Anglophone Poetry Research Articles

“The Creative Journey is all about Conquering New Frontiers”: In Conversation with Kaiser Haq

In this interview, Bangladeshi Anglophone poet, translator, and critic Kaiser Haq discusses diverse aspects of his writings and concerns. First of all, he talks about his recently published poetry collection, The New Frontier & Other Odds and Ends in Verse and Prose. Then, he dwells upon the charms and challenges of conquering new frontiers during his long poetic journey, his distinguished career as an academician, his role as an essayist and his work as a translator. He gives his opinion about the tradition of Bangladeshi Anglophone poetry and sheds light on his stance as a poet-witness and as a social critic. His representation of aberrant figures, debt to Bengal’s rich folk heritage, transformation of mundane observations to socio-political musings, and exploration of issues like identity and the environment come to the fore in course of the conversation. He spells out his poetic standpoint on issues like tradition and modernity, love and sex, religion and ethnicity, and diversity and unity. He takes pains to explain how his poetry testifies to Bangladesh’s evolution over the years through all the ups and downs. He points out how exposure to other climes and cultures and love for his own country and country people complement each other to create his poetic credo. Later, he elaborates on his attitude to memory and the media. He reveals his perspectives on poetic craftmanship and stylistic innovation. The interview wraps up with an enduring message from Kaiser Haq the poet for his readers.

Cosmopolitan Hybridity, Cultural Memory and Curation in Hong Kong Poetry

This article builds on previous research on the engagement of British-based Hong Kong Anglophone poets with the visual arts. It attempts to outline an object-based curatorial poetics observed in Hong Kong Anglophone poetry. Understanding curation as a mode of writing, we argue that Hong Kong poets writing in English employ a curatorial poetics, transforming the poetic space into a collection of images while refraining from description, as in ekphrasis. Objects with an Asian/Chinese/Hong Kong connection are presented as a collective, inviting the reader to associate with and reflect upon a pluralistic understanding of Hong Kong’s history based on an intermingling of personal and collective memory. We trace the development of this poetics and identify its beginnings in the works of Chinese-language Hong Kong writers. Then, we examine how a range of poets, both locally and internationally based, utilize the curatorial form to demonstrate the cosmopolitan hybridity that characterizes the city and contribute to an increasingly pluralistic discourse on Hong Kong’s identity. The poems employing this form of poetics act as museums of cultural memory, recording the hybridity of Hong Kong and subverting homogenous, totalizing attempts to define the city.

Sri Lankan anglophone poetry and modernist painting

The Cubist painter George Keyt became, in the three books of verse he wrote while unable to paint, Sri Lanka’s first Anglophone Modernist poet. His enquiry into the limits of representation, cognized through an alignment of literary with visual art, became central to Sri Lankan lyric. Although poems in this line take up the argument that Western art is an aesthetic branch of colonialism, their indebtedness to Modernist painting (and Modernist poetry) makes for self-questioning, intertextual and cross-generic encounters. As Sri Lankan poets wonder how, in a borrowed, contaminated language, to depict, analyse and memorialize complex and traumatic experiences, they turn repeatedly to visual art (invoked as a metaphor, but also as a model). Comparing works by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, Indran Amirthanayagam, Parvati Solomons Arasanayagam and her mother Jean Arasanayagam, we see how the appearance of visual art in a Sri Lankan poem makes possible transactions between identity and otherness, experience and aesthetics. This essay extends the “dialogic poetics” of Jahan Ramazani to argue that these Anglophone lyrics of the Global South engage painting as a means of achieving a poetic reflexivity that is also a historical situatedness.

Rethinking Tenderness in the Early Poetry of Juan Gelman

The poetry of Juan Gelman (1930–2014) is eminently suited to an edition of BSS that simultaneously celebrates a centenary of Hispanist research in the UK and attempts to survey the current state of the field. Gelman—poet, journalist and political activist—with an oeuvre that emerges from the socially engaged verse of the 1950s, engaging with Anglophone poetry, pseudonymous translations mysticism, and culminating in the Premio Cervantes 2007. An assessment of his early work, particularly the presence of ternura therein, draws on influential work in affect theory and speaks to signal moments in the history of UK Hispanism.

The New American Poetry , Personism, and the Cold War

Abstract: Stephan Delbos's deeply researched historical analysis provides new insight into American avant-garde poetry and art after World War II when, in its aftermath and the ensuing Cold War, certain poets and artists set American poetics on a new course. Delbos evaluates this movement from the perspective of recent Anglophone poetry whose concerns for identity and biography have left it oblivious to what was a fierce contest over a half century ago. Yet the famous anthology, The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 , has changed the terms of American poetry even into the present. The poets and editors involved in that bygone struggle were not immune to the Cold War's effects both at home and abroad; in fact both the avant-garde poetry and the contemporaneous avant-garde art, in being appropriated for the global struggle, also directly or indirectly reflected that struggle in the work.

