Canonical Poem Research Articles

Langston Hughes and American Lynching Culture by W. Jason Miller (review)

Miller, W. Jason. 2011. Hughes and American Lynching Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. $44.95 hc. $19.95 sc. 168 pp.W. Jason Miller's Hughes and American Lynching Culture opens with this observation: Langston Hughes never lived in an America where the very real threat of did not exist (1). Despite this fact, an in-depth study of Hughes's relationship to these gruesome events that marked his lifetime has not been undertaken until now. While often acknowledged as a prevalent theme, no one has previously shown how the violence of fundamentally shaped this titanic twentieth-century writer. Miller's argument is similar to Abdul R. JanMohamed's Death-Bound Subject (2005), which analyzes how the constant imminent threat of death determined the work of Richard Wright. Miller, however, employs different methodologies. With thick descriptions of social contexts and nuanced close readings, he combines studies, biography, and textual criticism in order to trace the lines of connection between Hughes's literary production and the formations engendered by lynching. result not only illuminates a (if not the) defining aspect of Hughes's oeuvre but also offers a model for analyzing the relationship between violence and the literary arts.Miller's is a tightly constructed study that draws on a range of fields to tell the story of Hughes's lifelong commitment to singing out against lynching convincingly (67). It builds on recent work on culture in American modernity. For instance, it is indebted tojacqueline Goldsby'sH Spectacular Secret (2006), a work that brilliantly details the cultural logic of lynching, and Adam Gussow's Seems Like Murder Here (2002), which examines the intimate relationship between racialized violence and African-American expressive forms. However, aspects of Miller's conceptual framework could have been more fully articulated in order to flesh out how Hughes negotiated culture. Some key terms- such as passing, to discuss Hughes's work during the 1950s, and topophobia, to discuss the relationship between race and the environment-were highly suggestive but would have benefited from more sustained engagement. At times, this study also moves too quickly. For instance, in the third chapter, Miller begins to examine the relationship between jazz and violence in Hughes's poetry, but then the focus suddenly shifts to the idea of photographic montage. jazz- violence relationship is never fully explicated. Despite these slippages, Miller successfully demonstrates the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the intersections of violence and production.Proceeding chronologically, the book opens with Hughes's first published poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, reconsidering it as part of a swirl of concerns-personal experience, news-media messages, and a bloody social landscape-overdetermined by lynching. This canonical poem, as Miller explains, is a meditative lyric about how African Americans have survived on and near rivers (38). Miller crucially establishes as the larger context for this meditation. He recontextualizes this standard reading, showing how Hughes reclaims riverscapes where took place and battered Black bodies were displayed from bridges. With careful attention to historical records, this chapter convincingly reimagines this poem's scene of composition in the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 while Hughes passed through the South on a train, crossing river after river. Hughes traveled through Texas shortly after a young man about his age, Lige Daniels, was brutally murdered. chapter includes a photograph of this horrifying event, reminding us that images of mutilated black people freely circulated in the media throughout Hughes's lifetime. In fact, as Miller explains, from a very young age Hughes regularly encountered such images and reportage of the perverse spectacles that often accompanied lynching. …

“They Say the War Is Over”

