that it is possible for the mourner to find themselves held out into the timeless time of the dead. My interpretation is informed by a close reading of poet Denise Riley's remarkable work Time Lived, without Its Flow, which I bring into dialogue with the shifting conceptions of time put forward by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In so doing, I situate Riley's account of the limits of temporal experience in grief at the juncture of Merleau-Ponty's turn away from the horizontal time of Phenomenology of Perception, and towards the vertical time of The Visible and the Invisible. By conceptualising Riley's own interpretation of time in terms of Merleau-Ponty's turn to a thicker, ontological interpretation of time, I suggest we are able to think through the limits of temporal experience in grief and see what is lit up about time, meaning, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, and life and death as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the relevance of this imperative starts in this essay with an understanding of the essential and urgent need to handle problems of identity and the lyric "I" in modern British poetry. The argument starts from this awareness. Among the issues the younger generation of poets cover, these ones are very dear to them. The corpus of work Denise Riley has created on the dialectical relationship between the "I" and the "other," as well as between the poet and the community, has a great degree of tension unmet. One may find a fight of this kind all over the body of work. By means of her poems, she aims to provide a coherent atmosphere emphasising the relevance of gender within the many modalities of poetic practice, authority, and tradition. She establishes a cohesive space to achieve this. We shall investigate the current situation of things on the topic of the speech holistically during the course of this project. The subject of this research is a philosophical analysis stressing on the nature of the self and the ongoing dialogue between the "I" and its "others". The focus of the research is on the nature of the self. Riley's seminal works, Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993, as well as her Selected Poems (2000), will form the basis of this study in addition to other works pertinent to the topic under current discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a commercial gallery in London in 2019 I'm listening to audio recordings of Rose English's 1980s performance Plato's Chair, while a video of the show is projected on the wall ahead. The effect is of the performer describing what she is doing as she does it, the description displaced from one medium or occasion to another. Although, what she appears to be doing – for all her constant motion – is enacting a kind of hiatus while she ponders her next move, alone with herself, removed from her audience, thinking it all through and using words to do so. Description attempts to move things along. At play here, a certain – or uncertain – mimetics. Pleasures, for sure, for those who were there, or are placed there now. And a theatrical know-how – comedy, melodrama, opera-dance, and dressage all get a try-out – which is rooted in repertoire, but which ponders how to proceed. She is at once, she says, a comedian and philosopher. Which is to say also, ironist. In her book-length study of our ordinary acts of self-description, The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley locates in irony a 'political astringency' that corrodes 'excessively vaunted' categories, such as the human. But she finds irony also arising spontaneously within injury, compelled into intensities of self-contemplation. The injury, for instance, of one – as human as they come – who describes to me, on the phone, a tree outside her window. 'I don't know what to call it'. Description goes around. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After losing her son Jacob to a previously-undiagnosed heart condition, English poet and philosopher Denise Riley published a collection of poems entitled Say Something Back, among which features the famous piece ‘A Part Song’, in 2016. The devastating loss also led her to write Time Lived without its Flow, a short piece of non-fiction, part-philosophical essay, part grief journal, in 2012. In this earlier work that sheds light on her poetics of grief, Riley metaphorises the catastrophic event as a seismic shift that causes the wounded self to experience life ‘on this near side of a cut’ (77). As a result, the wounding experience, which derails the apprehension of time, but also entails a faulty memorialization of the deceased and cognitive failures, seems to preclude the possibility of a complete recovery. Riley’s multi-generic grief-writing probes the nature of the cut and represents it stylistically in order to showcase the vulnerability of the grieving subject. While traditional elegy is described as a ‘poem of mortal loss and consolation’ (Sacks 1987, 3), whose goal is to heal the wounds of grief, the 20th-century emergence of its melancholic counterpart, anti-elegy, strives ‘not to achieve but to resist consolation, [. . .] not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss’ (Ramazani 1994, xi). In this article, I intend to investigate the nature of the friction between elegy and anti-elegy at the heart of Riley’s philosophical, autobiographical and poetic grief-writing. My aim is to show that this fault line can result in opening up a third category, which eschews binary distinctions between mourning and melancholy, healing and (re-)opening the wound. Riley’s aesthetics of grief could be conceptualised as a poetics of vibration, i.e. an oscillation that results from a loss of equilibrium and sets in motion an emotional response, which becomes a creative ‘principle of song’ (Riley 2016) and questions the notion of consolation.

