American Poet Research Articles

The Exhausted: Fred Moten's Poetics

Abstract: This essay focuses upon the American poet Fred Moten alongside the thought of Ádouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, and Frederick Douglass. Across this essay, I argue for the significance of wandering figures in these imaginative worlds. Focusing on diverse examples of erring figures—an exhausted walker on a beach in Martinique, a schoolgirl who took part in the first wave of desegregation efforts in Arkansas, and an improvisational jazz vocalist inspired by the struggles of Africans across the diaspora—I analyze the importance of performances that remain quiet, blurry, and distant. Ultimately, I show how such wandering literary performances suggest new conceptions of critique, identity, and collectivity.

Edward Everett, Transatlantic Publishing Connections, and an Unrecorded Early American Burns

The 1808 American Burns ‘edition’, unrecorded in earlier Burns scholarship, which is described here from the copy in Mr Todd’s collection. is significant both for its nineteenth century owner, the American politician and orator Edward Everett (1794–1865), and for its strange printing history. Everett’s bookplate and a manuscript inscription show that the Todd copy was presented to Everett by a young American poet Epes Sargent (1813–1880), and together these suggest an under-documented interest in Burns in America outside the Scottish diaspora before the 1840s, when Burns’s work would be championed by Emerson, Frederick Douglass and others. The title page states the edition was published in Boston, Massachusetts, but the book’s irregular pagination shows that it was printed in Scotland, not Boston, and was made up of sheets of an 1807 Scottish edition. The American title page (a close but not exact match with the Scottish one), whether printed in Edinburgh or Boston, disguised its Scottish origin during a period of strong protectionism in the American book-trade; if the title page were printed in Scotland, the 1808 Boston Burns would seem to be the only known early nineteenth century example of such an arrangement.

POEM IN MOTION: A UNIQUE BLEND OF EAST AND WEST IN SANDHYA RAJU’S PERFORMANCE POETRY OF MAYA ANGELOU’S POEM ‘PHENOMENAL WOMAN’

Dance is an ancient, universal art form that stirs the souls of the performer as well as the admirers. Dance has the power to heal, nourish, teach, and spread joy and peace. In India, a multicultural and multilingual country, innumerable folk, and classical dance forms have flourished and continue to be practised across villages, towns, and cities. Religious festivals, cultural gatherings, social movements, and youth programmes are incomplete without the rhythm and beauty of music and dance. On Feb 2, 2022, the eminent Kuchipudi danseuse Sandhya Raju launched a terpsichorean rendition of the famous poem ‘Phenomenal Woman’ written by the American poet and activist Maya Angelou and published in 1978, as a tribute to the former’s mother on her birthday. Raju, with her co-dancers from the Aayana Dance Company, made a creative interpretation of the poet’s powerful words, while adding a verse of her own which in turn emphasised the concepts of inner strength of a woman and the depth of mother-daughter bonding. The choreography largely borrows from Kuchipudi, a dance form with its origin in an eponymous village in Andhra Pradesh and founded in the classical Sanskrit treatise Natya Sastra. Angelou’s emphatic paean to the confidence and inner beauty of the woman fuses with the Indian performance art form to weave a mesmerising visual-aural experience to the viewer, bringing in an East-West blend that surpasses the boundaries of language, culture, and race.

Deconstructing the Language Poetry in Some Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein From a Derridaian Perspective

This paper investigates the language poetry and its practice in some poems of the American poet Charles Bernstein. The study will examine several poems for Bernstein, like "April" and "March" from Stigma, "Locks without Doors" from Dark City, "Slowed Reason" from Rough Trades, "Lift off", and "The next Available Place". It argues that the Derridaian perspective plays a prominent role in the way Bernstein visualizes meaning in his poetry. According to Jacques Derrida (1993), the divergence of indicative communication by making intentional gaps between expression and indication creates the signification to difference, deviation, and departure. The gaps for Derrida are gaps of space which become gaps of time and those of time become gaps of space, adding that the gaps of difference are in themselves gaps as difference. The gap itself works for the auto production and the auto-determination of meaning which will keep on travelling.
 The study will analyse the language of Bernstein in the above mentioned poems to prove that meaning emerges through interpretation and that even authors do not control the text interpretation, and that texts, like language itself, have no outside referents or transcendental signified.

“Somewhere listening for my name”: Black Queer Kinship and the Poetry of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic

Abstract This essay is about poetry, publication, and intergenerational caretaking in the context of a mass death event—the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It reads the work of contemporary Black, queer American poets Danez Smith, Jericho Brown, and Pamela Sneed for their intertextual and interpersonal engagement with queer and of-color literary texts and voices (in particular, those of Essex Hemphill, Melvin Dixon, and Donald Woods) under threat of erasure by HIV/AIDS and its effects and aftermaths. In doing so, it argues that Smith, Brown, and Sneed enact in their writing a political, spiritual, and historical project of recuperation and republication, taking the term “republishing” to encompass varying forms of print, performance, allusion, thematic evocation, formal echoes, and citation. In examining the complex, varied, and cross-temporal processes of poetic and scholarly caretaking and kinship—and of publication, “depublication,” and republication—this essay shows that the imprinting of HIV/AIDS into countercanonical poetry offers a crucial, ongoing, and collective counterweight to prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the virus and the disease it causes, as well as creating and sustaining alternative sites of memory, mourning, and meaning making.The implications of the kind of republishing that Smith, Brown, and Sneed gesture toward—this way of remembering and reminding others of lost texts and writers—are manifold, if complex and unavoidably constrained, and include new readerships; the preservation of stories, legacies, and knowledge; and the mitigation of Black queer literary losses as a result of HIV/AIDS.

A linguistic picture of the world: conceptualization of the human body in the poetry of Emily Dickinson

The paper focuses on the linguistic picture of the body in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, a 19th-Century American poet. The aim is to provide a coherent linguistic picture of the body of Dickinson’s lyric subject and to reconstruct the way she conceptualized and portrayed its physical appearance with regard to the artist’s perception of the self. This research is focused on cognitive ethnolinguistics, the methodology utilizes analytic and interpretative techniques with emphasis on the cognitive definition reconstruction and facet parametrization. The research sample consists of the selected poems in which the poet refers to the body of her lyric subject. This research has allowed for the identification of the following facets into which the conceptualization of Dickinson’s perception of the body can be categorized: 1) the perspective of the body as a spirit-encompassing vessel; 2) the body as a reflection of the social oppression experienced by women in the nineteenth century; 3) the facet of the body size, and 4) the ephemerality of the physical body. The identified facets overlap to some extent, but together they form a unified picture which reveals certain aspects of cognitive metaphor theory, such as the conceptual metaphor of a container. This unified picture also reveals literary and linguistic reflections of socio-cultural aspects of the 19th-Century America such as the tendency to diminish the female lyric subject.

“Inclining My Heart Towards the End”: Experiencing the Planetary Crisis in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

Awareness of the planetary climate crisis impacts our sense of being and time. It undermines the significance of our experience and our actions, posing questions about our agency. The drama of our response to moments when the possibility of a life-destroying catastrophe manifests itself is the focus of much of the American poet Jorie Graham’s (1950–) poetry. The intensity of her oeuvre creates difficulties for the uninitiated reader, partly because of the bleakness of its subject matter, partly because of her stylistic innovations. These include a distinctive use of format, deliberate disorientations, and shifts of focus. At the heart of the article is a close reading of the title poem of Jorie Graham’s 2008 volume, Sea Change (New York: Ecco Press). The aim here is to show the complex profundity of her unfolding of moments of experience and reflection. The article then looks more briefly at Jorie Graham’s most recent poetry in which she has gone beyond “inclining [her] heart towards the end”, to imagining a world after the end. The moving power of Jorie Graham’s writing is cathartic, sometimes curiously consoling, as she turns for a moment to showing how we can value what is still here. The article closes with a brief look at some poetry on comparable themes. Above all, the article aims to show how her poetry deepens our consciousness of consciousness, finding beauty in the tragic necessities of our human condition.

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ ФИЛОСОФИЯ И ОНТОЛОГИЯ АВТОНОМНЫХ ЗОН

The article reveals the content of the Temporary Autonomous Zones’ conception (TAZ), proposed by the American anarchist thinker and poet Hakim Bey (real name – Peter Lamborn Wilson, 1945–2022) and rather poorly represented in Russian-language scientific publications. The political and intellectual contexts within which this concept was formed and formulated, as well as its ontological roots, theorized by Hakim Bey himself, are highlighted. A brief overview of the main provisions of this concept, a critical reaction to it from other anarchist authors (M. Bookchin), as well as counterarguments by post-anarchist theorists R. F. Day and S. Newman are presented. The relevance of this work is due to the fact that the trends of instability and non-linearity, fixed both in the modern post-non-classical world picture (reflected in philosophy) and in current global politics, though not identical, but in a certain way correlate with anarchist approaches to understanding reality in general and political reality in particular. The purpose of this articleis attempt to incorporate the concepts of ontological anarchy and autonomous zones, developed by Bey in the 80s of the 20th century, into the context of the latest theoretical approaches in ontology, namely those presented by Q. Meillassoux’s speculative materialism, L. R. Brynt’s object-oriented ontology (onticology) and B. Latour’s actor-network theory. This also determines the scientific novelty of this work, achieved by methods of historical and philosophical description and comparative analysis and also thanks to the involvement of a number of rare English-language sources devoted to the scientific consideration of the work of Hakim Bey. The results of the work include the detection of theoretical approaches to the development and articulation of an anarchist political ontology, which may be associated with further areas of scientific research. In addition, as a conclusion, those nuances of the concept of autonomous zones that seem to be the most relevant today are outlined.

Поэзия России и Америки: к новым возможностям языка

The book by Vladimir Feshchenko, a Russian researcher of the language of poetry and a publisher of avant-garde literature, is devoted to Russian and American poetry of the language experiment in the 20th and early 21st century. Using examples from Andrei Bely, Russian futurists, Alexander Vvedensky, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, E.E. Cummings to the American poets of “language writing” and modern Russian-speaking young poets, the similarity of the philosophical and linguistic foundations of the language experiment, the convergence and differences of literatures, the personal interaction of authors from both countries are considered in the book. The analysis of a number of American and Russian poems from the point of view of the language of poetry is given. V. Feshchenko's book is of interest to researchers of Russian and American poetry, the avant-garde, the language of poetry, and the interaction of literatures.

Marianne Moore and the Lessons of Multiplicity

The intrinsically multiple work of American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) presents special challenges to her editors, as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of editions of her work. In this essay the author, editor of three such editions, reflects on questions about poetic making and representation that underlie editorial work, focusing in particular on the virtues and pitfalls particular to print and digital editions.

Literatura da nova era: estudo da qualidade poética de Glück e sua afinidade com as características da cultura chinesa

Abstract: As a modern American poet with international influence, Louise Glück’s works demonstrate a unique spirit of innovation and sense of experimentation, which would open up a new field of poetic creation. Therefore, it is important to study the influence of Gluck’s works on the literature of the new Chinese period. This paper examined the dissemination of Chinese cultural influences and their role in contemporary Chinese literature through the lens of poetics in Glück’s literary works. By employing data mining techniques, this paper conducted an online survey on the sales volume and readership of Glück’s works, examining the readers’ demographic information, including age, education level and regional distribution. The survey results demonstrated that from March 2020 to October 2020, the average monthly sales volume of Glück’s print books was 13,625, while the average monthly readership of e-books was 21,520.75. Glück’s works have been widely disseminated in China and collided with Chinese culture. Glück’s poetic nature and stubborn spirit of solitude without sinking have opened up new possibilities for contemporary Chinese literature and provided a new way for writers to explore art.

Collaborative Writing and the Poetics of the Occasion: The Pandemic Sonnets of Cindy Tran and Craig Santos Perez

During the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, writers turned to the practice of sonnet-writing to connect with others, stem isolation, and take stock of the multiple crises presented by the pandemic and its complex social contexts. This essay examines two collaboratively written pandemic sonnet projects, The Poetry Society of New York’s May Day 2020 crown and Cindy Tran’s Sonnet Crown for NYC, along with the pandemic eco-sonnets of Craig Santos Perez. These pandemic sonnets articulate our complexly connected identities while highlighting the pandemic sonnet’s capacities for meditating on and interrogating our expanding webs of connection. As collaborative writing projects and works of occasional poetry, these pandemic sonnet projects reposition the sonnet in contemporary American poetics as a social and socially-embedded practice, linking contemporary sonnet practice to the highly social poetic exchanges associated with the sonnet from its earliest roots.

The Impact of the Butterfly Effect Concept on Jorie Graham's Selected Poems

The butterfly effect states that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil causes a hurricane in Texas. It is the main concept of chaos theory that is developed by the American meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Besides, it is a term used to explain the high sensitivity of nonlinear dynamical systems to their initial conditions. The study applies the concept of the butterfly effect to the poems of the American poet Jorie Graham. It analyses two collections of her poems, Erosion and The End of Beauty, where the main purpose is to prove that every minor change in a chaotic poem, whether in the external form or in the content, leads the reader to order in one way or another. In other words, from the middle of the chaotic poem emerges a small part that restores order to the whole poem. The poet’s seemingly disordered techniques employed in her poems are strategically used to create the sense of order in the middle of chaos.

An Interview with American Poet- Novelist Joseph Fasano

An Interview with American Poet- Novelist Joseph Fasano

ETEL ADNAN’IN JOURNEY TO MOUNT TAMALPAIS ESERİNDE SANAT, DOĞA VE BELLEK

In her Journey to Mount Tamalpais: An Essay (1986), the Arab American painter and poet Etel Adnan (1925-2021) contemplates on the relationship between art, nature, and memory by focusing on the act of perception. Adnan’s text tells of her inner journey towards peace in contrast to her other work that responds to the Lebanese civil war, from which she had to flee in the 1970s. The centrality of perception reveals an intertwining relationship between art, nature and memory. In this relationship, the subject is intertwined with the object, self with the other, the perceiver with the perceived, which traditional Western thought separates as binaries. One of the prominent figures in phenomenological approach, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has focused on perception that is compatible with Adnan’s text. His concepts of “reversibility,” “chiasm,” “dehiscence,” and “flesh” are useful tools to analyze the essay both in its conceptual and cultural dimensions. As a work which incorporates verbal and visual treatments of the mountain, in which Adnan excavates the hidden histories and memories, retaining their differences, Journey to Mount Tamalpais proves to be a manifestation of “the intertwining—the chiasm” as Merleau-Ponty attempts to map. In relation to perception, memory emerges as a preeminent concept due to Adnan’s engagements with cultures and linguistic worlds such as Arab, French and American, and her witness of colonial wars. This article proposes a reading that captures the conceptual and cultural dimensions of the text, which ultimately leads to a new visibility of the mountain. The ultimate manifestation of Mount Tamalpais is the image of a wise and wounded old woman. When the process of perception that produces this image is analyzed from Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, Journey to Mount Tamalpais reveals a way of thinking about the chiasm of art, nature and memory in which the boundaries between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, and background and foreground collapse.

“Pain of Speaking”: Language and Environmental (In)justice in Ofelia Zepeda’s Where Clouds Are Formed

Ofelia Zepeda, an enrolled member of the Tohono O’odham Indian Nation (formerly Papago), is one of the most acknowledged Native American poets of her generation. Zepeda’s creative writing can be characterized as eco-poetry, for it is deeply connected with the natural environment of the Tohono O’odham traditional tribal territory in the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest. The present paper focuses on the motif of language and speech as it is presented in Zepeda’s latest collection of verses Where Clouds Are Formed (2008). The paper maps the diverse forms in the work and in studies of individual poems (some of which are bilingual: English and Tohono O’odham), the significance of the traditional language within the context of so-called environmental (in)justice is explored.

Irony and Yearning in W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg: A Close Reading of Three of their Confessional Poems

This paper examines three poems by three American poets – W. D. Snodgrass, J. Berryman and A. Ginsberg who subscribe to the confessionalism of the 1950s and 60s being largely spared the complication of clinical depression which plagued the other three major confessionalists – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Not having a severe form of it – Snodgrass – has resulted in generally more light-hearted texts by them containing irony and yearning which differ in mood from the rather mostly bleak verses of the other three mentioned American poets. These three, however, were also perfectly capable of their own personal darkness represented in verse and in turn did not fail to scandalize with the content of some of their verses. The paper also discusses the power of sincerity in these autofictional poems vs what could have been mere authenticity of dissimulated lived experience. As such, it aims to dispel possible attacks of self-display or glorification, as well as of possible victimization that autofictive poets, including some of the ones under scrutiny, have come under.

Unbecoming Archives: Anne Sexton's "Perverse" Imagination

Abstract: It is impossible to read much about American poet Anne Sexton before encountering references to her "perverse" imagination. Critics routinely argue that she paints a perverse vision of childhood sexuality, female identity, and adult sexuality in her work, and they often object to her frank discussions of the body, its pleasures, and its dangerous powers. Her depictions of mental illness, initiated in To Bedlam and Part Way Back , also earned the derision of many critics who urged her "not to enquire further." Helen Vendler (1988) argued that "a poem was never better for having a uterus in it," and James Dickey objected to being exposed to so much "naked suffering"; that quote was in Anne's wallet when she killed herself in her garage in 1974. In her interviews and her poetry, Sexton answered these critics as a confessional poet and a cultural critic. But even after her death, accusations of her perversion abound. First, her biographer, Diane Middlebrook, exposed her sexual abuse of her daughter Linda. And then Sexton's sister Blanche referred to the poet's "perverse imagination" in a 1991 letter to the Boston Globe , where she and her daughters objected to how Middlebrook's biography represented Sexton's family as riddled with alcoholism, child neglect and/or abuse, and suicide.

Evolving to Science Poetry: Three Poems by Ernesto Cardenal

Abstract Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) is one of the most important Latin American poets. He developed his “exteriorist” poetics in the 1950s, much influenced by Anglo-American poets, in particular Ezra Pound, to differentiate his poetry from the prevailing subjectivist verse in Latin America. The impact of Pound’s canto technique on his work is clear, as well. Cardenal’s epic poem Cántico cósmico (Cosmic Canticle), published in 1989, is his magnum opus. This work is distinguished by his avant-garde use of science and its language, as he contemplates the entire cosmos and issues of being and non-being. Revolution is another major aspect of the poem, reflecting Cardenal’s commitment as a Christian-Marxist revolutionary. My translations of three fragments of his Cosmic Canticle selected by him are published here for the first time. They represent his focus on the origin of our planet and life on Earth.

Crianza simbiótica entre literatura, cultura y naturaleza en la Meta-Picto-Poesía del paisaje de Gary Snyder

Abstract: This article holds the opinion that some meta-picto-poetry of landscape, composed by American poet Gary Snyder, takes Chinese landscape painting as its subject matter with the characteristics of ancient Chinese poetry, shimmering with incomparable artistic charm and cultural substance. Poetry of this kind is a perfect combination of eastern and western elements, integrating the cultures, thoughts and arts of both sides. The appreciation of this poetry creates a complex experience with a hybrid of artistic forms and aesthetic spaces. Gary Snyder is not only an eco-poet, but also a stylist and a man of practice. His poetic works reveal the fostering relationship between literature, culture and nature. The article intends to make a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and multi-field attempt in Snyder’s criticism, with analytical methods inclusive of eastern and western cultures, ancient and present visions as well as dynamic and static experiences.