Book 2.0 - Volume 13, Issue 2, 2023

This editorial is a brief summary of the articles, interviews and reviews contained in issue Volume 13, Issue 2 of Book 2.0 (BTWO), an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal primarily concerned with book creation and publication, including writing, illustration and design and the theoretical and practical study of books, literature, creative writing, storytelling, languages and cultures. Contents for this issue include articles, interviews and reviews mainly focusing on collaboration and cooperation between creative practitioners, scholars and in publishing.

Following renewed efforts to reclaim Loy’s legacy and to contribute to an emerging archive of scholarship on her work, this article addresses the perplexing lack of attention to her poetry that was often lauded by iconic poets of her time. We focus on selected poems that took shape not only within the mélange of Loy’s writings, visual design and art but also within the context of her fascinating and tragic life experiences. Here the body in all its materiality – from childbirth to death – plays a significant role in Loy’s work, particularly in the context of her expressions of complex entanglements of the corporeal/spiritual, human/non-human, self/other, words/sounds and individual/collective in her oeuvre. Although Loy’s work was shaped by modernism, feminism, avant-gardism and Christianity it also transcended these influences – her work ultimately reaches toward a broader focus on those who are abject in society, and on the role of aesthetic consciousness in formulations of a more humane world.

Meta/morphosis is a long-form poetry that acts as the rationale behind wider doctoral research as a practitioner-researcher, which uses performance research as a well-being intervention for young people with socio-emotional mental health conditions through the vehicle of mythology. The rationale behind my research – which explores the navigation of human emotion and aims to create pathways to new becomings (Braidotti 2002) – creative writing felt like the only apt medium. The poem meanders around the original form of Ovid’s Metamorphoses – inspired by the way in which the intertwining internal monologues and visceral feelings of the characters were never too much and, in fact, spurred on. The justification for and exploration of this mode of writing takes the form of a commentary, as is commonplace for ancient texts in Latin and Greek to be presented with an accompanying linguistic commentary. The ‘commentary’ is cut together side by side to the poem as a praxis to emphasize the materiality of how the two ideas can touch and influence/change their form (Arlander 2017; Barad 2007; Bayley 2018; Freire 1970; Murris 2022). The poem was performed in 2022 – the exploration of this practice allowed me to fully immerse myself in the epistemology and methodology of what I am hoping to do; it gave grounding to now move forward and begin research with the epistemology, methodology, practice, theory and ethics intertwined.

The poet and literary scholar Nigel Wheale recalls with appreciation and affection the intellectual and artistic influence and friendship of his former teacher R. F. (Roger) Langley. Nigel outlines Langley’s background and education and recounts the friendship between Langley and his Cambridge University contemporary, the poet, teacher and critic, J. H. Prynne. Nigel then recalls his experience of Langley as the teacher who not only prepared him to successfully take Cambridge University Scholarship examinations but also became a close and much valued friend. Nigel was eventually able to extend his support to Langley by establishing the small press Infernal Methods, which published Langley’s first three books: Hem (1978), Sidelong (1981) and Twelve Poems (1994), before co-publishing, with Carcanet, Langley’s Collected Poems (2000).

Two of the books Ted Hughes took with him when he worked as a Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter plotter during his two years of compulsory national service, were Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Both, he read closely and often. He was already familiar, through his interest in the magical preoccupations of W. B. Yeats, with the philosophy of Hermetic Neoplatonism which had made its way to England during Shakespeare’s time and influenced the work of poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spencer. All of these poets believed in, and used, the alchemical power of poetry which, as Sidney wrote in his Defence of Poetry, could ‘hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue’. This, and his immersion in Shakespeare’s work (which as Sylvia Plath told her mother, he ‘knew by heart’) led Hughes to discern a developing pattern, based on the transformative powers of the Goddess, through which he believed Shakespeare was performing a complex alchemical process. He expounded this theory in detail in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, but almost twenty years earlier he had written the poem ‘An Alchemy’ for a limited edition anthology published in 1973 by the Globe Theatre Trust. ‘An Alchemy’ is a difficult and allusive poem in which nothing is spelled out. In this article, I look at just one section of the poem in which Hughes created his own alchemical matrix through which he sought to reveal the underlying alchemical theme that he saw as the ‘Gold’ in Shakespeare’s work.

