Leeanne Quinn
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leeannequinn.bsky.social
Leeanne Quinn
@leeannequinn.bsky.social
110 followers 180 following 8 posts
Poet. Before You (2012) & Some Lives (2020) are published by Dedalus Press. (she/they)
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leeannequinn.bsky.social
I have co-authored a chapter on Free Verse in this Handbook of Poetic Forms, ed. @jessicabundschuh.bsky.social & Irmtraud Huber. Thank you to my kind & enthusiastic co-author Jessica for weaving my thoughts as a practitioner through the chapter. If you would like a pdf, I am happy to share. 🌱
The cover of the De Gruyter Handbook of Poetic Forms, Edited by: Jessica Bundschuh and Irmtraud Huber. The cover is various shades of blue, and the book sits on a wooden floor. A photo of the first page of Chapter 16 of this book, titled "Free Verse" and written by Leeanne Quinn and Jessica Bundschuh. The abstract reads: As the historical evolution of free verse demonstrates, the form has emerged – with its various possible antecedents from Homer to T. S. Eliot, Sasha Dugdale and Diane Seuss – as a reaction to the constraints of stricture and tradition. Such historical origins that treat free verse as a reactionary form have often set it in opposition to formalist verse, with the result that free verse has, at times, been labelled as shapeless and uncomposed. Such readings of free verse overlook the form’s capacity to incorporate, despite its absence of conventional meter and rhyme, the vital quality of poetic tension or ‘traction.’ This contribution considers Irish poet Leeanne Quinn, through a meditation on her craft and process of free-verse making, as a poet whose work seeks out opportunities for compositional resistance appropriate to the needs of each particular free-verse poem, like “Water,” where Quinn incorporates the formal restraints of caesura and enjambment to underpin a retrospective-prospective structure. A photo of the second page of this same chapter, where my contribution to the chapter commences with a discussion of the Politics of Form. The Chapter is available online here: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111296371-017/html
November 9, 2025 at 12:53 PM
leeannequinn.bsky.social
Very happy to have a poem in last Saturday's Irish Times 🏭🙏
Poem: Landscape with Factory By Leeanne Quinn You can see a lot from the hill, the grey breadth of the factory, its red lights, always on. And other hills beyond this one, where the earth is also red. I remember flying over a blue lake. It could have been the last thing I saw or the image I returned to after something else occurred. The water in the lake behaves in a similar way, it warms in summer while its layers grow cool, no hidden currents just the wind in the clear. It has a cold mind, like the mind flying over – empty of earthly things. I know the grey smoke makes it difficult to breathe, in small ways I don’t yet recognise. In summer the leaves hide much of the grey — small particles are still borne on the air. I’m ashamed of this but tell no one — I can hold my breath when it matters most.
April 16, 2025 at 9:31 AM