Beauty Of Poetry Research Articles

The Men in the Life and Work of Olga Kirsch

Abstract Olga Kirsch’s life and work was dominated by three men: her father Schmuel M. Kirsch, her youth lover Ellis, and her husband Joseph Gillis. Their presence can be felt throughout her oeuvre, both in her published Afrikaans and in her unpublished English poetry culminating in a collection of seventy-seven poems written in the months that followed the death of her husband. Through these poems the reader is introduced to a passionate side of Kirsch’s personality that was rarely seen by those who knew her in the normal course of her life. These three relationships resulted in some of Kirsch’s most beautiful poetry, of which her “Vyf sonnette vir my vader” is probably the best known.

Semantic Category theory and Semantic Intertwine: the anathema of mathematics

Purpose – The recent scientific observation that human information processing involves four independent data types, has pinpointed a source of fallacious arguments within many domains of human thought. The species-unique ability to assign observable characteristics to purely conceptual entities has created beautiful poetry and literature. However, this ability to generate “Semantic Intertwine” has also created the most incomprehensible paradoxes and conundrums. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Semantic Intertwine can be created between, or within, Semantic Categories; and in either case it then lies at the heart of fallacious, yet often very persuasive, reasoning. Findings – This paper describes how to detect mathematically related Semantic Intertwine in erroneous arguments involving: operands (VIII), mathematical induction (VIIA), orthogonal axiom sets (VIIB), continuous functions (VIIA), exclusive disjunction (VIIA), propositional calculus (VI) and the hitherto thorny problems arising from ambiguous intra-category use of “infinity” (VIIB). Originality/value – The applications of Semantic Category Analysis (SCA) are manifold. Determine the Semantic Categories involved in an argument and their modes of combination, and any Semantic Intertwine revealed pinpoints erroneous reasoning. SCA can be applied to any domain of human thought.

Her Books: Moving My Mother's Library to Al-Quds

Her Books: Moving My Mother's Library to Al-Quds

All the Pretty Things

All the Pretty Things Aimee Parkison (bio) The Beautiful Anthology. Elizabeth Collins, ed. TNB Books. http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com. 264 pages; paper, $14.99, eBook, $9.99. From crazy beautiful to beautiful ugly and the many shades of beauty in between, The Beautiful Anthology examines the politics, sensations, and life-altering consequences of the power of perception. The anthology also reveals the powerless sensations of being perceived. An intimate portrait of types and archetypes, contemporary obsessions and timeless fascinations, the collection delves into gray areas where dichotomies break down. Beauty blurs into ugliness as what was once ugly becomes beautiful. Essays, poems, and art offer a fresh perspective on diverse notions of beauty by revealing interpersonal and cultural conflicts. Unlike many recent works on contemporary myths surrounding the concept of beauty, this anthology focuses on both male and female perspectives. James D. Irwin’s “From The Venus de Milo to Porno Mags: The Evolution of Beauty, & Vice Versa” contemplates female desirability from Helen of Troy to the sex symbols of present day. In “Truth and Booty,” Tyler Stoddard Smith provides a hilarious cultural reality check, challenging quotations about beauty from Khalil Gibran, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Pablo Picasso, Gabriela Mistral, Helen Keller, and Albert Einstein. Going far beyond the traditional notion of the objectification of “beautiful women,” writers embrace the notion that beauty can be found not only in people (male, female, young, old, middle-aged, and of diverse races and cultures) but also in everyday objects. Steve Sparshott’s essay “Fin” proves that beauty can be found in unexpected places, even in a men’s restroom with its elegant sculptural design of fin-shaped urinal dividers. In “The Line Waver,” Greg Olear questions the popular aesthetics responsible for a McMansion’s garish windowed entryway and predicts that consumers will enter a new phase: the rejection of perfection. Careful not to fall into pop-culture snares, Matthew Baldwin explores male body image and finds “The Form within the Stone.” Celebrating the joys of sportsmanship, J. E. Fishman discovers masculine beauty in “Spinning” through a tennis miracle, where a perfectly masterful serve by a student of the game shocks his teacher. Poetry becomes the focus of diverse notions of beauty with Uche Ogbuji’s reflective analysis in “21st Century Beauty in Poetry.” Ogbuji reveals the way literature must evolve along with personal and cultural preferences as diversity and technology change the tastes of an increasingly global population connected by social media, information, and travel. In “No Animals or Insects Were Tortured or Killed in the Making of This Poem,” Rich Ferguson exudes confident musicality, exploring linguistic freedom with the beauty of radioactive language. Judy Prince’s heart-pounding “Summate” traces the journey of a hand moving over a lover’s body, creating a map of touch as silky skin meets the sea. Stephen Walter’s sensual poem “Upland Fall” transforms natural images of changing seasons into a poignant allegory encompassing male and female voices wondering about the splendor of natural love that fades even as it’s encountered. Catherine Tufariello’s poem “Meditation in Middle Age” reveals how the loss of physical beauty through aging allows a person to see what was once lost in the imprisonment of vanity. Writers such as Zoe Zolbrod and Nora Burkey explore international experiences with beauty. In “Pai Foot,” Zolbrod’s trip to Thailand offers unique erotic imagery in a glimpse of a young Thai man’s thorn-pierced foot. In “The Politics of Beauty,” Nora Burkey writes about teaching young female students in Cambodia, where politically motivated views of beauty threaten to rob girls of cultural freedom. Taking on the issue of race, Angela Tung’s “Blemished” provides an unflinchingly honest portrait of growing up as an Asian girl surrounded by images of whiteness. Tung reveals how having friends of different races and cultures sometimes impacts self-image in childhood. A more comforting view of beauty is found in familial experiences and universal rites of passage in growing up and growing old. In Victoria Patterson’s “The Beautiful,” beauty is discovered in unique expressions of kinship. In Robin Antalek’s “Inked,” a mother finds beauty in a daughter’s personal expression through body art. In...

