“Joyce’s poetry is, by general scholarly and editorial consensus, a secondary enterprise for both republication and study,” Tim Conley observes in the present issue of Hypermedia Joyce Studies. It is time to challenge that consensus; after all, poetry is to be found in Joyce’s entire oeuvre. From “The Holy Office” to Little Chandler’s love of Byron, from Stephen’s villanelle to Buck’s “Ballad of Joking Jesus,” from swerve of shore to bend of bay, from the graceful iambic pentameter of “A way a lone a loved a last a long” to “O, the green wothe botheth” – Joyce’s work is Joyce’s poetry.
So welcome to issue 14.1 of HJS, which addresses that tricky subject of, as I formulated it when I sent out my call for papers, “James Joyce and [in the widest sense of ‘and’: on/-an/’s/in/against/…] poetry.” The contributors have cast their nets wide.
Starting from a penchant of figures in Ulysses to make their sayings fanciful and expanding from that, Fritz Senn considers many of Joyce’s characters’ verbal, often poetic excess as “perhaps proportionally more than ordinary human vanity would account for.”
Onno Kosters discusses the ‘un’-(or, perhaps, ‘over’-)poetic qualities of Joyce’s poetry, the concentration of pitch-perfect poetical effects in his prose, and one of Joyce’s poems from Pomes Penyeach in particular. A spin-off of his work is the Wordlist to Pomes Penyeach that is appended to this introduction.
David Pascoe goes back to “The Holy Office” to find that Ben Jonson, a much neglected source for Joyce, is in fact central to his aesthetic at the time of writing his satire.
Tim Conley’s contribution discusses in detail Joyce’s (in)famous limericks, which he finds to have further reaching implications than the mere anecdotal value they’re usually assigned.
Katherine Ebury looks at the ways in which the American poet John Berryman has ‘processed’ Joyce in his work – not so much through Joyce’s poetry, though, as through his prose (and by a visit to the Martello Tower).
David Vichnar brings us even closer to the present day by looking at Joyce and the way the Language poets have ‘worked through’ him, looking in detail at the work of the American theorist and author Steve McCaffery.
Bridget O’Rourke’s creative contribution, finally, is a highly personal, and a highly poetical one: her audio composition “RoaraTORio: A Senescent Circus on Finnegans Wake,” inspired by John Cage’s “Writing for the Fourth Time Through Finnegans Wake,” is a moving tribute to the author’s father, affected by dementia, bringing us beyond the realm of understanding – the realm, I would suggest, where the poetic, much like ‘the Joycean,’ ideally, always brings us.
Onno Kosters (Editor), Utrecht University, 26h March 2015.