Alice Tarbuck reviews Greg Thomas, Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (2022); Nandini Ramesh Sankar reviews Zoë Skoulding, Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020).

This article explores the interrelationship of style, interpellation and impersonality in the writings of Denise Riley. Part one performs a detailed reading of Riley's essay 'Malediction', focussing on her theory of interpellation and her visceral sense of the materiality of language. It articulates the philosophical stakes of the essay by taking seriously its sustained, playful engagement with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and by emphasising the intrinsically Spinozist and dramaturgical elements of Althusser's theory of interpellation. It also seeks to elucidate the philosophical and political import of Riley's own critical style, which combines Stoicism (an 'ethics' in the broad sense), a materialist philosophy of language, and a distinctive poetics. The second part explores Riley's theory of style and literary composition. It engages with Riley's notions of ventriloquy and autoventriloquy, suggesting that her approach to style tends to stress the writer's guilty susceptibility to words. The final part considers Riley's elegy 'A Part Song' and the fraught manner in which grief accentuates contradictions endemic to style and authenticity alike. It argues that Riley harnesses the tensions of echo and interpellation to produce a poem that functions as much on the level of semi-conscious poetic association as via the interpellative mode of apostrophe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should critical traditions value transparency, surface effects, and a realist attitude? Does the frame of realism help us recognize, narrate, and understand histories marked by erasure? This article analyzes Denise Riley's 1988 book "Am I That Name?" alongside Gayatri Spivak's essay of the same year, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and argues that a stubbornly realist gaze remains blind to the enduring questions of feminist and postcolonial thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this conversation, composed through written correspondence, Julie Beth Napolin and Amanda Armstrong-Price discuss aspects of Denise Riley's "Am I That Name?" in light of contemporary feminist debates, including debates within black feminism and transfeminism. The authors begin by considering the significance of Riley's unconventional title, outlining what might be at stake--and what might be occluded--in the title's allusion to Sojourner Truth's interjection, "Ain't I a woman?" Allusion and juxtaposition form key aspects of Riley's approach to historical representation, which involves reading sources on sex and gender for what they say about adjacent historical categories and constellating discrepant historical situations in ways that speak to ongoing conundrums about identity and alliance. With respect to the latter, the authors consider the historical situation--in feminism and more generally--that occasioned Riley's 1988 work while also reading her work in relation to the challenges of our current moment. Riley's phenomenological account of the inconstancy of gendered being is read for its resonances with contemporary transfeminist work while her broader oeuvre is brought to bear on some of the scraps of phobic common sense--the voices without mouths--that circulate online and work to forestall what remain urgent acts of alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The subject of this article is the philosophical concept of affect as it comes into focus in major work in different genres by the British writer, Denise Riley (born 1948). Riley, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, UK, and currently holds the title of A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (as does Hélène Cixous), is the author of important contributions to the philosophy of language and several volumes of poetry, including her first book, Marxism for Infants (1977) and Selected Poems (2000). Her name is sometimes associated with the Cambridge poets' syntactic experimentation and materialist critique, but her protean poetic "voice" more often recalls the complicatedly self-dramatizing poetics of Frank O'Hara (though this comparison perhaps risks obscuring her work's markedly feminist discursive character). This essay begins by considering the way the word "affect" functions in some works by Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari, since this has important implications for Riley's own use of the term. A unifying concern in her most recent collections of essays, The Words of Selves (2000) and Impersonal Passion (2005), is with what she calls "the forcible affect of language," by which is meant the relatively autonomous emotionality that dwells in the words which we use and which, with often disastrous psychosocial consequences, use us. In the poems, too, we find a determination to acknowledge the extent to which the mutable self is an "inrush of others' voices." A final section of the essay lingers with the long poem, "Outside from the Start," and its phenomenological treatment of the perilous and affirmative process of becoming to which our language exposes us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]