Among her more than 400 books, Jane Yolen (b. 1939) has written or edited around 50 collections of poetry. In this new interview, Yolen discusses how her poetry developed throughout her writing life. We talk about her early desire in childhood to write poetry and about poets whose work she has admired. Yolen talks about her process in writing works such as the verse novel Finding Baba Yaga (2018) or the agonizing Radiation Sonnets (2003) and explains the difference between writing poetry for children and grown-ups, using her How Do Dinosaurs…? (2000–ongoing) series and Yuck, You Suck! Poems about Animals that Sip, Slurp, Suck (2022) as examples. She gives advice to teachers and suggestions to the poetically perplexed, as well as telling stories about encountering W. B. Yeats and reciting poetry to a wombat. Yolen’s poetic oeuvre is by turns whimsical and heart-wrenching, lyrical and conversational. She writes with a demotic lyricism that balances the formal requirements of prosody against the musicality of everyday speech. Her poetry begins from keen observation of everyday life and translates it into the mythic and the elemental, her words creating images that haunt the readers’ imaginations. What emerges is a glimpse of poetic truth—or, perhaps, the glimpse of the way to catch a glimpse.

I was recently very moved while reading ‘Constructing identity by writing roots into life: A poetic autoethnography’ by Andrew J. Garbisch in which he used a poetic-narrative autoethnography to explore his lived experience as a transracial Asian American adoptee. In it, he shares four of his original poems, following each with a narrative reflection. Favourite lines include the conclusion of his poem, ‘Allegory of the Tsohg’: ‘But you’re not supposed to hear any of this, I should really hush,/ Otherworldly, I’m sorry, I’ve already said too much’. Although I feel largely distanced from much of what is discussed in this piece, including adoption and experiencing the world as a person of colour, I was nevertheless struck by this project and many moments resonated, especially how his efforts to ‘construct meaning of [his] own identity’ was a somewhat ‘haunting endeavor’ (39). He inspired me to try and write a piece that ‘take[s] a bird’s eye view’ (43) of my educator journey and self – that is, how I am wrangling with reconciling that my years in academia have now eclipsed my previous time spent as a secondary English teacher. Because I have found arts-based research methods, such as narrative and poetic inquiry, to be quite generative (see, e.g. Author 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018a, 2018b), I immediately understood Garbisch’s piece as an inspiring mentor text – an exemplar of sorts for how to write to wrestle with the (albeit completely differently) somewhat haunting identity work that I find myself moving through presently. I love his bringing together of methodologies that I have used independent of one another but had not yet melded before. As such, his approach, structure and exercise in vulnerable arts-based work largely inspired this ‘micro’, snapshot-style project, which is also built on my learning from arts-based researchers, poets and storytellers I admire (e.g. Clandinin and Connelly 2000; James 2009, 2017; Sameshima et al. 2017; Faulkner 2019; Prendergast et al. 2009, among others). They have taught me a great deal, including how poetic inquiry can be a way of living in the world (Leggo cited in Irwin et al. 2019) and that narrative inquiry might consist of telling stories from our past that lead to possibilities of retellings and potential futures (Clandinin and Connelly 2000); such teachings also deeply inform this piece.

Review of: The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume I: 1927–1939, W. H. Auden (2022)

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 848 pp.,

ISBN 978-0691219295, h/bk, £48.0

The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, Volume II: 1940–1973, W. H. Auden (2022)

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1120 pp.,

ISBN 978-0691219301, h/bk, £48.0