Modernity and Spirituality in Malaysian Anglophone Poetry: An Interview with the late Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof

Malaysian literature in English epitomises the move to the new world and incorporates various national and international, social, political, and cultural subjects. Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof (1939-2022), an eminent Malaysian playwright and poet, voices the spiritual vacuum these changes bring within the modern man and draws the path towards relief, solace, and comfort in the soul’s journey back to the Creator. Ghulam-Sarwar’s poetry explores various social and cultural aspects, but no endeavour to date has been taken to discuss its spiritual dimensions. Given this background, this interview with Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof outlines his perspectives on the quest for spirituality and the modern man’s hunger and restlessness to find a meaning for existence as a way to connecting with the higher Being. Using the qualitative method of semi-structured interview that contains both structured and unstructured questions, the paper sheds light on the artistic abilities Yousof shows in blending themes of self, love, nature, and society. The paper attempts to critically appreciate the interweaving of modernity with spirituality in Ghulam-Sarwar’s poetry and demonstrates how it is clothed in simple language, coupled with a sublime content, and delineated with harmonious and rhythmic intensity of his mystical experiences. It seeks to situate his mystic poetry within the realm of modern Anglophone poetry.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, ed. Moyra Haslett

<i>Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780</i>, ed. Moyra Haslett

Tennyson

Tennyson Linda K. Hughes (bio) This year's survey of Tennyson scholarship fittingly begins with the Summer 2021 special Tennyson issue of Victorian Poetry (59, no. 2) edited by Michael [End Page 407] Sullivan.1 It is titled "Tennyson and the Poetic Imagination" and, according to Sullivan, offers diverse approaches to Tennyson's imagination, including poetry's visionary possibilities, fancy, and sensory experience registered in language. A recurring feature of the issue's excellent essays is attention to the suggestibility of Tennyson's poetry, an ability to exceed meaning beyond what his lines immediately express. Ewan Jones in "Tennyson's Phantom Ballads" (VP 59, no. 2: 201–221) arrives at Tennyson's suggestibility beyond the explicitly stated by way of the philosopher Andy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty and Clark's model of predictive processing. Predictive mental processing postulates a dynamic agential activity in which an inferred predictive pattern is constantly self-correcting in the face of fresh sensory input. Jones couples this model with Derek Attridge's contention of a dominant four-beat measure in Anglophone poetry and applies this framework to Tennyson's two-volume Poems (1842) to posit a kind of phantom balladic measure at play. "Break, break, break" is a telling example in Jones's analysis. Though a three-beat measure seems dominant, a phantom fourth foot that is intuited but not heard gives way to actual tetrameter that surfaces in lines 11 and 15 ("But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand"; "But the tender grace of a day that is dead"). These lines reference elements of an unrecoverable past, thus materializing and simultaneously effacing (through the lexical reference to death) the once-living, once-expected ongoing human life in tandem with a ghostlike meter, now here, now vanished. "Break, break, break" is thus a hybrid lyric haunted by ballad measure without conforming to it. A. J. Nickerson alternatively takes up the "gleam" in "Tennyson and the Gleam" (pp. 223–241)–not the imaginary gleam of the autobiographical "Merlin and the Gleam" so much as a persistent yet ineffable crux of Tennyson's poetic imagination and poetics. Stated reductively, the poesis of the "gleam" is irreducibly liminal, hovering always between the known and unknown, life and death, the nearly or partly glimpsed and oblivion. The quest to grasp the nature of the relation between life and death, identity and a beloved other, or the nature of time always fails, but in that failure and through Tennyson's verbal melody, the poetry always implies more than itself. This mode is exemplified in In Memoriam, which constantly pushes to exceed the limits of consciousness and death, falls back unto and into the self, yet leaves a glimmer of half-light glimpsed and conveyed through the work's resonating constancy of verbal music. Alison Chapman emphasizes deixis, along with prosody, in "Placing Tennyson, Tennyson's Place: Memory, Elegy, and Geography in 'Frater Ave atque Vale'" (pp. 243–258). She draws attention to the suggestive duality of [End Page 408] any geo- or spatiotemporal settings in Tennyson insofar as a "here" always signals an "away," a distant prospect of memory and space. If the trochaic octameter catalectic meter of Tennyson's elegiac tribute to his brother and to Catullus in "Frater" propels the poem forward to some arrival, the rhyming catalectic syllables all feature the same open o that suspends forward motion. Similarly, as the boat lands on Sermio, so Catullus arrives in Tennyson's poem in direct quotation, even as the Catullan "Lydian laughter" recalls Catullus's homecoming after serving in Asia Minor far away and evokes by association the Etruscans colonized and ousted by Roman settlement. Even the poem's first publication under a monthly time signature on the cover of James Knowles's magazine Nineteenth Century signaled a specific "now" yet simultaneously revived an ancient past by surfacing Catullus's voice, so that the publication's materiality simultaneously inscribed decay and loss as well as going forward from the past. Jane Wright looks back to Tennyson's classical inheritance as well, specifically his early immersion in Horace from childhood onward ("The Charm of Tennyson," pp. 141–160). Whereas Northrop Frye and Herbert Tucker associate "charm...

