Introduction: Poetry and extremity

In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.