By Alice Maitlis
Edited by Coco Usher and Anna Roberts
Poetry’s revolution lies not just in what it says, but in how it is made. This essay traces how Marlene NourbeSe Philip and Phyllis Webb engage these spatial forms as sites of resistance, but from distinct positions. In “Poetics Against the Angel of Death,” Webb enters the canonical sonnet only to disrupt it from within, while Philip destabilizes the very frame of the poem, displacing hierarchy through fragmentation and silence in “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” Both poets share a deliberate deterrence from the conventional roles that language and form are expected to play in reinforcing systems of power. By reading their formal interventions side by side, I explore how spatial disruption becomes a poetics of defiance against literary, colonial, and patriarchal authorities.
The biographies of both poets provide insight into their distinct relationships to poetic form. Phyllis Webb was a Canadian poet, born in 1927, in Victoria, British Columbia. Her work strips language down to its essentials, creating a new, intimate voice through brevity and fragmentation. “Poetics Against the Angel of Death” was published as the last poem in one of her earliest collections, The Sea Is Also a Garden, in 1962. This poem marked a new direction in her writing style, filled with energy and a fight against “the suffocating shadow of male, Western literary tradition” (Cameron 75). It is written as a sonnet that attempts to stretch out of the skin it has been given, rebelling within the constraints of the form. The poem sits below the fully capitalized title, surrounded by white space that is only broken up by the occasional extending line that reaches out past the confines of its allotted fourteen lines.
Webb begins her poem in iambic pentameter, the metric line that dominates canonical, patriarchal English poetry—Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth. The iambic pentameter carries on, through the deployment of hesitating parentheses, and past the allusion to Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” sustaining the weight of the “elevated tone” that Webb is forced to reckon with (5). The notion of what is relevant here becomes blurred; the parenthetical line “(some say I’ll have a long life)” unsettles the authority of the main clause, marking the speaker’s voice as uncertain (2). The poet disrupts the metrical line by cutting it off abruptly with “I mean the measure,” but still nods to tradition through the pause created by the comma. This hesitation briefly holds the weight of this legacy before the line fractures completely. The first half ends with the same metric rhythm it began with, suggesting self-conscious performance: an anxious attempt at tradition, visible in fragmentation and parentheses. Webb aligns herself closely with this idea of reconfiguration, bending the established form she has been working within in the second half of “Poetics Against the Angel of Death.” The moment that Webb’s poem hits the period at the end of line six, the sonnet falls out of its inherited body. As Webb writes “Last night I thought I would not wake again,” the metrical rhythm continues with iambic pentameter, but with a sly, initial trochaic substitution. The opening trochee gives the line a sudden, heavy drop. This emphasis on disrupted and heavy-stress rhythm masks an underlying iambic skeleton. The feminine beginning, with its stressed first syllable, can be seen as a deliberate subversion of assumed authority.
By stretching the iambic line beyond its expected limits, Webb exposes the sonnet’s margins as a pressured site where form strains, spills, and resists containment. Webb alludes to “ragged” margins by stretching the line to seven feet, breaking from the expected five (8). It implements a spillage beyond the curvature of the poem, exceeding expectation. Paul Celan describes this phenomenon as the poem “holding its ground on its own margin.” This phrase goes in tandem with a poetics of survival—it does not assert itself through resolution, but clings to the tension of the threshold (qtd. in Hecq 408). Webb’s stretched line performs something structurally analogous. By exceeding the normative five-beat iambic unit, she does not shatter the sonnet form outright. Instead, she forces it to hold more than it was designed for—to accommodate what leaks and spills. There is a refusal to let traditional form dictate totality; rather, Webb bends the form literally and rhythmically until its seams show. The poem’s enjambment on problematizes the crux of the poem: can a writer like Webb ever outrun the legacy of “The Great Iambic Pentameter” and all it signifies? The reference to “writing Haiku” several lines later seems to answer this question (12). Invoking haiku—a non-iambic and non-Western form—within the sonnet points to the struggle to resist patriarchal narratives from within the “master’s house” (Lorde 113). Webb’s sonnet inhabits a precarious position that “pulls itself back from an ‘already-no-more’ into a ‘still-here’” (qtd. in Hecq 408). The line lengthening, the breathless enjambment, the allusions to haiku, all suggest that the poem endures by performing the same oscillation as Celan names. This poetic voice survives by rescuing itself from the brink of being silenced, asserting a “still-here” from within an untrusted structure.