“They Say the War Is Over” Philip Metres (bio) Diederik Oostdijk, Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. 304 pp. $49.95. In a time when the United States has been conducting at least two wars in the Middle East (one inarguably imperial, one ostensibly a response to 9/11); when the U.S. continues to operate hundreds of military bases across scores of countries and executes hundreds of targeted killings via remotecontrol “drones”; when thousands of returning soldiers and veterans carry the physical and psychic wounds of war; and when our defense budget occupies between 20 and 54 percent of the federal budget, Diederik Oostdijk’s Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II is a timely and all-too-rare exploration of war poetry by the best-known American poets who treat the Second World War. Focusing primarily on the elite “soldier-poets” (Randall Jarrell, James Dickey, Karl Shapiro, Anthony Hecht, John Ciardi, Lincoln Kirstein, and Howard Nemerov) and two conscientious-objector poets (Robert Lowell and William Stafford), Oostdijk plumbs the archive to consider the role of the war in the work of the poets and the work of these poets in our understanding of a war that Studs Terkel sardonically termed the “Good War.” The importance and value of Oostdijk’s archival research is made clear from the book’s opening, which reveals an unpublished poem (“D Day plus 20 years”) by Howard Nemerov as what Oostdijk calls “the quintessence of the poetic response to World War II” [End Page 834] (2)—an arguably major poem that Nemerov never saw fit to publish. The poem’s focus on silence and an almost fatalistic resignation are hallmarks of the poetic response of the poets of the Second World War; the fact that it was never published doubled this felt silencing—both by the culture and by the poets themselves. In this regard, Oostdijk’s choice of title is particularly resonant. Taken from Randall Jarrell’s canonical poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”—perhaps the most well-known of all American poems of the Second World War—“the nightmare fighters” denotes the airman’s experience of the enemy fire (from both the ground and the air) that he wakens to, in the waking dream of warfare. Figuratively, the “nightmare fighters” alludes to the long-standing emotional effects of the war for the survivors of the conflict. For Americans during the Second World War, of course, these survivors were soldiers, since the U.S. was almost entirely spared the horrors of battle on home soil. This is precisely why we need to listen to the voices of soldiers, not merely to understand what battle feels like but to hear how the war—for its prosecutors and its victims—persists in bodies and minds and does not end neatly with peace treaties. Among the Nightmare Fighters builds upon the crucial scholarship of Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) and Lorrie Goldensohn (Dismantling Glory), among others, to stake a claim for the importance of this corpus of war poetry and the poets who emerged from the war’s crucible. Divided into four parts—“Haunting Traditions,” “Emerging Selves,” “Confused Masculinities,” and “Troubled Afterlives”—the book focuses as much on personalities and biography as it does on poems. While it is indeed true that these poets wrestled with the dominant poetic tradition and strictures of identity, and continued to wrestle with the war, could this not be said about any generation or cohort of poets? One weakness of Among the Nightmare Fighters is Oostdijk’s inability to make a good argument for choosing an almost entirely white, middle-class, canonically elite set of male poets to examine. Though he acknowledges this focus early on, he does not argue convincingly about the necessity of the exclusions that such a focus entails; in his words, the elision of great [End Page 835] poets such as Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, and Gwendolyn Brooks is due to the fact that “it appears that their influences or experiences were markedly different from the group of poets featured in this book” (5). It is...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: “I Grow Old: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Inventions of the March Hare 100 Years on”

Teaching and Learning Guide for: “I Grow Old: T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and Inventions of the March Hare 100 Years on”

Calabrese, Michael, Hoyt N. Duggan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. 2008. <i>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive Vol. 6: San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2)</i>. and Adams, Robert, ed. 2011. <i>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive Vol. 7: London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 398 & Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R)</i>. Cambridge: Published for The Medieval Academy of America

Volumes six and seven of <em>The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (PPEA)</em> mark a significant achievement for the work of the editors and contributors to the project. The omnibus project aims to provide not only colour digital images of the entire corpus of William Langland’s texts of <em>Piers Plowman</em>, from the medieval period through the sixteenth-century, but also electronic transcriptions of each manuscript (as explained by <a href="http://digitalmedievalist.org/journal/7/olsen/#duggan2005">Duggan 2005</a>). Volume six includes images and transcriptions from San Marino, Huntington Library Hm 128 (Hm, Hm2); volume seven includes images and transcriptions from London, British Library MS Lansdowne 398 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 38 (R). <em>Piers Plowman</em> has traditionally received much scholarly attention, not only due to its status as a canonical poem surviving from the Middle English period, but also because Langland wrote three distinct versions of the poem (A, B, and C), and thus the poem offers much for the study of Middle English textual history, editorial theory, and reception theory.

