Dr Steve Nash

Novel

This article posits an ecological reading of poetry production and reception. While an individualist/isolationist view has long formed the prevalent approach to poetry, our contemporary digital landscape instead highlights the complex interrelationships between the many people, places, platforms and other entities involved in poetic processes. The hyperconnectivity afforded by new media (Hoskins 2018) has recently prompted a multidisciplinary shift towards ecological ways of thinking, most notably in experimental psychology (Gibson 1979), media ecology (Postman 1968; Nystrom 1973; McLuhan 1977), and cognitive ecologies (Hoskins 2009; Hutchins 2010). Drawing on this rich scholarship, and on Nissel’s visual model of the contemporary UK poetry ecology –informed by Timothy Morton’s mesh, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, and Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory– this article explores the interconnectedness of the production and reception of poetry. In 2005, Marjorie Perloff stated, ‘Seeing, hearing, and performing: in the internet age these take on a rather different valence from the poetries of the eighties’ (133). Another twenty years later, the hybrid age of poetry publishing and events and the participatory culture of Web 2.0 have once again transformed the way we write, read, and think about poetry. How might the plurality of planes in which poetry is produced and read/experienced add to its multivalence? To discuss this, the authors will reflect on their respective experiences from their roles in literary magazines, Spelt and The Passionfruit Review, social media in the poetry community, and the Tears in the Fence and Stay-at-Home! literary festivals. Nissel, Parsons, and Nash’s intervention into individualist approaches extends to the writing and editing process of this article itself. Using a collaborative approach, each responds to the previous piece in sequence, offering an opportunity to respond creatively, such as with illustrations of ecological models and collaboratively written poetry, alongside traditional essay material.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome is integral to the positing of a philosophy of digital/postdigital narrative. The postdigital represents a breakdown of the authoritarian structures which guide traditional narrative practice. What Deleuze postulates in his theory of ‘the worst’ is not the breakdown of these barriers, but the reaction to the breakdown. If the barriers are transgressed then the reaction of the author is to impose boundaries with greater force. This amounts to an act of authorial violence against the reader or spectator. The individuated yet networked mode of engagement of postdigital media circumvents authorial regulation. It is rhizomatic, the barriers are porous. Mythology and mythmaking are crucial to our navigation through an increasingly textualised world. Caught between texts, armed only with our schematic cognition of the narratives and metanarratives that we have inherited along the way to make sense of it all, we forge ahead constructing new meaning out of what works and what has informed us from the constructions we set off with. And some of us even produce extra texts in the process, documenting ourselves and our journeys. Using examples of popular videogames as artefacts that are symptomatic of our current engagement with rhizomatic narrative, this paper will examine how literary theory can be applied in new media, where the reader/spectator becomes the player/author, as the active agent in a semblance of control over new, democratized narratives. Assessing the efficacy of mythological awareness as a navigational technique in Oblivion, Heavy Rain, and Mass Effect, this paper will explore the way we use and recycle old narratives to understand and further create new ones, both in cultural production and in life

Third Full Poetry Collection

Mythology and mythmaking are crucial to our navigation through an increasingly textualised world. Caught between texts, armed with only our schematic cognition of the narratives and metanarratives that we have inherited along the way to make sense of it all, we forge ahead constructing new meaning and configurations from those that we set off with. The following chapter seeks to examine the reconfiguration of traditional Nordic modes of narrative to better fit a more clearly Western approach to storytelling, as is evident in the recent example of Neo-peplum Television, Vikings. Utilising the Television show’s source material: Ragnar’s Saga Loðbrókar, and Ragnarssona þáttr, in addition to older Norse texts, such as The Poetic Edda, and The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, the chapter will outline a major distinction between the authorial approaches to narrative. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome is integral to the positing of a philosophy that distinguishes between these storytelling traditions. The Nordic sagas are presented in forms that reject clear delineation, chronology, borders, and boundaries, they are rhizomatic. The traditional Western mode of narrative is, what Deleuze and Guattari would define as, arborescent. It is structured, hierarchical, with a governing or organising General. The shift that occurs in the reconfiguring of the traditional Icelandic tale for a contemporary Western audience in the Television narrative, is a shift from the rhizomatic to the arborescent. The rhizomatic represents a breakdown of the authoritarian structures that guide traditional Western narrative practice. What Deleuze postulates in his theory of ‘the worst’ is not the breakdown of these barriers, but the reaction to this breakdown. If the barriers are transgressed, or are revealed to be illusory, then the reaction of the Western author is to impose or reassert these barriers with greater force. This amounts to an act of authorial violence against the reader or viewer. In the context of Vikings, this presents a paradox – in this retelling of a history (that Deleuze and Guattari would term a ‘nomadology, the opposite to history’) about a people obsessed with infinite passage and the rejection of boundaries, it is the freedom of the rhizomatic that has been eschewed in favour of structure. The original Icelandic Sagas, and Eddas represent a nomadology but in their reconfiguration for the screen, and a Western audience, has this become a history, with the figures navigating the tales no longer in passage, no longer in flight?

Tove Jansson’s Moomins occupy a unique space in Nordic literature, existing at the intersection of mythology, existentialism, and cultural reinvention. While often classified as children’s literature, the Moomin stories engage with profound themes of mobility, identity, and the uncanny, reflecting a distinctly Nordic sensibility that embraces impermanence and transformation. This article argues that the Moomins function as an evolving mythology, resisting fixed meanings and adapting fluidly across different cultural and historical contexts. Their world, shaped by seasonal cycles, environmental upheavals, and an ever-present tension between home and exile, mirrors the existential uncertainties of modern life. Drawing on theories of rhizomatic storytelling, psychoanalysis, and cultural translation, this study explores how the Moomins negotiate the boundaries between nostalgia and reinvention. Particular attention is given to the Moomins’ engagement with the uncanny, notably through figures such as the Groke, and their relationship with Nordic existentialist thought, which underscores their ambivalent stance towards stability and belonging. The Moomins’ cultural afterlives further demonstrate their mythic adaptability, from their commodification in global markets to their reimagining in Japanese media as symbols of an idyllic, pre-modern Finland. Ultimately, this article positions the Moomins as more than literary characters; they are living myths, continually reshaped by those who engage with them. Their enduring relevance lies not in their fixity but in their capacity to reflect the shifting anxieties, hopes, and identities of the cultures that reinterpret them.