Webb’s allusion to the “Hound of Heaven” becomes a pointedly ironic figure through which she exposes how the iambic tradition polices poetic speech, turning a symbol of divine pursuit into an emblem of formal coercion. The line “who is the Hound of Heaven in our stress” crystallizes this internal struggle by collapsing divine pursuit, poetic tradition, and embodied pressure into one image (10). The enjambment from the previous line spills directly into this phrase, creating a kind of breathless entanglement; it is not just that the iambic line chases the poet, but that it chases through the very structure of her speech and stress. Webb’s allusion is satirical and biting; she twists Francis Thompson’s devotional metaphor into a figure of artistic surveillance and spiritual exhaustion. The “Hound” no longer offers salvation but becomes the internalized agent of literary discipline, tracking the speaker’s rhythms, measuring each footfall, ensuring the poem behaves. From the introduction of the Hound, the behavior that the speaker’s words take on reacts to this “Hound” of form. She “want[s] to die,” and from that declaration onward, the lines fracture—visually and rhythmically—into shorter, staccato utterances (11). These lines mimic the syntax of haiku, not just in form but in ethos. For the first time in the poem, the words begin to act out what they express: “clean and syllabic” (14). This section forms an inverted staircase, descending visually down the right side of the page. Each line steps back from the right margin, retreating into increasing white space. The poem tries to break apart, revealing what cannot be neatly voiced inside the master’s meter.
While Webb’s resistance operates within canonical frameworks, Philip is more confrontational: she refuses to enter the frame at all. In “Discourse on the Logic of Language,” she cleaves language into a site of resistance, making her poetic lens deliberately difficult to access. The only guide for reading is the white margins—subtly signaling that the text still belongs to poetry. To view her poem as ‘difficult,’ as I described it earlier, is to measure it against the very standards of clarity that Philip seeks to dismantle.
Philip stands in sharp contrast to Webb’s poetic strain, foregrounding an inverted form of poetic resistance through structure. Born in Tobago, she studied at the University of the West Indies and later in Ontario, where she earned graduate degrees in law and political science before leaving law to focus on writing. Her 1989 collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks—which includes “Discourse on the Logic of Language”—dissects the colonial and racist foundations embedded in the English language. Acclaimed internationally, Philip’s work has been widely anthologized across the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Caribbean. “Discourse on the Logic of Language” spans four pages framed by rigid margins, but that is where its conformity ends: it compels readers to inhabit the uneasy overlap between the violent legacy of linguistic colonialism, the intimacy of inheriting a “mother tongue,” and what happens when that becomes severed. By refusing clear beginnings or endings, Philip transforms disorientation itself into a mode of resistance.
In an essay titled “The Poethical Wager,” Joan Retallack details what she has named the poethics of poetry. These poethics emerge when a work consciously engages with the forms of life that have created its existence—“the science, the arts, the politics, the sounds and textures of everyday life, the urgent questions and disruptions of the times” (297). Retallack argues that in order for a poethical development to occur in a poem, form, grammar, and language must flee from the reader’s grasp (298). Letting go is what allows the representational and political decentering of words and an active marginalization of language. Philip’s poem embodies this poethical wager by letting language unravel on the page. The poem slips from coherence, as we know it to be, and crumbles form into unquantifiable sections. Her poem doesn’t describe colonial violence so much as it formulates it, barring control at the level of form itself.
In Webb’s poem, centralized and in bold, the title alone retains the visibility and legibility of a conventionally formatted poem. The traditional title emphasizes how her formal disruptions operate within the structures of poetic authority, underscoring that poetry’s revolutionary power lies as much in how it is made as in what it declares. The mention of “discourse” and “logic” gives rise to a philosophical, scientifically demarcated nature (Retallack 298). As soon as the reader moves beyond the title, this sense of rigidity is put into question. Philip constructs three columns of text instead of one, different kinds of formatting in each section—be it italics or capitalization—and one section is vertically-oriented. This fragmentation destabilizes the visual field, enacting an immediate rejection of the structures the poem sets out to expose. Yet, the margins in the poem remain well-defined. The words do not trail off the page; they end at an appropriate distance from the bottom. The repeated columns on the third page create a cyclical structure that underscores tension between form and disruption, showing that repetition doesn’t offer resolution.
