Terraqueous

ABSTRACTThe author, a political theorist, uses poetry to reflect on and spur structural change in admissions committees, hiring committees, funding decisions, curriculum development, and the institutionalized awards-making structure regarding African Politics in the American Political Science Association. This poem, delivered and performed at the American Political Science Association 2018 meeting in Boston, provides empirical and verifiable data about how scholarly awards are distributed in the discipline. The analysis of this process reflects on a long history of erasing, minimizing, and tokenizing the scholarship of African political scientists in the discipline of political science. Written as an epistolary poem, the author explains how #MeToo accounts for complex and interrelated forms of exclusion from the production of knowledge and uses the history of Black women in politics associations, writings by Patricia J. Williams, Pearl T. Robinson, Darlene Miller, and poetry by June Jordan (1936–2002) and Sweet Honey in the Rock (f. 1973).

The object of investigation is a historical-literary one, being a reconstructive interpretation. My aim is to analyse and interpret some epistolary poems by Lithuanian and Polish authors and to describe their poetics. The poems were created in different languages and under the impact of different literary traditions, but they speak about a similar historical and existential experience. Another question I address in this article is the formula of Modernism in the poetry of the authors whose origins are not in Western, but rather in Eastern Europe. The texts to be analysed are: Do Jonathana Swifta (To Jonathan Swift) by Czesław Miłosz, Užgavėnių kaukės (Shrovetide Masks) by Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas, Widokówka z tego świata (A Postcard from this World) by Stanisław Barańczak, Disciplinuoti ir bausti. Apsilankymas tardymo izolatoriuje IZ – 45/1 (Discipline and Punish. A Visit to the Detention Centre IZ – 45/1) by Tomas Venclova, and also an excerpt from Žodžiai ir raidės (Words and Letters) by Jonas Mekas.

Apple is a collection of poems that explores the connection between human relationships and the evolution of an identity. Multiple speakers investigate gender and sexuality, plentitude and poverty, atheism and Christianity in order to better understand some of the forces that affect a woman's consciousness. An awareness of perceived dualities, such as self and other, reason and faith, nature and technology, socialization and loneliness are central to this exploration. The poems employ various forms, such as ultra-talk narratives, lyrical meditations, prose poetry, epistolary poems and hypertext. The variety of structure and form in the collection mirrors the variety of approaches the speakers employ to move closer and further away from the subjects at hand. The rhetorical posture employed in each poem is directly linked to the speaker's relationship with the audience, which is an excellent example of a human relationship affecting the evolution of an identity.

The Epistles and the Ars Poetica consist of verse letters written in dactylic hexameter. Epistles 1, published in 19 bce, comprises twenty letters with a range of real and fictive addressees. The dating of Epistles 2 presents a more difficult puzzle, although scholars generally date the poems to the period between 13 bce and Horace’s death in 8 bce. This book contains two poems, the first addressed to Augustus and the second to Julius Florus. The 476-line Ars Poetica is addressed to a Piso and his two sons and has been variously dated, with some estimates as early as 24 bce and some as late as 8 bce. Debate persists as to whether the poems of Epistles 2 should be treated singly or as a unified book. Sometimes treated as “Epistles 2.3,” the Ars Poetica was nevertheless thought of as a discrete work already in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 8.3.60. Produced in the wake of Horace’s monumental Odes 1–3, Horace’s epistolary poems are the product of a mature poetic voice, and the persona constructed in them belongs to a man with the success and experience that allows him to address with authority not only younger colleagues and protégés but also his social superiors. In keeping with this experienced persona, the poems turn away from the erotic and sympotic themes prevalent in the Odes and focus instead on the ethical (Epistles 1) and literary (Epistles 2 and Ars Poetica) topics befitting his changed age and mentality (Epist. 1.1.4). The poet shifts away from the role of public vates adopted, for example, in the Roman Odes and instead occupies a secluded retreat from which he addresses men occupying a range of public and private positions. Horace ironically claims (Epist. 1.1.10, 2.2.52–57, and Ars 306) that these letters are something less than formal poetry, which, along with their short hexameter form and moral focus, connects the Epistles with his earlier Satires (cf. esp. 1.4.39–42), themselves the product of a “pedestrian muse” (Sat. 2.6.17). While the Epistles share strong thematic links to the Satires, Horace develops these themes anew in keeping not only with his own changed voice but also with the social and political transformations of Augustan Rome. Often viewed in the shadow of his more widely read Satires and Odes, the Epistles and Ars Poetica have nevertheless received an impressive amount of scholarly attention.

