Rhyming Hunger: Poetry, Love and Canibalism

Abstract

This paper wants to explore how poetic texts often draw on the body in a very self-aware manner, and by doing so accomplish what could be called a self-referential corporeality. By looking at a selection of love poems by Carol Ann Duffy (mainly from the volume Rapture, 2005) and at two poem sequences from Michael Symmons Roberts collection Corpus (2004), I want to investigate the relationship between the poetic and corporeal acts of internalisation and externalisation. I will be particularly interested in the link between love and the concept of consumption by reading the latter in its specific relationship to eating and the process of digestion. By drawing on the theoretical work of Freud, Derrida and Kristeva, I want to suggest that the poetic processing of words shows some significant and illuminating connections to the processing of food and by doing so allows us to look at poetic imaginations of love and the body in new ways.