In her description of Wernicke and Broca, Philip highlights form as a piece in her rebellion against the place supposedly set aside for her docility in colonial discourse. Her description details the research findings of “two learned nineteenth century doctors,” who participated in the propagation of racist scientific discourse surrounding the Black body (2). Through her allusion to the scientific racism of Wernicke and Broca, Philip emphasizes the link between racist theory and the scientific craniological language prevalent at the time. Something else to examine is the blank space below this academic report. It is the same size as the text above it, refusing to ‘fill in gaps’ or ‘correct’ racist science. Fred Moten offers a compelling framework for understanding this disruption. He asks, “What might an impurity in a worldview actually be?” (179). In his definition, impurity implies a non-completeness and absence in a worldview. Moten suggests that non-completeness signals a radical refusal to be boxed in, understood, or owned, often seen as “criminal” by governmental forces because it defies the systems that try to control and contain (Moten 179). Philip’s blank space connotes precisely such a negation, refusing to stabilize meaning. Her negation actively interrupts the systems that try to collect, organize, and make visible knowledge, enacting what Moten calls a “victory of the unfinished” (202). The text holds space for what has been excluded from official knowledge, not as a lack but as presence. This void disrupts the assumption that knowledge must be definitive, acting as a decolonizing force. In a colonial context, knowledge is power, and by subverting the expectations of how knowledge should be transmitted, Philip introduces chaos into the academic order.
“Discourse on the Logic of Language” asks the reader to sit with its denial of any kind of straightforward answer to the question of its underlying meaning through form. The last page exemplifies this, written in a multiple-choice style that has no answer key, no hierarchy of rightness. The answers comment on each other rather than displacing each other as right or wrong, pointing to the necessity of uncertainty to question fixed meaning. Her poem becomes a spatial metaphor for multiplicity—answers coexist, overlap, and refuse to stabilize. The form of multiple choice disperses authority, fracturing the logic of linear reading and instead mapping a field of possibilities. This refusal to prioritize a single interpretive path enacts a politics of disruption; the reader is not invited to translate the untranslatable, but rather to remain within that dissonance.
As this non-ordinary knowledge emerges, Philip’s choice to place the mother-child paragraph vertically on the first page coalesces into a meaningful act of resistance. Where the rest of the text grapples with the violence of colonial language, this passage turns toward something tender, relational, and opaque to institutional understanding. Like the blank space, the paragraph refuses to “explain” or be easily absorbed into the logic of the surrounding text. Positioned outside conventional layout, the passage enacts a “para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance” (Moten 179). It does not argue or prove: it is simply an instance of Black social life that survives on an axis foreign to the frameworks of legality or colonial logic. The intimate verticality of the text stands with its back against leading discourse. The layout is a deviant translation that resists being made whole, unwilling to be fixed or defined. Like Moten’s para-ontology, Philip’s poetics rejects the logic of completeness that underwrites colonial knowledge. Her fragmentary columns and voids are not aesthetic flourishes, but epistemic denials.
The opening lines of the first middle column introduce the idea of the “mother tongue”—a term whose etymological origin is ironic and revealing. As Ivan Illich notes, the phrase was first used by Catholic monks to refer to the vernacular language they used from the pulpit instead of Latin, the sanctioned language of authority and the Church (87). Thus, the “mother tongue” was born not as a term of intimacy or inheritance, but as a designation for a lesser, feminized, and unofficial language—permissible only when it served the purposes of power. Philip resists the diminishment of the mother tongue, the speaker’s words breaking down at the mention of “lan lan lang / language” into “l/anguish” in the first stanza (3). In this moment Philip makes the violence of colonial speech legible on the page, as the typographic break inserts a wound into the word itself. By fragmenting the word so early in the text, Philip signals that no linguistic structure should remain untouched; everything must be unsettled and re-examined. The breaking apart of “language” contrasts with the last stanza of that column (1):
tongue
dumb
dumb-tongued
dub-tongued
damn dumb
tongue
Philip’s repetition of “tongue” is a somatic act. Its rhythm is incantatory but never soothing, disturbing the flow through the friction of consonants like “d,” “m,” “b,” and “t.” Reading becomes a physical labor, the mouth compelled to navigate Philip’s purposeful formulation of the English language. “Tongue” initially grounds the reader in the body, but shifting modifiers—“dumb,” “dub,” “damn”—disrupt that anchor, creating a rhythm of disorientation and recalibration as line breaks and stuttering syllables jolt the reader (1). The recurring “tongue” becomes a ritual of repossession, reaching for a language once torn away. This unresolved cycle enacts a corporeal poetics: reading becomes a bodily performance, a form of witnessing through flesh and breath.
Just as Philip’s repetition of “tongue” turns reading into a somatic, bodily act, Webb’s sonnet similarly enlists the reader’s body, making the mechanics of meter, line, and sound a site of physical engagement and attentive presence. As a reader, I find myself muttering the iambs of the poem under my breath to count the feet, tripping up on the shifts between metric rhythms, pronouncing the alliteration all too clearly to feel her words pressing through the traditional sonnet form. The poem bursts through the mouth, creating a physical encounter with structure: form is no longer abstract but something inhabited by the reader. This ritualized participation is a way of transforming passive reading into an embodied practice. This form resists the tendency to consume quickly and move on. I am moving through the poem, navigating its spatial arrangement through finger-counting, breath control, and bodily rhythm. This is a spatial politics of slowness and presence.
