Poetry and Work

Poetry and Work offers a timely and much-needed re-examination of the relationship between work and poetry. The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely. The book interrogates whether poetry and avant-garde and experimental writing can provide models for work that is less alienated and more free. In this major new collection, sixteen scholars and poets draw on a lively array of theory and philosophy, archival research, fresh readings, and personal reflection in order to consider work and poetry: the work in poetry and the work of poetry. Individual chapters address issues such as the many professions, occupations, and tasks of poets beyond and around writing; poetry’s special relationship with ‘craft’; work's relationship with gender, class, race, disability, and sexuality; how work gets recognised or rendered invisible in aesthetic production and beyond; the work of poetry and the work of political activism and organising; and the notion of poetry itself as a space where work and play can blur, and where postwork imaginaries can be nurtured and explored.

Jo Lindsay Walton is Research Fellow in Critical and Cultural Theory at the Sussex Humanities Lab, UK. His main research interests are modern and contemporary poetry, speculative fiction, and political economy. Ed Luker is Associate Lecturer at University of Surrey, UK. He completed his PhD at Northumbria University on the poetry of J.H. Prynne in relation to British and North American poetry. As a poet his work includes Peak Return (2014), Headlost (2014), The Sea Together (2016), Compound Out The Fractured World (2017), and Heavy Waters (2019).