Ann Ho

Ann Ho graduated in 2017 with a Bachelor’s of Arts in English and a minor in Slavic Literatures and Languages. Inspired by her engagements in both the development field and literary criticism, she is invested in interdisciplinary research, particularly in the fields of postcolonial/transnational literatures and cultural studies. Ann has completed an Honors Thesis in English on Grace Nichols’s poetry and the ways in which it redresses modernist representations of gender, politics, and race in the revanchism of Thatcherite Great Britain in the 1980s. Post-graduation, she is working in the non-profit sector for a year and realizing her dreams of becoming an amateur oil painter before applying to doctorate programs in English literature.

Introduction

The Jan. 26, 1986 edition of The Sunday Times announced the completed installation of Poems on the Underground. It reconfigured the world’s oldest underground transport system, one that had sheltered people during the Blitz, as an unexpected cultural vehicle that circulated poetry on its carriage walls.¹The inaugural installation curated works by Robert Burns, Seamus Heaney, Grace Nichols and William Carlos Williams. [2] Placing Guyanese-British poet Grace Nichols’ work alongside Burns’ vernacular Scottish romanticism, Williams’ American modernism, and Heaney’s Irish formalism, speaks to her merited position among canonical Anglophone poets. Indeed, from her earliest books in the 1980s, to Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009), written during her residency at the Tate Gallery, Nichols has reconstructed the poetics of canonical modernism, typified by writers and artists from T.S. Eliot to Pablo Picasso. Her modernist revaluations emerge concurrently with her participation in municipal functions, ranging from civic life of the commute, to museum residency. Through her poetry, Nichols articulates the daily experience of Black Britons in the space that Stuart Hall describes as “the land which they are in but not of, the country of estrangement, dispossession and brutality.” [3]

Nichols’ Poems contribution “Like a Beacon,” thereby adds a cosmopolitan dimension to the installation, and addresses London as both the traditional seat of imperial power, and the setting for postcolonial mobility. Accordingly, this essay will posit selections of Nichols’ poetry as such a link between 1980s Black British poetry, and several previous generations of modernist literary and artistic representation. As such, Nichols’s poetic oeuvre spans beyond its current inclusion in the postcolonial canon of the Greater Caribbean. Her engagements with T.S. Eliot’s representations of London’s social underclasses form a systematic redress of a previously colonizing literary form. Nichols subsumes these earlier models into the creation of a uniquely gendered and racialized modernism. [4] Through this new, “Nicholsian” rendering of modernist language and themes, Nichols writes herself into the configuration known as “global modernism.”

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1. Fred Hill, “The Tension and the Glory of Subway Poetry,” The Architectural Leagues’s Urban Omnibus: The Culture of Citymaking, March 23, 2016, http://urbanomnibus.net/2016/03/the-tension-and-glory-of-subway-poetry.