Poetic Labors and Challenging Political Science: An Epistolary Poem

This chapter provides an introduction to and overview of the poetry of Charles Brockden Brown. It situates poetry writing within Brown’s biography, including his early childhood and education at Friends Latin School, and then tracks how the circulation of poetry in manuscript formed the basis for his most important personal relationships in the 1790s and 1800s. It also demonstrates how writing and publishing poetry in the major periodicals of Philadelphia and New York facilitated Brown’s entry into the magazine culture of the Federalist period. The chapter discusses examples of Brown’s childhood verse, his epistolary poems, his pseudonymous newspaper poetry, and the poems he published in magazines during the last decade of his life. Overall, the chapter argues that Brown’s poetry offers a different perspective on the development of his career, while at the same time showing how the rich literary culture of the early republic could be both local and transatlantic.

This chapter examines how W. S. Graham views communication with another person and argues that his spirituality coincides with the process of reaching out to other people. It suggests that echoes of T. S. Eliot, John Donne, and subtly disguised biblical allusions can be found in Graham's epistolary poems. It also traces the thread of spirituality in Graham's poetry from his early essays and letters through ‘The Nightfishing’ to ‘The Thermal Stair’. It also offers a reading of Graham's previously uncollected poem, ‘Letter X — My dear so many times’.

The study of the feature of Dufu’s Epistolary poem in QinZhou

This essay argues that W. H. Auden uses elegiac tropes to reflect on his ambivalent relationship to leftist politics at the start of World War II. The essay makes the case that the long epistolary poem “New Year Letter” is an elegy of sorts—in conversation both with Auden’s shorter (and more famous) elegies from this time and with the German elegiac tradition from Friedrich Schiller to Rainer Maria Rilke. Central to this tradition (and to the essay’s argument) is an understanding of poetic tone. In a broader frame, then, this essay—echoing the contemporary theorist of affect Sianne Ngai—suggests that tone is an especially apt tool for thinking (and feeling) about social and political dilemmas.

This chapter focuses on poems that represent storyworld communication as written rather than spoken and thus raise a different set of questions about how this storyworld communication relates to the poetic discourse. A written collection of poetry was by no means radical and new in the days of Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. Yet it still was a phenomenon that starkly distanced these poets from some of the most important models in the literary tradition. In an ironic twist, the representation of their poetry as a written form of communication brings the Roman poets back closer to the situation of the archaic Greek lyrists, since in both cases the form in which the poem reaches its extended audience is echoed in the storyworld. The chapter then studies Catullus's epistolary poems and the poems of Horace's first book of Epistles. Each poet shines a spotlight on how the written form can be perceived as mediating between communicative partners.

Epistolary poems and prose letters written between Michael Longley and Derek Mahon in the early 1970s deliberate upon the idea of a coherent poetic group in Northern Ireland; they reveal a concurrent need for these poets to find their own distinctive poetic voice; and their meditations on group versus individual, as well as on the role of the artist in the community, stem from their poetic maturation and the immediate pressure of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

As the title of this edition indicates, it provides a critical apparatus for a holistic understanding of this alliterative epistolary poem by C.S. Lewis, which has never appeared in print before. With this in mind, all points requiring clarification are addressed: a description and history of the manuscript, Lewis's relationship with the addressee, the dating of the work, the Old English phrases and connection to Beowulf, and the poem's alliterative nature. It is the editor's hope that the edition provides a solid foundation for all further work on ‘Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg', a poem which highlights once more that Lewis the scholar and Lewis the author often operated under the same guise.

This essay offers an analysis of the Greek epistolary poems composed by the Italian humanist Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481). Filelfo’s so-called De psychagogia, which is dedicated to Bessarion, consists of 44 Greek poems in elegiac and Sapphic meters. The epistolary character of these poems is indicated by their abundant use of direct address and of the “friendship” topos, which is characteristic of both Byzantine and Latin letters. Filelfo’s addressees include intellectuals and leading figures of his time such as Bessarion, John Argyropoulos, Theodore Gazes, and Isidore of Kiev. The Ottoman question plays an important role in his oeuvre. While most of the verse letters deal with the Ottoman expansion in very negative terms, the poem addressed to sultan Mehmed II is more ambivalent: while full of praise, Filelfo also states that the sultan cannot fully exploit his power because he is not a Christian.

