American Poetry Research Articles

Exploring the Nature of Life in Emily Dickinson’s Poems

Emily Dickinson was one of the pioneers of twentieth-century modernist poetry in the United States, and her poetry is rich in subject matter, with poemson the theme of the nature of life being an important part of Emily Dickinson's work and particularly noted by researchers. Through the method of textual analysis, this essay analyzes herlife-theme poemfrom the perspective of content analysis and rhetorical criticism, combined with Dickinson's life experience. Herpoems explore the issues of life and eternity from many sides, with the significance of finding the true nature of life and revealing the true meaning of life. It is a milestone in the creation of new American poetry.

Terrifying Memory: An Interview with Carey Perloff

Terrifying Memory: An Interview with Carey Perloff

John T. Lowney (1957–2022)

This past September admired friend and respected scholar, John T. Lowney, passed away at the age of 65. John was professor of English at St John’s University in Queens, New York.John’s work explored the cultural politics of how modernism has been constructed in the literary history of the United States. His first book, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (Bucknell UP, 1997), focused on Williams as an avant-garde writer in the early modernist period during and after World War 1 and elaborated the complex literary and cultural politics of Williams’s reception as a poet through the late 1950s and 1960s. His scholarship on twentieth-century American poetry and literary culture continued in History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (U of Iowa P, 2006).Over the years, his writing on Williams included other essays and reviews—including, most recently, “Williams: The New Poetries and Legacy” in The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams (Cambridge UP, 2016) and “Reflections on Bryce Conrad’s Historiography” in the William Carlos Williams Review (2018). In addition, John’s scholarship in African American literary and cultural studies, and jazz literature, includes Jazz Internationalism: Literary Afro-Modernism and the Cultural Politics of Black Music (U of Illinois P, 2017) as well as essays in American Literature, The Langston Hughes Review, Melus, and The African American Review. His intellectual work was recognized with grants from the Donald C. Gallup Fellowship in American Literature at Yale’s Beinecke Library and a National Endowment for the Humanities Study Grant.During our PhD studies, writing about Williams, we both read John’s work. We also remember John as approachable and engaging, quietly spoken and sharply intelligent, with a sense of humor amid the often overly serious atmosphere of academic conference. Moreover, he was a generous and sensitive reviewer, including a review of Ian’s first book that came out of the PhD studies his own work had helped along. We celebrate his contributions as we mourn the loss of a colleague and friend. Though we are confident that John’s voice will continue to inspire continuing explorations of Williams’s ongoing presence in the tradition of American poetry and poetics.

Introduction

Introduction

Conners, Carrie: Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Conners, Carrie: <i>Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry</i>

Fidelity to the deep structure of literature: Yu Kwang-chung’s translation of Emily Dickinson

ABSTRACT Yu Kwang-chung embarked on a translational project, Anthology of American Poetry, around 1960. Edited by Stephen Soong, the anthology was published by World Today Press, Hong Kong, in 1961. This research commences with Yu’s plight in selecting what poems of Dickinson’s to translate, a plight associated with Poundian translatology. It follows with textual analyses of Yu’s translations of and introduction to Dickinson’s poetry. I aruge that Yu is far from being an absolutist inasmuch as translational fidelity is concerned. In contrast, what he pursues in poetry translation is an optimal fidelity, one that intends to bring about as profuse poetics as possible in the target language. The translator exerts optimal faithfulness to a variety of traditional literary elements, all of which amount to what I call “fidelity to the deep structure of literature.” It is with such a flexible fidelity that Yu transplants Dickinson’s metaphysical universe onto the Chinese soil.

Analysis of the Similar Characteristics in the Works of Dickinson and Bishop

Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop are both the most influential poets in western literary history. They both lived in a time of great change, and they both were seen as more silent than men. Dickinson lived a reclusive life until her death, she devoted almost her whole life to writing, and created 1775 poems in her lifetime. Her lonely life nourished her poetry, and despite frequent illness and unrequited affection, Dickinson’s relationship with poetry was inextricably inseparable. As for the modern American poet Bishop, she always shuttles between different countries in her life. This experience of displacement and migration is not only her pleasure, but also the source of her loneliness and pain. There are many similarities in the life and creation of Bishop and Dickinson, both of whom have experienced the misfortune of growing up, and both have doubts about the identity as poets and as women. This paper explores the similarities between the two poets’ creations and the causes from the aspects of time, physical condition and spiritual pursuit. The causes are their thoughts of life, death and female identity, as well as their pursuit of peace, which takes modern American poetry to a whole new level.

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

On Crying While Stripping Wallpaper

On Crying While Stripping Wallpaper Stevie Edwards (bio) Keywords Stevie Edwards, poetry, home renovation, nursery, children, grief Three days into strippingthe third layer of painted wallpaperin a poorly ventilated powder roomand I am a sorrow river. My husbandsticks his head in to ask why I’m standing on a ladder, sobbingugly and snotty, a steamer in my left handspitting at the wall, a scraper in the right:I’m not sure. Too many hoursof quiet in close quarters. No, I’ve been choosing colors and namesin my sleep. My mind keeps its secretPinterest board of nursery décorpadlocked in its dingiest corner:the wallpaper border with baby animals, the mobile and cribI circled in my Grandma’s JCPenneycatalogue when I was sevenand knew how to want without guilt.There’s a small guest bedroom across the hall from mine, perfectfor the child my husband doesn’t wantenough, the child I spent yearsnot being sure I deserved. I am notredecorating that room in lambs [End Page 101] or unicorns. Not carefully choosingeach rattle and onesie for a registry.Scraping three decades offthe same four walls for days, my prettyfingers haggard with hangnails, I am chanting the name of a daughterI, more than likely, will never teachto strip wallpaper like my mothertaught me in the hallway one summerwith no air conditioning and too much July. I only teach the children of strangers,and I never teach them anythingas useful as how to undo the shortsighteddecisions of homeowners with too many recitalsand soccer practices to do the job right. [End Page 102] Stevie Edwards stevie edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer at Clemson University and author of Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry), Humanly (Small Doggies Press), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing). Edwards is currently poetry editor of The South Carolina Review, and her third full-length collection of poetry, Quiet Armor, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press’s Curbstone imprint. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her husband and a small herd of rescue pitbulls (Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Peaches). Stevie uses she/they pronouns. Copyright © 2023 The Massachusetts Review, Inc

Homage to a Picture Bride

Homage to a Picture Bride Garrett Hongo (bio) When years were long with labor in the sugarfields,I sought a wife, at last, choosing her from a photograph.She was but fifteen, a shy child of a bridewrapped in faded kimono, as I likewise was wrapped in wind,a man of thirty, weathered by work in the green seasof cane, my savings finally enough to take my wedding vows. Before then, it was to the coming world that I made vowsto wrest a new life from the earth and leave the fieldsso I might cast my eyes without sorrow from mountains to the sea,never again to falsify who I was in a photographas though I were a clerk or a saddler, sheltered from the constant winds,the image I'd sent, a deception to my young bride. She was young but daily growing, my new bride.We stood on the pier and took our vows,and I led her to the North Shore, its mountains torn by winds,below them the rippling green fieldsof cane stretching all the way to the sea,a landscape no one would care to photograph. [End Page 328] Before we left, someone took a photograph—this laborer and downcast picture bridehalf his age at their dockside ceremony of vows—staged before a background of slate-gray seasand the small curls of waves tossed by winds,impassive faces resigned to a hard life in the canefields. We were destined never to leave the fields—my wife gave birth to a son we did not photographas, before he could cry, he was taken by the windthat came betrothed as his own promised bride,journeying from the Afterworld over storm-tossed seas,our mortal dreams of a better life all but disavowed. She herself died within a year of our vowsand so finally escaped the sugarfields,a ghost in flight, ha-alele-hana, over the dread seasthat never would be captured in a photograph,so that, ever after, only resolve would be my brideand my mourning cloak a coat of harsh winds. Only the wind knows my sorrows now, whatever vowsmy bride and I made are forever lost in the sugarfields,this photograph the one moment we lived apart from life's cold seas. [End Page 329] Garrett Hongo Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai'i, and grew up in Los Angeles. His latest books are The Perfect Sound: a Memoir in Stereo and a forthcoming collection, The Ocean of Clouds: Poems. He is the recipient of the 2022 Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, and he teaches at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Copyright © 2023 The University of the South

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song ed. by Kevin Young (review)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song ed. by Kevin Young (review)

Assimilation or Detention

How are the migration of people and of poetry, through literary translation and translational literature, linked or alike? What can the poetry of migration teach about the translation of form in poetry? What is the role of the text in understanding the politics of poetry in politicized contexts? Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 is an important collection and translation of poems etched in the walls of the Angel Island detention center. Though the Angel Island poems were mostly composed after the 1919 vernacular revolution in Chinese literature, they were written in classical Chinese and premodern forms. Island translates them into stiff free-verse academic English, asking English-language readers to imaginatively project poetic beauty onto the originals. Other translations, such as Teow Lim Goh's Islanders (2016) and Jeffrey Thomas Leong's Wild Geese Sorrow (2018), render the poems with more attention to the dominant styles of contemporary American poetry. This article argues for a retranslation of the Angel Island poems—not into free verse but with formalist attention to meter and rhyme in English. Such translations could blur the dichotomy between the former's target-oriented poetics and the latter's source-oriented translations and also offer a stronger migration into English for the poetry of these migrants.

:Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge

:<i>Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge</i>

The Unsung Heroes of Holy Garbage: An Analysis of Waste in A.R. Ammons’s Garbage

This essay analyzes A.R. Ammons Garbage (1993) through the lens of Waste Studies by focusing on the interactions between the material and metaphorical uses of waste, scrutinizing the complex trope of the dump-ziggurat, and paying special attention to the neglected figure of the waste collector or garbage worker. In the 1990s, when Ammons published his long poem, waste and garbage were becoming pivotal tropes in American poetry. While Ammons deals with the inescapable presence of garbage in his homonymous poem, he also goes beyond the materiality of waste in order to incorporate more metaphorical resonances. Arguably, the most valuable insights that Garbage has to offer derive precisely from its striking juxtaposition of the material and the immaterial, the scatological and the eschatological. Most importantly, Ammons not only sings a hymn to the huge garbage dump and its implications, but also to the “unsung heroes” of modernity (Bauman 2004): the anonymous workers who collect the garbage and maintain the landfill.

Literature of the Black Diaspora and the Performance of Caribbean and African American Aural Texts

The second half of the twentieth century, witnessed a new kind of literature often referred to as "Literature of the Black Diaspora; its appearance and acceptance into mainstream world literature was not without hostilities: overcame what seems like a futile effort, and now a major world literature. One salient feature of literature of the black Diaspora is the representation of aural texts in its composition and reception. This paper is therefore designed to examine the concept and performance of Afro-Caribbean and African American aurality as African legacy and constituent of the Black Literature. This paper, with reference to specific oral and aural texts, discovers that the performance of orality and aurality is a veritable heritage of the Caribbean and African American poetry and this criticism of the black vernacular tradition ranging from the spirituals and blues to jazz, calypso, reggae, hip-hop, gospel, and other contemporary poetic forms indicates that African American and Afro-Caribbean music is particularly rich in mixture of African tradition. The tradition was heralded by the forceful movement of Africans from their native land, through the middle passage, and their ultimate adaptation to a new land. Thus, music is to Africa as the anvil is to the blacksmith, and slavery was the surface on which American and Caribbean music was forged no matter how refined they are now. Aside emotional needs, as with Baldwin and Du Bois, music gives black people ―ability to say ―things‖ that otherwise cannot be said- blurs that boundary between the white man and the black man‖.

The Purchase

The Purchase Matthew Kelsey (bio) Late August, in the shade of a canvastarp, near the blue brick of Bolton DanceAcademy and the newly warpedtraffic circle spilling toward the Hudson,tomatoes stacked on gingham clothpoke into the light. A table over,punnets of beans crown some cratesof corn fresh from their silks.All the fruits and vegetables shinein an estival haze, the catch of heatmugging the late cache. My newmother walks me through the market,less for the cobs, more for miniatureleaves doused in maple, shows me howthe light hits the confection smackdab in the stem, changes the sugarcrystals’ composition. She lets me eatone, maybe two, then tells me we mustsave something for later. She meansto hold a sweet melt for a hard night,but what I keep is the thought of heroutstretched hand, still open, a littlesugar in each crease. [End Page 175] Matthew Kelsey matthew kelsey’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a teaching fellowship from the Kenyon Review Young Writers Program, and an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week Fellowship. Copyright © 2023 Matthew Kelsey ...

I Keep Walking into Orchards at Night

I Keep Walking into Orchards at Nightafter Andrés Montoya David Campos (bio) the birds whose names I can’t say hide their flight among star breath, where it is said dead children have gone to seektheir shoes and socks for running. these nights their footsteps cut through the coughs of trees and sing the opposite of lullabies;though there is no translation for a bird’s neck breaking. Do not stop the ants from carving tunnels that will lead to your mouth.I try not to think of my brother, his face turning blue that one night he came close to flightand wonder how big his feathers would have been. tonight, his name is cutting through the branchessentencing fruit to the worms. Tonight, a flock feeds on the fallen. a branch snaps under my feet. [End Page 106] David Campos Fresno City College David Campos David Campos is the son of Mexican immigrants, a CantoMundo Fellow, and the author of Furious Dusk (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) and American Quasar (Red Hen, 2021). His work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Normal School. He’s the winner of the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, and the Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for the best group of poems in Prairie Schooner. He teaches English at Fresno City College. Copyright © 2022 The Trustees of Indiana University

세스티나의 강박적 구조와 마술적 미학: 엘리자베스 비숍의 시들을 중심으로

This paper investigates the poems of Elizabeth Bishop written in the sestina form and discusses how she uses the sestina''s obsessive formal logic to construct fascinatingly surreal and deeply emotional landscapes. To contextualize Bishop’s sestinas and demonstrate their unique significance, this paper will first offer a brief overview of the sestina form’s adoption and adaptation in the English poetic tradition. Bishop’s first sestina, “A Miracle for Breakfast,” is influenced by Auden’s moralized and allegorical re-interpretation of the troubadour form that originated in medieval France. Furthermore, Bishop, whose childhood struggles with a sense of dislocation, alienation, and mortality lie at the heart of her poetic universe, naturally gravitates toward the form’s intensely affective and strikingly magical force in her tour-de-force poem, “Sestina.” Through the close reading of Bishop’s two sestinas, this paper will argue that Bishop offers paradigmatic models to understand the sestina''s formal virtue and enriched potential for exploration, articulation, and expression in the context of twentieth-century American poetry.