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Playing Life and Death in Provincetown:

Yingelishi by Jonathan Stalling

72 World Literature Today reviews motives” from history, religion, myth, and politics might be the result of his radical American individualism. Bojana Stojanovic Pantović University of Novi Sad Jonathan Stalling. Yingelishi. Denver. Counterpath. 2011. isbn 978-1933996233 Our appreciation of poetry almost always takes place within a single language. Although poems written in one language can be translated into other languages, often-translated poems lose their unique prosody , images, and culturally specific significance. From this perspective, Jonathan Stalling’s new book, Yingelishi , can be regarded as a crucial breakthrough. This book of poetry wanders freely between Chinese and English, leaping over the gap between sound and meaning, providing its readers with an experience virtually unprecedented as the same sounds enact poetic references in both languages simultaneously. The Chinese phrase “Yingelishi” is the Chinese transliteration of the word “English,” but the characters Stalling chose literally mean “chanted songs beautiful poetry.” Both English and Chinese meanings come through. In his book, Stalling uses this notion of “sinophonic English”; that is, English written in Chinese characters and thus spoken with a strong Chinese accent in sharp contrast with the contempt and ridicule that people have often held against so-called “Chinglish,” as Stalling sincerely seeks out the beautiful prosody within the accent. With the wide proliferation of English across the world, there are ever more accented forms of English, but sinophonic English is by far the newest and largest of these new Englishes, and “Yingelishi” is a bold step toward exploring its depths. For instance, in the English sentence “I would like to tell you a story,” Stalling hears the following Chinese poem: 哀舞／得来客／徒忒忧／娥 思他汭。The meaning of the characters are translated as “Dance of Mourning / Attracts a large audience / Grieving in vain / A beautiful woman misses her lover at the river’s edge.” Even someone who is a native speaker of Chinese would have to admit the poetic beauty that is harbored by the Chinese characters he chooses, but the poetry is equally a product of the accented English sounds these characters make: Āi wu/̌ dé lai ke/̀ tú tèi yōu/ é sī ta ̄rui. To help his readers hear the music of the accent, the book, which Stalling speaks of as a libretto, was performed as an opera at the University of Yunnan by the singer Miao Yichen along with several musicians. You can listen to the opera online at Stalling’s website (jonathanstalling .com/yingelishi.html) and become transfixed by the uncanny ways in which the two languages converge into one strange, beautiful song. For those who have read his first book of poetry, Grotto Heaven (Chax Press), you will see that this book is an extension of his poetics set forth in his poem “Dictation”: “To speak the foreign without deciphering / is to lean toward, momentarily, / past a return. / It is to hear voices in darkness / and vanish into the greeting.” As a poet with versatile abilities and a dynamic imagination, Stalling’s poetry aims to allow Western readers , who do not necessarily understand Chinese, to directly feel the aural beauty of the Chinese language and sense ways of attending to this beauty beyond that of acquisition and mastery . As he sees it, to understand a culture, particularly its language, one does not have to master it with the gesture of a colonizer. Better to listen to it, to make a space for it in one’s own heart and mind as a first-time student might, with awe and humble reverence, yet lost in the imaginatively perceived vastness of meanings that still lie “elsewhere.” This was the driving poetics of his first book, which has been most palpably realized in this, his second, leading to what this reader perceives as a truly poetic formula for ethical forms of appreciation. Liu Qian University of Oxford, United Kingdom Tomas Tranströmer. The Deleted World. Robin Robertson, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2011. isbn 9780374533533 When Swedish poet Tomas Transtr ömer received the 2011 Nobel Prize ...

Editorial: Fundamental Research Needs Excellent Scientists and its Own Space

Editorial: Fundamental Research Needs Excellent Scientists and its Own Space

Singing a Beautiful Poetry: Theological Aesthetics and An Artistic Approach toward Christian Education

Singing a Beautiful Poetry: Theological Aesthetics and An Artistic Approach toward Christian Education

Rabina Achi: A Mayan Drama of War and Sacrifice

Dennis Tedlock’s translation and exegesis of the Rabinal Achi text (RA) is a valuable contribution to Mayan studies, as well as to the anthropology of cultural discourse and artistic expression. As with his prior translation of the Popol Wuj, Tedlock once again demonstrates his ability to translate classical K’iche texts into beautiful poetry and prose. I was particularly pleased to find that besides Tedlock’s devoted interest in the literary and poetic features of the RA, he did not neglect the historical and even political dimensions of this important Mayan drama. Also, like all good historiographers, Tedlock defines the type of Mayan document that the RA represents, compares and contrasts it with other K’iche documents, explains its scholarly and humanistic significance relative to other post-Hispanic Mayan dramas, ties it to archaeological remains found in the Rabinal area, and most importantly provides extensive exegeses on the language and meaning of the text.Tedlock captures the precise nature of K’iche history that the RA sets forth, “a series of customary actions in which the participants could be any captive in the Guatemalan highlands at any time during the last several centuries preceding the Spanish invasion” (p. 175). He then attempts to use the text’s generic history in order to reconstruct a more specific K’iche history based on strategic references in other Mayan sources, such as the Popol Wuj, Título de Totonicapán, Annals of the Kaqchikels, and so on. His effort in this regard is insightful and most welcome.Tedlock is to be commended for extending his historiographic study of the RA into the post-Hispanic period. For example, he points to the possible influence of the Old World Carlomagno drama, translated into Spanish in 1521, on the composition of the RA, and he points out similarities between the RA and other colonial “dance dramas” such as the Dance of the Conquest (Saq K’oxol) and Dance of the Trumpets (Xajol Tun). These other K’iche colonial dramas, however, are shown to be much less indigenous than the RA.Despite the considerable merits of his study, some of Tedlock’s methods and interpretations are open to challenge. It is especially noteworthy that he did not carry out serious ethnographic research on the K’iches of Rabinal, and hence he can offer only limited insights into the local cultural features that no doubt shaped this highly stylized account. His scattered references to comments made by the current director of the drama seem particularly meager compared to translations of cognate Mayan texts by other scholars. As a minimum, for example, one would expect Tedlock to have at least visited the many sites of the area that are mentioned in the text. I also found it disconcerting that Tedlock has translated the K’iche names of sites and persons to English. Not only are such etymologies almost always subject to contested interpretations, but they also make it difficult to know which places or persons they refer to as recorded in other texts.Some of Tedlock’s interpretations of the RA seem overly speculative. I salute Tedlock for attempting to understand elements of K’iche history in the RA, but in some cases his reconstructions are based on very thin evidence. For example, he offers no real supporting evidence for his suggestion that the prisoner, Kaweq, might be identified with (or served as a model for) Tata Yak, a rebel son of the legendary K’iche king, K’iq’ab. And the parallels he finds between the RA account and carved and painted scenes from classic Mayan sites, while intriguing, are also speculative. Any connection between the Late Postclassic K’iche and Classic Mayan cultures and histories should be based on historical information that bridges the large gap in time and space between these two Mayan traditions.I also think that Tedlock could have been more generous in recognizing the contributions of prior scholars who have studied the Rabinal documents, cultural life, and archaeological remains (such as Alain Breton, Charlotte Arnauld, Ruud van Akkeren, and many others). It is proper to point to the errors of our predecessors, or suggest alternatives to their interpretations, but we inevitably build on their prior work, and it is more than just courtesy to recognize our debt to them.Despite the criticisms just mentioned, I highly recommend this book not only to historians and other scholars, but also to the educated reader interested in the Mayas and other native peoples around the world. It is a fascinating read backed by serious scholarship.

Péguy et Hugo: une admiration réticente

The most influential author in Péguy's life was Victor Hugo. Péguy never really reproached Hugo for the stylistic faults he was often criticized for. Only when Péguy broke with his socialist friends did he become critical of the political side of Hugo's poetry. It was not because he did not share Hugo's ideas anymore, but because he thought that political rhetoric was insincere on Hugo's part, contrary to his genius, and harmful to beauty in poetry. According to Péguy, when Hugo listens to his genius and does not politicize, he is unsurmountable. If Hugo has his limits, it is just that, not being a Christian, but a genuine pagan, there are things in the human soul he was unable to perceive. Those are the things Péguy, after Corneille or Pascal, tried to express in his late poetry.

“Barbarous Ignorance and Base Detraction”: The Struggles of Michael Drayton

When Michael Drayton began work on Poly-Olbion, his vast poetic description of England and Wales, he committed himself to a course of action which was seriously to endanger his career. Drayton's reputation as a poet was injured by his faith in that strange, unfashionable poem, and he found himself increasingly out of touch with the main literary developments of his time. In his old age, fortunately, it led him to compose much of his most original and delicately beautiful poetry. The significance of Poly-Olbion in Drayton's life and art, however, has seldom been understood by the poet's biographers and critics, who have usually regarded it either as a charming eccentricity or as an unfortunate deviation from his true line of development. To Drayton, however, Poly-Olbion was his major work, innovating, he believed, a major new genre. When the first part was published in 1612, he boasted “My Poeme is genuine, and first in this kinde”; ten years later, bitter and depressed at its failure but determined to press on, he still proudly proclaimed that “it was a new cleere way, never before gone by any.” On its fortunes he was prepared to stake his literary reputation, and, as events were to prove, his commitment to “this strange Herculean toyle” (PO, 30:342) lasted well over thirty years.Northop Frye has written that the epic, as Renaissance critics understood it, “is not a poem by a poet, but that poet's poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer, and hence the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life. To decide to write an epic … is an act of considerable courage, because if one fails, one fails on a colossal scale.” The decision to write a poem on the scale of Poly-Olbion, whether “epic” in the strict sense of the word or not, involved Drayton in a similar risk. The spectres of ridicule and detraction haunted him for the rest of his life, and only his growing conviction of the political and literary importance of his magnum opus enabled him to continue writing.