The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei

The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie

Reviewed by: Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body by Cary Howie Katharine Jager Cary Howie. Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 190 pp. $130.00. Cary Howie's Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body is a series of comparative readings, or what he calls "an especially concentrated set of turns and returns" (53), that range across a wide selection of texts including contemporary American lyric poetry, Italian and French medieval poetry, medieval theology and hagiography, and twentieth-century continental philosophy. In a delicate, beautiful mash-up, Howie presses together seemingly disparate texts to marshal claims about meditation, theology, desire, and the bounds of the embodied self. Comprising nine brief chapters, the book is also framed by a series of Howie's original free-verse poems or "interludes" that reflect concerns with lyric [End Page 405] questions of praise, deixis, prayer, and belief, expressed in a diction that is simultaneously casual ("face down / ass up, that's the way we like"; xi) and theological (as expressed in the title on Interlude 2: "Puking Prayer"; 125). As he notes, "the poetic word is always an incarnate word, a tongue, a body spoken and speaking," and poetry itself "takes place in and as religious discourse, conceptual argument, God-talk, prayer" (9). Howie begins with an analysis of American poet Mary Szybist's poem "The Troubadours, Etc.," which he uses to ground his notion of "transfiguration," or an embodied, spiritual "light that makes something newly visible, even as it appears to disappear" (1). "Transfiguration" guides Howie's concept of "lyric medievalism," or the ways that the contemporary poets he reads "have started to sound like medieval theologians, or, in fact, like certain holistic modern readers of medieval theology, especially in their accounts of the human body in its limitations and at its limits" (147), and he presses twentieth-century anglophone poetry against medieval theological texts. For instance, Howie's first chapter, "Toward Transfiguration," reads Laura Kasischke, Matt Donovan, the account in Matthew's Gospel of the hemorrhaging woman reaching for Christ's hem, Linda Hull, Aquinas, Augustine, Marie Howe, and Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, to argue that "to be transfigured is to undergo, at the surface of the body, an intensification of this body that does not leave it intact, if by 'intact' we understand all too literally, 'untouched'" (24). His second chapter, "Saints, Poets, and Other Crossover Artists," extends this concern for the body's edges and apertures. Using Barbara Newman's concept of the medieval crossover artist to weave readings of sci-fi; mid-century American fiction; Boccaccio; philosophy; theology; medieval studies; and the lyrics of Mary Karr, Kasischke, and Mary Oliver, Howie argues that these writers are able to express "something so fundamentally accommodating of the world—its ugliness, its beauty—that it challenges the very discursive and categorical prejudices of our critical language" (44). Chapter 3, "Monastic Poetics," is Howie's strongest chapter. In it, he considers discretio across and through readings of Jane Hirshfield, Foucault, the Conferences of John Cassian, Benedict's Rule, Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, Thomas Merton on Mark Van Doren, Guigo II the Carthusian's Ladder of Monks, Melissa Range's "Shell White," and Marilyn Hacker's "Annunciation, 8 A.M." Howie argues here that monastic poetics, in its use of discernment and discipline, is "not afraid to find occasions for prayer in situations of impurity" (68). His fourth chapter, "Waiting for the Middle Ages," considers Catherine Brown, Carla Freccero, and Carolyn Dinshaw's [End Page 406] recent claims about temporality and medievalism to wonder "how we, singularly and in common, are taken by the objects and the persons we attend to and how they, more often than not, if we wait for and with them, take us by surprise" (74–75). Howie reads Beroul's Tristan; Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion; Dante's Inferno, XVI; Bernard of Clairvaux; Caroline Bynum; Marie Howe's "The Gate"; theology; literary criticism; and philosophy; as well as Paul's letter to the Romans; to...

Anglo-French Poetic Exchanges in the Little Magazines, 1908–1914

This article demonstrates the extent and significance of exchange between English and French poets in the years leading up to World War I, a crucial period for the development of modern Anglophone poetry. Through archival research, I trace the growing interest in French poetry of Imagist poets F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, exhibited in various little magazines including the New Age, Poetry Review, Poetry and Drama, Poetry, the New Freewoman and the Egoist. Moreover, I show that such interest was reciprocated by contemporary French poets, notably Henri-Martin Barzun and Guillaume Apollinaire, who published works by English poets in their respective little magazines Poème et Drame and Les Soirées de Paris. This suggests that not only were modern English poets influenced by their French counterparts, but they were also given a voice in the Francophone artistic world, resulting in a unique moment of cross-channel poetic exchange before the war.

Anglophone Poetry in Kenya at the Turn of the Century: Past Experience and Artistic Transformation

The main trends in the development of the English-language poetry of Kenya at the turn of the XX—XXI centuries are considered. The main material is a collection of poems by Kenyan poets, first published in the early 2000s. Particular attention is paid to the ideological and artistic transformation in the work of the young generation of Kenyan poets of the key directions in the development of Kenyan English-language poetry, which developed in the first half of the XX century. The novelty of the research lies in the conclusion about the continuity of the experience of the older generation poets by the English-speaking Kenyan poets, which is expressed in the development of two key directions of the development of Kenyan English-language poetry: socio-political and philosophical-lyric. At the same time, a fundamental change in the artistic method and style transformation is noted in the work of the new generation of Kenyan authors: unlike their predecessors, young Kenyan poets are increasingly gravitating towards the use of rhyme, expressed allegory and imagery, and also adopting previously untested techniques, for example, the use of elements of youth subculture. New material has been brought in, many names are first introduced into the everyday life of domestic and world African studies.

Nostalgic Forms: Agha Shahid Ali, Space Age Poetry, and the Cold War Planet

In the late 1960s, poetry became curiously entangled with NASA's famous "Earthrise" photograph taken from the moon, which appears to show a united planet Earth rising over a desolate lunar surface. Tracing the relationship between poetry and the disenchanted moon of the Apollo era, this piece reveals the complicated discourses through which planet Earth became an essentially American artifact and the impact of this rhetoric on poets writing within and beyond the US. After exploring a range of US poems, the piece engages extensively with Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose first major poem was about the "Earthrise" and who uses the moon throughout his career as a symbol of national elegy tied to the threatened poetic form of the ghazal. This transnational context reveals how contemporary anglophone poetry uses the moon to contest the ways in which the US universalized itself as the global norm during and after the Cold War.

Materiality,Agency, and the “Revised Sublime” in Northeast Indian Anglophone Poetry

Materiality,Agency, and the “Revised Sublime” in Northeast Indian Anglophone Poetry

The Cold War Community of Love and Scorn: Robert Duncan, The New American Poetry, and the Lavender Scare

Robert Duncan’s significance for anglophone poetry after World War II is indisputable. But Duncan communicated with his milieu – both supportively and antagonistically – in unpublished letters as much as in his published poetry and essays. This essay centers around an exchange between Robert Duncan and editor Donald Allen in 1960, just after the publication of The New American Poetry. In one important letter, Allen suggests that “the community of love” was the central unifying feature of the poetry in the anthology. This inspired a long reply from Duncan, detailing his feelings about specific poets while describing the ability to experience and write about sexuality and romance as a significant difference between the poets of Allen’s anthology and the so-called academic poets of the period. Clarifying Duncan’s role in the development of Allen’s anthology, this essay highlights the political and social repercussions of The New American Poetry as well as the vulnerability Duncan felt as a homosexual poet during a period known as the Lavender Scare.

Verbal Poetic Images of the USA in the Texts of American Poetry

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Язык и литература» — научно-теоретический журнал, публикующий научно-исследовательские статьи и критические научные рецензии на русском и английском языках, призванные отразить актуальную проблематику современной лингвистики, литературоведения и междисциплинарных гуманитарных исследований, а также представить многообразие существующих здесь подходов и плюрализм мнений исследователей.

Whose foreign is foreign? Form and norms of translation of contemporary Russian poetry into English

ABSTRACTDiscussions of poetry translation from Russian into English often touch on issues related to the concepts of domestication and foreignization. This article considers issues of poetic form, especially rhyme and metrical patterning, as a domestic or foreign element in anglophone poetry itself and as an important aspect of poetic translation from Russian into English. The article analyzes four individual translations from the point of view of their treatment of formal elements and finds a shift toward greater metrical and rhyming equivalence in more recent translation work. Examples include poems by Innokenty Annensky, Konstantin Batyushkov, Olga Sedakova, Polina Barskova and Joseph Brodsky.

A Global "We"? Poetic Exhortations in a Time of Precarious Life

A Global "We"?Poetic Exhortations in a Time of Precarious Life Walt Hunter (bio) In his analysis of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin shows that late nineteenth-century European poetry's retreat into a radical individuality is a response to changes in capitalism—in particular, new temporalities of machine work and "shocks" by the crowd (161). This essay brings together two poets, Sean Bonney and Myung Mi Kim, who write under conditions in which that crowd has disappeared. The hortatory mode used by their poems takes its ethical and political force not from the shock of encountering the crowd but from realizing that crowds themselves are in jeopardy. While some contemporary hortatory poems draw on historical norms of lyric poetry, my concern here is not the Anglophone lyric per se; the ballads and experimental open forms of poetry I look at below also reshape the rhetoric of calling, inviting, pleading, and cursing. Written from, and in tension with, centers of economic and political power in the United States and UK, these poems uncover a specific historical relation between contemporary poetry in English—in Kim's case, English and Korean—and the politics of the crowd. To orient these poems in relation to global capitalism today is to underscore the extent to which global capitalism renders its crowds precarious, capable of disintegration by informalized labor conditions, dispersal by a militarized police and a securitized state, or cooption by the politics of communitarianism and expulsion. In response to the globally induced vulnerability of collective life, the poets in this essay desperately conjure a globalized "we," a crowd to come. Neither poet lays claim to an explicit, thematized "we," however. Suspicious of the totalizing and potentially totalitarian politics of the "we," both of them develop instead a formal and stylistic procedure for culling and gleaning the material that they include in their poetry. [End Page 72] I use the metaphor of commoning to describe this poetics, taking my cue from the titles of the two poetry collections in this essay, Bonney's The Commons and Kim's Commons. Their materials are never simply equal fragments juxtaposed across gulfs of difference, but, as the terms "gleaning" and "commoning" both imply, ones scored by economic precariousness and marked by historical and racialized positions of inequality. Nor are they the remnants of a high European tradition, preserved in modernist bricolage against their ruin. The porousness of the poem to its different materials varies in degree from Bonney to Kim, depending on the unique possibilities granted by their chosen forms. The conditions and locations in which the poems are situated are ineluctably specific: Bonney's cuckoo sings ballads about British and U.S. networks of finance; Kim's fractured and reconstituted Korean and English syntax is embedded in the violence of war and displacement. But both poets reinvent the forms they use through the poetic enactment of gleaning. In this way, the commoning of diverse poetic leftovers becomes the stockpile that powers a collectivity yet to come. The invitation to a crowd is not so much marked by the imagination of a particular set of figures in Bonney and Kim as it is by their innovations within the hortatory modes of summoning, calling together, and inciting. The rhetoric of exhortation has been reinvigorated in contemporary Anglophone poetry written under global conditions of vulnerability, exile and migration, radical uncertainty, and expulsion from social life. Hortatory rhetoric is closely related to the trope of apostrophe, which Jonathan Culler argues "makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself" (1977, 59). Epideixis, or the convention of praise that is constitutive of Greek lyric poetry, can often be combined with exhortation: The Song of Songs, for instance, balances devotion with invitation: "come, my beloved, / let us go out into the fields" (105). Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, notes that praise has the tendency to slip quickly into exhortation: "To praise a man is … akin to urging a course of action" (35). As early as Sappho and as late as Claudia Rankine, exhortation is one of the most recognizable ways that Greek, European, and Anglophone poetry talks to strangers, extending its intimacy...

Introduction to Special Issue “English Poetry and Christianity”

The hallowed scholarly area known as “Religion and Literature” has been seeking to expand itself, clarify itself, and even justify itself over the last decade or two.[...]

Crossing points and connecting lines: Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes in Bombay and beyond

Like any other form of art, poetry depends upon social networks for its creation, circulation, appreciation and preservation. In turn, social networks are defined by cultural and historical circumstances. The flourishing of anglophone poetry in postcolonial Bombay provides a good case to for studying the significance and impact of social networks on the naturalization of literary modernism in a particular period and place. In this context, the parallel lives of two of India’s earliest and most accomplished postcolonial anglophone poets, Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes, reveal the relevance of the network paradigm in understanding their work. This article is a preliminary attempt at highlighting the vast network of local, national and international contacts underlying the different yet overlapping careers of these two poets in a wider context defined by events and realities (the cultural cold war, the decolonization process, the rise of postcolonial literatures) that simultaneously transcended and impacted the local scene.