Troy Urquhart: About

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Troy's poem "when it's just spring: two sestinas" has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Troy led a session on teaching the skills required for synthesis at the 2011 conference of the Florida Council of Independent Schools.

Troy's poems "when it's just spring: two sestinas" and "Sometimes, a song. Or a smile." have both been nominated
for this year's Best of the Net.

Excerpt: T. S. Eliot

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From “[Suspended Animation: The ‘Whimper’ of Kinetic Energy in] T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men.’” The Explicator 59.4 (Summer 2001): 199-201.

While images of suppressed motion are present in the first section, the images create a passive, rather than an active, tone. In the first two lines, Eliot’s speaker introduces himself by using the first person plural “We” (1, 2), a fact which not only indicates the association of other people with the speaker’s situation but also suggests a duplicity of character within the mind of the speaker similar to that found in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The image of “hollow men” (1) who are “Leaning together” (3) introduces the image of immobile action. “Leaning” denotes the application of force, but this force is directed toward a central point and merely provides a method of self-support. The balance of such an arrangement also suggests that it is precarious: should one part change the force with which it leans, the arrangement becomes unstable and is likely to collapse. If the speaker’s “We” is interpreted as different aspects of one person, the image here suggests mental stability which is maintained only through the careful balance of different personas. The “Paralysed force, gesture without motion” (12) confirms this image, for energy is expended without visible result. Further, people who have “crossed / [. . .] to death’s other Kingdom” (13-4) do not remember the speaker’s “We” “as lost / Violent souls” (15-6) but “As the hollow men / The stuffed men” (17-8). The kinetic energy of this scene is directed inward, and the description of non-violence suggests that the motion goes unnoticed by those outside the speaker’s “We.” Throughout the first section of the poem, the speaker’s efforts are directed inward and are therefore “meaningless” (7) because they do not influence the outside world.

Excerpt: Percy Bysshe Shelley

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From “Metaphor, Transfer, and Translation in Plato’s Ion: The Postmodern Platonism of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry.” Romanticism on the Net 31 (Aug. 2003). <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2003/v/n31/008700ar.html>.

From this perspective, which focuses on the way the metaphor of the iron rings works rather than on how Socrates seems to use it to critique the rhapsode, the model of the iron rings ceases to be a model for diluted truth and becomes instead a model for the construction of meaning. In a statement which Socrates seems to ignore, Ion himself suggests that his role as a rhapsode is defined by his audience as well as by the inspiration he receives from the poet, stating, “I look down upon them [the spectators] from the stage, and behold the various emotions [. . .] stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking: and I am obliged to give my very best attention to them” (15). Ion recognizes that his performance as a rhapsode is shaped by the act of performing, understands that he becomes a rhapsode only in the interactive act of interpreting Homer for his audience. In other words, Ion’s task is not merely to recite the words of the poet, but also to translate them into a form his audience understands, a form which affects the audience the way Ion believes they should be affected. This view suggests that each link in the chain of iron rings relies on both the higher and the lower links, for just as the rhapsode is a rhapsode only in the action of bridging “the mind of the poet” (Plato, Ion 12) and the mind of the audience, the poet is a poet only in connecting the muse with the rhapsode—engaged in any other activity, the poet could not take the title “poet.”

Excerpt: J. M. Coetzee

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From “Truth, Reconciliation, and the Restoration of the State: J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” Twentieth-Century Literature 52.1 (Spring 2006): 1-21.

The hope that Olsen and especially Gallagher want to find in the Magistrate’s interpretation of the wooden slips, like the hope the TRC wants to find in narrating the events of apartheid, ignores the self-interested nature of the Magistrate’s interpretation. In particular, Gallagher’s claim that the wooden slips do have meaning is troubling. Certainly, it is reasonable that the wooden slips might have contained meaning in the language of their original writer, but this writer and all who speak his language are dead, permanently silenced by Empire, just as those who have been most oppressed by the system of apartheid in South Africa have been permanently silenced. Although the Magistrate assumes that the slips come from an earlier Empire, the writer of these slips has become mute, unable to speak. When the Magistrate speaks for the writer of the slips, performing a sort of translation, he does not speak for the subaltern, but rather imagines the subaltern, and the voice with which he speaks is his own, not the Other’s, and the experiences he narrates are his own, not those of the writer of the slips. The problem of the Magistrate’s performance reproduces the problem of representation articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the distinction between vertreten and darstellen:

the shifting distinctions between representation within the state and political economy, on the one hand, and within the theory of the Subject, on the other, must not be obliterated. Let us consider the play of vertreten (“represent” in the first sense) and darstellen (“re-present” in the second sense) . . . . (275-6)

Representation in the first sense, vertreten, denotes political proxy, speaking on behalf of the Other, while the second, darstellen, denotes a mimetic re-presentation or portrait. Later in her essay, Spivak asserts that “[t]o confront [the subaltern] is not to represent (vertreten) them but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves” (288-9), and this is certainly the case in the Magistrate’s attempt to represent the writer of the wooden slips. While he wants to understand the writer’s experience and read the slips, he cannot, so he is unable to represent the writer in terms of political proxy (vertreten), and the performative interpretation he gives is a representation (darstellen) of his own experiences. This is not to say that the Magistrate cannot discover the “moral truths” that Gallagher seeks, but any truth he finds will be his own, subjective truth, and not the truth of the writer of the wooden slips. The Magistrate cannot narrate the experience of the Other, so he can neither erase the distinction between self and Other nor restore the dignity of the Other. The attempt to see this scene as restorative justice reveals the problem which underlies restorative justice: it is the Magistrate, the speaking agent of the state—and not the silenced victim of the state—whose dignity is restored.

