Unfit for history: race, reparation and the reconstruction of American lyric

This article explores how contemporary US black poetics evidences the entanglement of the history of lyric with the history of race. Through readings of the work of Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Tyehimba Jess and Terrance Hayes, I make the case that this poetics situates American lyric within the violence of Reconstruction to imagine how Black Reconstruction may be enacted in cultural form. My contention is this poetics makes lyric 'unfit for history' and thus exposes the racialisation processes embedded in poetry’s modern life forms. I show how this poetics does not simply recuperate lyric subjectivity but presents a different model of subjectivity altogether, one that is rooted in a fugitive idea of blackness. I locate this lyric from the publication of Shockley’s The New Black (2011), as a reckoning with the failures of representation that were pronounced in the colour-blind politics of the Obama era and chart it to Hayes’ engagement with Trumpian politics in his sonnet sequence American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). I argue that this contemporary poetics, which makes its argument through a destabilisation of genre, unravels the racialisation processes embedded in the form of reading poetry that Virginia Jackson refers to as “lyricization.

'Rimbaud in embryo’: collaborative reproduction in T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane

The reproductive metaphors that T. S. Eliot uses in his early theories of creativity are indicative of modernism's ambivalence towards collaborative authorship. Moving away from a critical tendency to read Eliot's collaborative practice primarily in terms of Pound's editorial signature, this article examines how modernist collaboration, as theorised by Eliot, is bound up with a fantasy of origins. Framed by Eliot's positing of ‘merging’ as ‘involuntary collaboration’, it considers the collapse that occurs between co-labour, imitation, and theft not only in Eliot's work but also that of Hart Crane. More particularly, the article explores how Eliot and Crane both make use of another poet's work to release their own poetic sensibilities; it also shows how ‘involuntary collaboration’ takes on a shadowy presence in their respective works. This highlights the complex role that fantasy and affect play within modernist poetry's collaborative practices and attempts to forge a poetic community

Lyric weathering: reading poetry in the age of bewilderment

The language of ecocriticism is often one of mourning and melancholia: a mourning for the end of nature that has already come to pass. The emergent field of ecopoetics is driven, similarly, by a language of grief and its most emblematic forms are, accordingly, elegies. In this article, I make a case for reorienting the language of ecocriticism to make it more hospitable to the affects – bewilderment and anxiety: negative affects that are characterised by confusion and by an inability to act – which, I contend, might better characterise our relation to the changing climate. I make this argument through a reading of John Ashbery’s late work because he encapsulates the particular forms of inattention and anxiety that saturate the contemporary atmosphere. Ashbery’s poems are, in no typical sense, ‘ecopoems’, and the criticism his work invites is only incidentally ‘eco’. In this way, I make an argument about the incidental ecopoem that offers insight insofar as it captures the psychical stakes of states of bewilderment on our ability to think the future

HORYZONS trial : Protocol for a randomised controlled trial of a moderated online social therapy to maintain treatment effects from firstepisode psychosis services

Introduction: Specialised early intervention services have demonstrated improved outcomes in first-episode psychosis (FEP); however, clinical gains may not be sustained after patients are transferred to regular care. Moreover, many patients with FEP remain socially isolated with poor functional outcomes. To address this, our multidisciplinary team has developed a moderated online social media therapy (HORYZONS) designed to enhance social functioning and maintain clinical gains from specialist FEP services. HORYZONS merges: (1) peer-to-peer social networking; (2) tailored therapeutic interventions; (3) expert and peer-moderation; and (4) new models of psychological therapy (strengths and mindfulness-based interventions) targeting social functioning. The aim of this trial is to determine whether following 2 years of specialised support and 18-month online social media-based intervention (HORYZONS) is superior to 18 months of regular care. Methods and analysis: This study is a single-blind randomised controlled trial. The treatment conditions include HORYZONS plus treatment as usual (TAU) or TAU alone. We recruited 170 young people with FEP, aged 16–27 years, in clinical remission and nearing discharge from Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre, Melbourne. The study includes four assessment time points, namely, baseline, 6-month, 12-month and 18-month follow-up. The study is due for completion in July 2018 and included a 40-month recruitment period and an 18-month treatment phase. The primary outcome is social functioning at 18 months. Secondary outcome measures include rate of hospital admissions, cost-effectiveness, vocational status, depression, social support, loneliness, self-esteem, self-efficacy, anxiety, psychological well-being, satisfaction with life, quality of life, positive and negative psychotic symptoms and substance use. Social functioning will be also assessed in real time through our Smartphone Ecological Momentary Assessment tool. Ethics and dissemination: Melbourne Health Human Research Ethics Committee (2013.146) provided ethics approval for this study. Findings will be made available through scientific journals and forums and to the public via social media and the Orygen website. Trial registration number: ACTRN12614000009617; Pre-results

Human variome project country nodes: Documenting genetic information within a country

The Human Variome Project (http://www.humanvariomeproject.org) is an international effort aiming to systematically collect and share information on all human genetic variation. The two main pillars of this effort are gene/disease-specific databases and a network of Human Variome Project Country Nodes. The latter are nationwide efforts to document the genomic variation reported within a specific population. The development and successful operation of the Human Variome Project Country Nodes are of utmost importance to the success of Human Variome Project's aims and goals because they not only allow the genetic burden of disease to be quantified in different countries, but also provide diagnosticians and researchers access to an up-to-date resource that will assist them in their daily clinical practice and biomedical research, respectively. Here, we report the discussions and recommendations that resulted from the inaugural meeting of the International Confederation of Countries Advisory Council, held on 12th December 2011, during the 2011 Human Variome Project Beijing Meeting. We discuss the steps necessary to maximize the impact of the Country Node effort for developing regional and country-specific clinical genetics resources and summarize a few well-coordinated genetic data collection initiatives that would serve as paradigms for similar projects. Hum Mutat 33:15131519, 2012. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc