Nealon Infinity for Marxists full text (2023) (2025)

Introduction to Infinity for Marxists

Infinity for Marxists, 2023

This is the Introduction to Infinity for Marxists, a volume of essays on poetry and capitalism I published with Brill in 2023. The web page for the whole book is here: https://brill.com/display/title/64140

'Speculative assertions: notes towards reading the poetry of J.H. Prynne'

Parataxis, numer 10, 2001

'I don't know about you, but I'm not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themelves in an informational Diaspora.' (1) This is an old, 1999 essay on reading the work of J.H.Prynne.

Iain Sinclair

Cambridge: Salt, 2005

Hix Eros: Poetry Review

Poetry reviews journal. Edited by Joe Luna and Jo(w) Lindsay Walton, and sometimes by Jordan Savage. Design by Robbie Dawson.

Hix Eros: On the Late Poetry of J.H. Prynne

2015

Co-edited with Joe Luna.

Writing Politics and the Limit: Reading J. H. Prynne's "The Idea Star Fighter"

The poetry of J. H. Prynne continues to divide critical opinion over thirty years since it first began to appear in a series of small-press publications. The urgency of this metaphor of division perhaps overstates the case when we consider that one half of the debate about Prynne's work is characterised by a deliberate refusal to acknowledge that a corpus so committed to rethinking the relationship between experience and the languages available to describe it has any place within a contemporary British cultural sphere still defined by romantic and anti-romantic attitudes to poetry. Such critical resistance is all the more perplexing given Peter Ackroyd's celebrated claim that Prynne is " without doubt the most formidable and accomplished poet in England today, a writer who has single-handedly changed the vocabulary of expression (Ackroyd 27). " It might be expected that the force of this assertion would have propelled Prynne's name to greater prominence, but his work remains almost completely unknown inside and outside Britain, with the exception of a handful of small and obscure journals edited by Prynne's former students at Cambridge University. The irony that now confronts us is that a body of work which seeks relentlessly to expand the boundaries of " poetic " expression and to map the possible relationships between poetry and the other discourses that constitute the cultural space of late capitalism has been either marginalised or reabsorbed by those institutional sites that

This paper is a report on the fourth annual Northumbria University poetry symposium, organised by Jo Lindsay Walton, Ed Luker, and Ian Davidson. The conference aimed to explore the relationships of work (in its many forms) to poetry and poetry performance.

Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency: A Reading of the Poems of

Interpretative geography and the practice of the aesthetic share a relation that throws new light upon the interaction between the individual and the state thereby informing our understanding of the nation. The nation located through such a practice becomes an entity that is tempered by the functioning of individual affects 1 and at the same time homogenized to fit into cartographic demarcations. To a large extent, the indeterminate category of geography (owing to the conurbation of spaces, the dense array of spatial artefacts and the telescoping of the self from the city onto the nation) can be refracted across two levels of meaning-making – the upper limit of 'space' and the lower limit of 'place'. The limit of space emerges as a palimpsest containing within itself the medieval imagination of the infinite, the eighteenth century constructions of the Absolute (joining point, position, place, region) while being contained within the cognitive capacity of the finite human subject. On the other hand, the lower limit of 'place' understood geographically as 'locale' or 'abode' becomes the means of understanding the individual's subjectivity placed within spatial boundaries. The conceptual boundaries of space and place are instrumental for understanding the manner in which resistance against late capitalist ways of being is formulated within the purlieus of the city and is then transposed onto that of an abstract entity such as the nation. J. H. Prynne's poems look at the state as a transformative category and delve into the processes of commoditization that creates the generic structures of nation, state and critically assess the ways in which such structures are reproduced and sustained. Within the ambits of literature, geography has always played an integral part in formulating a sense of national identity. In late seventeenth century England, for example, John Bunyan'sThe Holy War – The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Man-soul (1682) disputes over the territory of the town which then becomes an allegory for the disputes over national sovereignty (following the collapse of the English Revolution and the establishment of the Restoration period). Closer to our time, the poetry of W. B. Yeats strives to create an Irish national literature which distinctly conveys a sense of the Irish national soil. However, following from the late capitalist defenestration 2 of actual boundaries, we find that the notion of community and the contextualization of a community of people become increasingly difficult as there is a whole range of geo-political phenomena that come to define the function

Book Reviews: Toward. Some. Air. reviewed by Lila Matsumoto; For the Future reviewed by Shalini Sengupta

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2019

Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities

2010