The expanse : self-consciousness and the transatlantic prose poem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This work consists of a portfolio of creative work in the form of verse and prose poems, The Dusty Era, preceded by a thesis, ‘The Expanse: Self-Consciousness and the Transatlantic Prose Poem’, arguing for a serious analysis of humour within the form of prose poetry. Chapter 1 introduces the form of prose poetry and the idea of self-consciousness as methodology through the book-length prose poem In Parenthesis (1937) by David Jones. Chapter 2 concerns Seamus Heaney’s Stations and Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, two prose poem sequences from the early 70s, both of which cite In Parenthesis as their primary influence. The works are discussed in terms of their reactions to Jones, arguing that they largely excise self-consciousness in favour of poetic self-mythology and aggrandisement, whereby the events of a poet’s life are elevated to the significance of historical events. The chapter concludes by looking at Heaney’s recent return to the form in his 2006 collection District and Circle. In Chapter 3 John Ashbery’s Three Poems is read alongside Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable and through Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. Antecedents are sought in the prose poetry of Baudelaire and Kafka and the parallel themes of judgement and Christian imagery are traced through Three Poems and W. H. Auden’s The Orators. In Chapter 4 the process poetry of The Orators leads to the identification of a hybrid form, the poem-as-essay (or essay-as-poem), analysed through the work of Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose prose poetry simultaneously complements and subverts her research as a classicist. Chapter 5 concerns the English poet John Ash, in particular his technique of inverting his standard poetic voice within his travelogue prose poems. This is traced back to Bashō’s 16th century travelogues, as self-conscious and self-referential as anything which is today classed as postmodern. In conclusion the thesis assesses the work of Lee Harwood as a poet who encapsulates the central arguments of self-consciousness, humour and transatlanticism within his prose poetry while remaining stylistically unaffiliated with a specific movement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".