Natural Imagery and Poetic Stance in the Love Sonnets of Francisco de Rioja

Natural Imagery and Poetic Stance in the Love Sonnets of Francisco de Rioja by Edward H. Friedman* According to Pedro Salinas in Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, Garcilaso de la Vega—as his nation's supreme example of Renaissance poetic practice—converts impure reality into beautiful poetry, substance into concept, nature into the idea of nature.1 Jorge Guillen, in Language and Poetry, notes in the clearly Baroque Luis de Góngora an enthusiasm for the material world to the extent that "his whole soul is concentrated in his five senses, in a propensity toward all that sets up a resistance to be joyously conquered."2 Searching for obscurity of expression, Góngora relies on the very elements of the material world by describing one object in terms of another or others, thus transforming what might be called natural substance into poetic substance, or material reality into esthetic or poetic reality.} Francisco de Rioja, whose works are Baroque in form and to some extent classical in inspiration, conceives nature as neither delicately beautiful nor superreal. Rather, he contrasts the beauty of nature with its destructive aspect. Natural imagery represents not so much nature as human emotion, and while the obscurity which marks the works of Góngora is present in the poetry of Rioja, it is not as blatantly obscurity for its own sake as for poetic effect, as part ofa literary trend and an individual poetic structure. Rioja's particular use of natural imagery within a Baroque framework leads to what Angel Valbuena Prat designates as "la forma ... del estilo barroco personalísima del poeta."4 An examination of the use of natural imagery in the love • EDWARD FRIEDMAN is an assistant professor of Spanish at Ar¡70na State University, withdegrees from the University of Virginia and Johns Hopkins Unncrsity. His research is primarily in the field of Golden Age literature, with emphasis on the ¡.omedia and Cervantes. •I would like to express my appreciation to Dr. Elias L. Rivers for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper. 1 Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, trans. Edith Fishtine Helman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), pp. 80 and 93. !Jorge Guillen, Language and Poetry: Some Poets ofSpain (Combridge: Harvard University Press. 1961). ? 39. 'Salinas, p. 141. 'Angel Valbuena Prat, Historiade Ia literatura española, 7th ed.. 3 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Gustavo GiIi. S.?.. 1963), II, 260. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW|>) Sonnets of Krancisco de Rioja sonnets of Rioja5 provides a means of defining Rioja's specific poetic approach, not only to nature as a literary device, but to the conventions of his age. Rioja belongs to the Sevillian school of poetry, whose founder, Fernando de Herrera, offers a link between Renaissance and Baroque poetic techniques. An exponent of the Italianate style exemplified in Spain in the works of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso, Herrera at the same time foreshadows the cultista innovations of Góngora in what Elias Rivers calls "the color, the intellectualized density and complexity, and the chiseled forms of his poetic idiom."6 Adolfo de Castro, in his anthology of Golden Age lyric poetry, considers several of Rioja's sonnets as stylistic imitations of Herrera.7 Yet it is necessary to see the works of the two poets as part of the progression from the so-called second cycle of the Renaissance8 to Baroque poetry. In the seventeenth century poetic complexity, which began as a type of amplification of earlier conventions, becomes increasingly intricate. Within this context, Rioja's primary distinction is conceptual rather than stylistic, with a change in tone more evident than a change in expression. A clue to Rioja's poetic aims can be seen in his criticism of the poetry of Herrera. In the prologue to the 1619 edition of Herrera's Kétsos, Rioja says that human feeling and benevolence, while not lacking, "se asconden i pierden a la vista entre ornatos poéticos," and adds the following esthetic judgment: Los sentimientos del animo afectuosos, cuanto mas delgados i sutiles, se deven tratar con palabras mas senzillas i propias; solo porque se descubran a los ojos, i hieran el animo con su viveza: en fin...

Teaching Poetry Writing to the Old and the Ill

When people are separated from the activities and relationships that make life so passionately interesting, they are separated from real accomplishment. A poet's non-therapeutic approach to writing led a group of ill and handicapped nursing home residents, aged 59-93 years, to find new strengths of feeling and ideas. Above all, it gave them the real accomplishment of some beautiful poetry.

Wandering and Wondering

Here is an interesting point, that it is not the works of art, but the works of raw Nature that wonder the heart of man. However great be the thing man made, there is always the reflection that it was a man who did it, a man like myself, I might have done it; why not have a try? But Nature defies me from the first and it wins my love by winning my respect. The works of Nature produce wonder, but art elicits delight from the heart of man. This must not be taken as an absolute statement, as such it is most certainly not true. Nor is it meant as a generalisation, but rather as a description of a radical difference. There are many works of art which produce wonder, but the wonder comes rather from an affinity with Nature which these particular works possess than from the fact that they are art. There is a word which I love to use to characterise such art; it is ‘creational,’ and it is not irrelevant to notice that the Creation provided the first great occasion for its use. The first chapters of Genesis are beautiful poetry and therefore great art, but they produce wonder in the heart of man because they speak of the making of Nature.

Poetry and Prose in the Arts (I)

I Shall begin by a distinction which will limit my subject. I propose to speak only of beautiful poetry and beautiful prose, or if the phrase be preferred, artistic poetry and prose. The distinction I wish to draw is between art and craft, between making a competent and useful thing which exactly fits its purpose and making it beautifully, between technical skill and artistry, between good workmanship and design and that touch of rareness which makes not merely good but fine and lovely. The boundaries are difficult to draw. For much craft is also beautiful, and the craftsman is always in doing his best, striving to be an artist and often succeeding. But they are not the same things. Mere technical skill will not make a work beautiful but only correct, and on the other hand art may possess beauty, even if not of the highest order; though it fails in skill, the conception in some degree makes up for the defect of skill, as for instance much primitive Italian painting or Greek sculpture, which is defective in drawing or modelling and yet beautiful. Now a large part, perhaps the greater part, of what is called art is not art at all, but craft, good correct painting or drawing or sculpture; pleasing, but not pleasing with the pleasure or even rapture which beauty gives. It is so with prose and poetry. Many poems are not poetry, though written in impeccable verse, and long poems are always apt to drop in places into what is only not called prose because it is metrical. By far the greatest part of prose is merely good workmanlike writing, and in no sense art. I am not intending to depreciate craft, and still less the value and difficulty of attaining it.