Reading Fiona Sampson

Omar Sabbagh

Description

The FIRST, and a lucidly compelling, book-length study s on the oeuvre of a major contemporary poet and female writer who evinces a vital literary intelligence

This book-length study of an eminent, distinguished and influential poet and contemporary woman of letters integrates analysis and a honed interpretation of the near-total gamut of the oeuvre to-date of Professor Fiona Sampson. The study includes biographical insight and synthesizes its rigorous discussions of the dominant rubric of Professor Sampson’s poetic métier, her prose in different genres, and the literary practices of over a decades-long and much-lauded literary career.  This critical work finds and displays incisive and fruitful ways by which the oeuvre in question crosses boundaries in literary writing and practices with fertile results and evidences those cross-currents in a manner that indicates the trajectory of a sensibility or structure of feeling, one which though highly intelligent and self-aware is also deeply empathic.  

The idiosyncrasy of this study comes about by the ways in which a formidable consideration of Sampson’s other roles as editor, translator, healer, educator, critic, and biographer in the world of letters can be understood as complementary parts of her predominant, first, poetic métier.  In this sense, the book itself has a poetic function though written in clear discursive prose.  Its aim is to see and make its readership see how all of Professor Sampson’s flourishing roles in the literary world grow out of and into her primary role as a creative writer. The study finds felicitous and innovative ways of showing how the work of an editor, a critic or theorist might be fruitfully seen as vehicles for the major poetic tenor. Thus, the central critical trope of this study shows how and why the variegated oeuvre to date is organically rooted in and connected into and out of one thoroughgoing literary intelligence and vision.  All the readings and chapters cohere in a way to display the oneness of the oeuvre and career but, more pressingly, to show the readership how such oneness might be usefully understood.  

A lucid, coherent and compelling reading of Sampson’s main works makes this book a scintillating study and a much needed contribution to the current work being done on major contemporary poets and writers and, in particular, contemporary women figures, in the British and international literary scenes.