I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark Jennifer Schomburg Kanke (bio) Clark, Tiana. I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Blurbs on the backs of books can be misleading. Our expectations rise when we see that Kaveh Akbar, who has been awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and keeps our Twitter feeds gloriously overflowing with amazing poetry links, says the book is "one of the best first books of poetry" and NAACP Image Award nominee Allison Joseph calls on us to "Read it, and be changed and redeemed." Can a book possibly live up to all this praise? Yes, absolutely, yes. Tiana Clark's first full-length collection, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winning I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, presents readers with a commanding cinematic lyricism that envelopes them in the history of American race relations and the narrator's personal history. In the poem "800 Days: Libation," Tiana Clark says, "I don't want to watch another black man die/today or know the story of how," in explanation of why she doesn't want to watch Time: The Kalief Browder Story about a sixteen-year-old awaiting trial at Rikers Island who spent two years in solitary confinement. My reaction to the poem is similar to my reaction when viewing a silhouette by visual artist Kara Walker. The works are a mixture of beauty and horror, which is to say, truth. The poem is potently self-aware about how these intersections in art are sometimes problematic, yet often necessary. It covers some of the same ground as Roxane Gay's meditation on happy endings found in "The Smooth Surface of Idylls," but sets the ideas to music, lineates them with skill and precision. "800 Days: Libation" reminds us that there are things poetry can do that other formats can't. As Yeats has said, "we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry." The collection invites us into Clark's inner journey with prosody, allusions, and images. On the journey, she often puts herself in conversation with African American women of the past. In the epistolary poem series "Conversations with Phillis Wheatley," she imagines responses to Wheat-ley, the first published African American woman poet, from her friend Obour Tanner, while also pulling in the overarching narrative of the collection. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," she uses the voice of the singer/songwriter/activist to interrogate herself about her relationship to her own art and the powers that be of the literary world. I wanted to play Bach and Beethoven for endless encores. But they wouldn't let me and they won't let you. Things have changed Miss Simone.I have a scholarship. They want me here. [End Page 186] They want my poems. They want— Do they want you, she says, sucking her ghost teeth, or your black pain? This excerpt is fairly representative of the collection. The personal is political and vice versa. Lyrical and disjointed, but not hard to follow if you pay attention. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," the voices weave back and forth between the primary narrator of the collection and Nina Simone. Nothing is labeled or in quotation marks. The "I" can be either Clark or Simone. But, at least to me, it's always clear who is speaking even without the overt markers we get from prose or more traditional narrative poems. "Self Portrait as Hannah Peace" weaves between lines from Toni Morrison's Sula and Clark's own description of her mother on the dance floor at a country bar called the Cotton Eyed Joe in Knoxville, Tennessee. But isn't it all Clark's description? Though Morrison wrote some of the lines, Clark selects them, adapts them, helps us see another layer to their power. All of the poems in the collection using this (or similar techniques) reify the slipperiness of authorship and palimpsestic nature of identity. Her explorations of her biracial heritage, in poems such as "Mixed Bitch" and "After Agon," also reinforce these notions. All the...

Hovering between biographical precision and lyrical elaboration, Frank O’Hara’s poems are often addressed to friends and lovers. As the mock manifesto “Personism” reveals, the issue of communication lies at the heart of his poetics : instead of picking up the telephone, the poet, O’Hara says, can write a poem to the person he wanted to call. Instead of writing letters, O’Hara wrote a number of epistolary poems to his would-be addressees. Feeding on aborted telephone calls and unwritten letters, O’Hara’s lyricism explores a new mode of communication, which he deemed more “personal”. His poems create the illusion of an ongoing conversation between friends and lovers, while really aspiring to “the ideal possibility of not communicating” (Kaufmann). Perverting the impulse to communicate even as it claims to be nourished by it, Frank O’Hara’s poetry calls for the dispersion of the author’s voice by invoking the reader, who eavesdrops on every exchange, yet whose intervention is necessary to the poem’s survival. O’Hara’s messages never seem to reach their addressees without giving them the reassuring or disheartening impression that they are not alone in receiving them.