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By David Sergeant\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n For a while now a lot of my research has been circling around ideas of utopia, and how it relates to prose fiction; a reading that has involved drawing on a range of fields and approaches, from narratology to environmental criticism. However, it wasn\u2019t until I was a fair way into assembling my new poetry collection that it occurred to me that it was dealing with many of the same ideas as this research. I\u2019ve always been happy to assume but leave almost superstitiously unexamined the fact that there must, presumably, be some bleed or crossover between my critical essays and creative writing; this time I couldn\u2019t really ignore it. And becoming aware of this convergence \u2013 well, I\u2019m trying hard to avoid the management-speak-ified word synergy here \u2013 but there was a feeling of the collection\u2019s sinews suddenly being knitted tighter together; of older and more familiar poems shrugging off an outer skin and stepping back onto the stage in a new light, a slightly different character.<\/p>\n A word about the volume\u2019s title, which a few people have asked about. It comes from the end of the penultimate poem:<\/p>\n \u2026 entailed in duplicate the pronoun<\/p>\n utopia.<\/p>\n Any idea of utopia \u2013 of living better, of making a better world \u2013 must involve the question of scale, perhaps more so today than ever before, in our age of planetary crisis: so, how do I relate to you, how do I and you become we, how does that we scale up beyond the other yous that we can see, how do we become a true commons, holding individuality and collectivity together, with no diminishment to either. The lines here attempt to keep some of these apparently discordant energies in play at the same time. And as I\u2019m a humanities scholar, and can do this sort of thing, I\u2019m going to invoke here, with a recklessly grand naivety, the spectre of quantum splitting and time-travel. So, to name just some of the states into which the lines collapse: \u2018entailed in never-quite\u2019, to be fixed and involved in a state of always almost existing, a perhaps catalytic always-imminence; \u2018never quite duplicate the pronoun\u2019, you\u2019ll never do it; \u2018duplicate the pronoun\u2019, you can and must do it; and then both of these feeding into \u2018the pronoun utopia\u2019, a utopia made up of pronouns (I, you, we, etc.), and \u2018the pronoun utopia\u2019, utopia as a pronoun. And that’s not even to consider the questions raised by the spacing on the page (and in the ear): for instance, between ‘duplicate the pronoun’ and ‘utopia’, commanded action and a perhaps concluded state, with a gap – but what kind of gap? – between them …<\/p>\n The collection has been beautifully produced by Jennifer Grigg at the Green Bottle Press, and is available to order here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Poetry publishers need all the support they can get, so please get yourself a copy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By David Sergeant\u00a0 For a while now a lot of my research has been circling around ideas of utopia, and how it relates to prose fiction; a reading that has involved drawing on a range of fields and approaches, from narratology to environmental criticism. However, it wasn\u2019t until I was a fair way into assembling… Continue reading The Pronoun Utopia by David Sergeant<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":2449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,138],"tags":[36,46,257,94,422],"class_list":["post-2448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-transdisciplinary-creative-practices","tag-book","tag-david-sergeant","tag-english-and-creative-writing","tag-poetry","tag-publication","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2448"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2451,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2448\/revisions\/2451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nnever-quite<\/p>\n