About the Author; Preface; Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Hearthsides and Hospices; 2. From The Looking-Glass to the Lamp; 3. Prose Animations; 4. For the Love of Music; Conclusion; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Reference
• Modern history
• Literary criticism
• Renaissance architecture
• 20th century
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785274206
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reading Fiona Sampson
Reading Fiona Sampson
A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Omar Sabbagh
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Omar Sabbagh 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936290
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-418-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-418-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Fort-da
CONTENTS
About the Author
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What This Book Is Not; What This Book Is
Fiona Sampson: A Brief Biographical Reconnaissance
1. Hearthsides and Hospices
An Editor’s Poetics: On Fiona Sampson as Editor and Curator
Hospitable Words, Or, Care for Idiosyncrasy
2. From the Looking Glass to the Lamp
Into the Looking Glass: Fiona Sampson as Poet and Critic from 2005–2007
Homely Duplicities: Reading Fiona Sampson’s Rough Music
Haunting Ambivalence: Reading Fiona Sampson’s Coleshill
Ways of Empathy: Reading Fiona Sampson’s The Catch
Falling into Hope: Reading Fiona Sampson’s Come Down
3. Prose Animations
Animating Places: Reading Fiona Sampson’s Limestone Country beneath a Durrellian lens
Animating Instruments, Or, the Creative Artist as Biographer: On Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley
4. For the Love of Music
Literary Friendship(s), Or, ‘trying, to get closer […]’: On Fiona Sampson’s Beyond the Lyric
Expanding the Formal Project: On Fiona Sampson’s Lyric Cousins
Conclusion: Democracy and Excellence
Appendix: Inaugural Wellcome Trust Annual Public Mike White Memorial Lecture, June 14, 2016
Seminal Publication of Professor Fiona Sampson’s ‘A Speaking Likeness: Poetry Within Health and Social Care’
Selected Bibliography
Index
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic. From 2006 to the present his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Agenda , Banipal , Kenyon Review Online , PN Review , Poetry Review , Poetry Wales , Stand , The Moth , The Reader , The Warwick Review , The Wolf , (T&F) New Writing , New Humanist , Two Thirds North and Acumen , among others. His first collection and his fourth collection are, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To the Middle of Love . (Cinnamon Press, 2010/2017) His fifth collection, But It Was an Important Failure , is published with Cinnamon Press in 2020. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile , was published with Liquorice Fish Books in 2016; and he has published much short fiction, some of it prize-winning. His Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City , was published with Fairlight Books in 2019. He has published scholarly essays on George Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, G. K. Chesterton, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Joseph Conrad, Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Basil Bunting, Hilaire Belloc, George Steiner and others; as well as on many contemporary poets. Many of these works are collated in To My Mind, Or, Kinbotes: Essays on Literature , published with Whisk(e)y Tit in 2020. Sabbagh holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford; three MAs, all from the University of London, in English Literature, Creative Writing and Philosophy; and a PhD in English Literature from King’s College London. He was visiting assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB), from 2011 to 2013. He is associate professor of English at the American University in Dubai (AUD) and is presently associate editor of the new, AUD-based literary journal, Indelible.
For Marcel Proust – The son of well-to-do parents who, whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues […] The urge to suspend the division of labour which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies …
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
PREFACE
I have known Fiona Sampson since 2006, when she was assigned as my tutor in a second MA I was starting at the time, in Creative and Life Writing, at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. Earlier that summer, having just resigned a PhD under Professor Stefan Collini at Cambridge, I sent in a batch of poems to be considered for Poetry Review , where Sampson happened to be editor. I was being, to put it lightly, ambitious. However, at the close of our first group meeting with our tutor later that year in September, as I was about to leave, Sampson mentioned that she had accepted a poem of mine for the forthcoming winter 2006–2007 issue. I hope the present book serves in some small way as a token of personal gratitude as much as of professional admiration.
As I make clear in the introduction, this book is by no means a work of scholarship in the field of contemporary literary studies. It is a work of sustained literary criticism. And, as a literary critic, my hope is that, for all the baroque sound effects and rhythms of the prose, my judgment in the way I have analysed then synthesized in and through the chapters that make up this book is as lucid as it might be incisive. Yes, the approach is aggressive; but I see no point in merely describing the body of work under study. I chose to study the oeuvre of Professor Sampson, and then write this book, not only because I was a longstanding admirer of her work, but also because I value bodies of writing whose overt signs of high intelligence are palpable and fruitful. The kind that challenge me to find their inner workings, their submerged logic and hidden unities; the kind that challenge me to find ‘ways of going on’ that mirror some of my own tendencies as a meaning-making or meaning-seeing mind. Work, in short, such as Sampson’s, allows me to elicit some inferential load that takes my thinking life forward. I hope the arguments in this book inform, interest, but also ‘take the story forward’, too, for any students or readers of contemporary literature or creative writing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is a small group of primary persons to acknowledge as having been highly helpful and/or understanding by the time this book will have been completed and released. I would like to thank four editors who were kind enough to publish a very small part of this book, as is, or different, before in fact work on the whole book-length essay got underway. First, thanks to Patricia McCarthy, editor of central UK poetry organ, Agenda , for publishing a review of mine, ‘The Ways of Empathy’, on Professor Sampson’s 2016 collection, The Catch. The section in this book on that same collection is longer, more copious and more studied, but the original seed of my reaction to that collection is to be found in that short review. Secondly, to thank Professor Clare Simmons, who as editor of Prose Studies (T&F) published my paper, ‘Animating Places’, which in fact remains as first published in this present book. I would like to thank the editors of The London Magazine and of Life Writing (T&F) who were also kind enough to publish short review articles on, respectively, Coleshill and In Search of Mary Shelley ; these preliminary reactions to two of Sampson’s major works proved foundational as well for the more copious writing on said works in this book. I would also like to thank Abi Pandi and Megan Greiving at Anthem Press for being understanding, given certain obsessive and/or manic tendencies that overcome me when in flagrante when at work on a new publication. They were always kind enough not to complain when I would send repeated versions, edited-up or edited-down, of the different chapters of this book as they were written, piecemeal, between fall 2018 and fall 2019. Finally, I would like to thank Professor Fiona Sampson herself. Since coming to know her in late 2006, she has remained like a literary guardian angel for many of my endeavours and many of my follies. Not only has her patience with the same obsessive, manic tendency mentioned above been unequalled, but she was always on hand by email to fact-check those more empirical parts of the book. She was also of course continually on hand to answer queries and to provide as much information as I needed at any one time; not to mention, as I came towards the close of writing the first draft of this book, providing me with many documents, articles, papers, and book chapters, that otherwise would have been more arduous for me to locate, read and use, given my cur