Excerpt: Titus Andronicus

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From “The Subversive Text of the Female Body in Titus Andronicus.” Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Tucson, October 2006.

The rape and mutilation of Lavinia, as well as the killing of her husband Bassianus, can be read as the punishment for her mutiny against Tamora, and her punishment possesses the spectacular theatricality common to Early Modern punishments. Foucault remarks that there were “cases of an almost theatrical reproduction of the crime in the execution of the guilty man—with the same instruments, the same gestures” (45), and that punishments often centered on cutting off or inflicting pain upon the offending body part. Aside from being a political threat to Saturninus, Bassianus is also guilty of accusing Tamora of sexual infidelity, for he remarks that she is “Unfurnished of her well-beseeming troop” (2.3.56) and sarcastically refers to her as the notoriously chaste Diana (2.3.57-59). Lavinia’s crime, too, is accusing Tamora of being unchaste, of suggesting that Tamora has “a goodly gift in horning” (2.3.67), and of remarking that she and Bassianus should leave so that Tamora can “joy her raven-coloured love” (2.3.83). Following their mother’s order to revenge her, Chiron and Demetrius both stab Bassianus with their swords, and they then symbolically stab Lavinia by raping her, their sexual organs having been associated with their swords earlier in the play. Chiron and Demetrius rape both Bassianus and Lavinia, violating both their bodies with their phalli; both are violated sexually because they have accused Tamora of sexual crime, and rape provides the reproduction of their crime in their punishment. Further, while Green interprets Chiron and Demetrius’s forceful removal of Lavinia’s tongue as revealing the muteness of and powerlessness of women in Elizabethan England (323-24), the cutting out of Lavinia’s tongue also suggests the “theatrical reproduction” of her crime against the sovereign: her tongue is cut out because it is with her tongue that she has abused the Queen.

Excerpt: Guantánamo

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From “Torture, Tolerance, and the Body of the Other: The Culture of Life in Guántanamo Bay.” The End of Tolerance?, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, Atlanta, November 2007.

What I am proposing, then, is an examination of Guantánamo along three related lines of inquiry that reveal the tensions central to contemporary Western politics. First, such an examination would see Guantánamo as bringing to public scrutiny the problem of punishment in the contemporary Western state. By seeing Guantánamo as a space which potentially represents the space of the pillory or of the public scaffold—that place of public punishment which becomes increasingly private with the rise of governmentality—Guantánamo reveals the problems of the public exposure of violence committed by the state against those who commit offenses against it, an exposure which threatens to demonize the state and its agents who effect such violence. Second, it would see Guantánamo as a liminal space, a space which is neither inside nor outside law, a space to which the undesirable and unredeemable Other is banished. The construction of this space of abandonment threatens to expose rights, as a defining feature of the liberal state, as neither natural nor unalienable and therefore threatens the foundations of the liberal state itself. Third, it would recognize the deployment of a discourse of tolerance as countering these threats. This discourse of tolerance, as a defining feature of contemporary (neo-)liberalism, thereby eclipses rights-based discourse as the self-defining discourse of Western culture.

Excerpt: Ralph Ellison

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From “[‘This is God!’: Hierarchal Naming in] Ralph Ellison’s ‘King of the Bingo Game.’” The Explicator 60.4 (Summer 2002): 217-9.

The protagonist’s re-naming of himself expresses the elation that he feels as he attempts to grasp power, yet it also implies the emptiness of that power. He casts off his old, “white” name and declares that he is “The-man-who-pressed-the-button-who-held-the-prize-who-was-the-King-of-Bingo” (213); and, significantly, the story takes its title from this act of naming. While this title suggests that he does hold “a certain power” (213) by defining himself as a “King,” it deflates that power by indicating that it is over something trivial: a bingo game. Further, this self-aggrandizement quickly breaks down as the protagonist again internalizes the social messages: “He felt that the whole audience had somehow entered him [. . .] and he was unable to throw them out” (213). Even as he holds the button, as he grasps power, and as the uniformed enforcers of the white patriarchy threaten him with physical harm, the protagonist “couldn’t afford to break the cord” (214). This image of an umbilical cord which cannot be cut suggests the “two-ness” of the African American psyche described by Du Bois (3) and reinforces his inability to define himself except in terms given to him by the dominant white male.