“Poetics Against the Angel of Death” explores Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied consciousness, as explored by Todd Balazic’s reading of poetic perception. Balazic describes the body as a “pre-objective syntax,” a structure through which meaning is made before it is conceptualized (116). In reading Webb, the reader does not decode from the outside but participates in what Merleau-Ponty calls a “communion” with the text: the sonnet’s formal constraints do not limit the reading, instead drawing the body into it (113). To read Webb’s poem is to refuse to abstract the experience into disembodied intellection, despite its formal complexities and nuances. Where Philip’s fragmentation resists understanding through semantic opacity, Webb resists through formal constraint and invitation into structure. The form organizes space but demands the reader physically co-occupy it.
The ending of Webb’s poem does not fully break from convention. The commas around “better” in the penultimate line mirror the earlier hesitation of the parentheses, creating a pause that softens the constraint without abandoning the form (13). The third lines, both at the beginning and near the end, reference external models: “Wordsworth,” representing conformity, and “Haiku,” which inherently resists it (3,12). The final word, “Yes!,” becomes the true marker of subversion (14). The last word pushes past the confines of the preceding structure, stretching the line beyond the period that should signify closure. This moment of expansive affirmation disrupts the anticipated end, spurning containment, even as the poem’s form retains its structural grip. The exclamation mark gives voice to the hesitation that has marked the poem so far, but now it speaks with intention—a decisive rupture that both completes and unsettles the traditional sonnet.
Both poets, through their manipulation of spatial form, create poetic spaces that are uncomfortable and resistant to closure. Webb, entangled within the sonnet’s spine, bends it until it snaps. She fights fire with fire: the poet deploys calculated strikes from within the structures that trap her as a female poet. Rather than abandoning formal rigor, Webb weaponizes its discipline, turning the grammar and edifice of the form against itself. Philip’s defiance is more direct and expansive in its rejection of form as a tool of authority. There is a splintering of the very idea of the poem as a cohesive unit. She explodes the page—tripling the column, inverting text, weaponizing silence—to expose how language itself is structured to exclude and speak over racialized voices. Where Webb haunts tradition just as it haunts her, Philip renders the coloniality that plagues language unmistakably visible. Both poets reconfigure the page, where the politics of voice are shaped as much by absence as by articulation. Their work compels us to read differently—not just with our eyes, but with our bodies, our breath, and our awareness of what lies just outside the margins. Philip and Webb don’t just resist the structures of language; they lay bare its complicity, forcing poetry to reckon with its own violences. On the wreckage of inherited forms, they build new frameworks of sense, where silence speaks, fissures heal, and the page becomes a possibility for liberation.
Works Cited
Balazic, Todd. “Embodied Consciousness and the Poetic Sense of the World.” SubStance, vol. 32, no. 1, 2003, pp. 110–116, https://doi.org/10.2307/3685705. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
Cameron, Laura. “‘The Great Dreams Pass On’: Phyllis Webb’s ‘Struggles of Silence.’” Canadian Literature, vol. 217, 2013, pp. 72–86,
https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i217.192674. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.
Hall, Phil. “The Malahat Review | Poetry Review of ‘Poetics against the Angel of Death.’” Web.uvic.ca, 2015, web.uvic.ca/malahat/reviews/190reviews_hall.html. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
Hecq, Dominique. “Margins: The Poetic Text and Its Theoretical Gesturing.” TEXT Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, Feb. 2009, pp. 1–9, https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.31544. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.
Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism, vol. 50, no. 2, 2009, pp. 177–218. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/crt.0.0062. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025.
Philip, Marlene NourbeSe. “Bibliography | M. NourbeSe Philip.” Nourbese.com, 2020, www.nourbese.com/about/bibliography/. Accessed 18 Apr. 2025.
Philip, Marlene NourbeSe. “Discourse on the Logic of Language.” 1989. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Break, Gynergy Books/Ragweed Pr, 1989.
Retallack, Joan. “The Poethical Wager.” Onward: Contemporary Poetics and Politics, Peter Lang Publishing, 1996, pp. 293–306. Accessed 19 Apr. 2025. Webb, Phyllis. “The Poetics against the Angel of Death.” The Sea Is Also a Garden, Ryerson Press, 1962.
Feature Photo
Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (Scottish, 1864-1933). The May Queen, 1900. Gesso, hessian, scrim, twine, glass beads thread, mother of pearl & tin lead on panel. 158.8 x 457 cm. Glasgow Museums.