John Francis Barnett's "Ancient Mariner": From Ballad to Cantata

Previous articleNext article No AccessJohn Francis Barnett's "Ancient Mariner": From Ballad to CantataRodney Stenning EdgecombeRodney Stenning Edgecombe Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 43, Number 1Winter 2012Wordsworth Summer Conference Papers: A Selection: 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24045514 Views: 11Total views on this site © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reflections on the Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Résumé L’histoire de la vie de Coleridge n’a que fort peu favorisé la réception de son œuvre, de son vivant comme aux yeux de la postérité. Trop souvent, ceux qui écrivent sur Coleridge cèdent à la tentation de dénigrer son caractère, puis tombent dans le regrettable travers d’une certaine condescendance, aussi infime soit-elle, à l’égard de ce qu’il a accompli. Cet article ne prétend pas être hagiographique, et encore moins entreprendre une défense évidemment superflue de Coleridge. Certes, l’homme n’était pas sans défauts. Mais Biographia Literaria fut à bien des égards une tentative réussie de se sauver par la littérature. Le génie particulier de Coleridge était avant tout d’une nature oratoire, qui devait beaucoup à la tradition britannique des prédicateurs laïques dissidents. Sa principale contribution à la littérature, outre un certain nombre de grands poèmes canoniques composés avec le talent éclairé d’un amateur au plus noble sens du terme, ne fut pas simplement une vulgarisation de la philosophie idéaliste allemande, mais consista délibérément en une réconciliation idéologique de la philosophie avec la religion, qui exerça une influence décisive sur l’histoire des idées.

Anthony Hecht: Selections from Seven Decades of Correspondence

Anthony Hecht:Selections from Seven Decades of Correspondence Jonathan F. S. Post (bio) "I hope, fer Cry Sakes, that you have kept my entire correspondence on file so that in due course you can make a mint of money by publishing my letters, you lucky bastard." Anthony Hecht made this fanciful remark in a 1969 letter to his longtime friend and former Smith colleague, the architectural historian, William MacDonald. The mischievous gusto is characteristic of their epistolary exchange in particular and of many of Hecht's letters more generally. But in this case, his high spirits were perhaps inspired by recent events in the world of poetry. Hecht's second volume of verse, The Hard Hours (1967), long in process—his first book, The Summoning of Stones, appeared in 1954—had received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1968, and although the probability of making "a mint of money" from an author's correspondence could hardly have seemed more likely then than it does today, the bestowal of a prestigious award might momentarily at least encourage a hopeful glance at fortune. Nothing came of Hecht's remark, of course. Even more to the point, Fortune had granted Hecht a good many more years of writing, during which time, among other activities, he would publish another five books of poetry: Millions of Strange Shadows (1977), The Venetian Vespers (1979), The Transparent Man (1990), Flight Among the Tombs (1996), and The Darkness and the Light (2001); write four substantial volumes of essays and criticism; produce a translation (with Helen Bacon) of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes; and along the way garner an enviable number of additional prizes dear to many poets. [End Page 28] So, too, his correspondence would continue to grow. 1969, to the year, in fact, marks the half-way point of what would turn out to be a capacious epistolary life covering seven decades of correspondence. Beginning in 1935, when Hecht first went away to summer camp at age twelve, his letter writing continued unabated until his death in October 2004. Initially, through to the early 1950s, most were written to his parents, who had the good sense to save much of what they received. But dovetailing with the later years of these family correspondences is an increasing number of letters addressed to, and about, an ever-widening circle of friends and acquaintances that Hecht made during his time at Bard College, then in the Army, then at Kenyon, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom, and then abroad again, in the process of entering the professional ranks of poet and teacher at what would turn out to be a goodly number of colleges and universities, including time spent as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1982–84. To date, over 4,000 letters (and post cards) of Hecht's have come to light. In their comprehensive variety, they allow for a much fuller, more nuanced, and indeed richer view of this "many-sided" poet—to borrow a term of praise from Richard Wilbur's "An Eightieth-Birthday Ballade for Anthony Hecht"—than was certainly imaginable in 1969. The present sampling represents a small composite of a much larger picture. Some are chosen for their simple (and sometimes complex) charm. His 1992 letter on the lark may show us nothing more than his dazzling descriptive abilities at work—how nothing is that? Other letters illuminate Hecht's early years. As a young soldier going off to Europe in the Second World War—already much commented on by critics, especially in relation to canonical poems like "More Light!, More Light!"—Hecht was also to be stationed in Japan, where his fascination with an exiled Nazi society and his appreciation for music come separately to the fore. I have included, too, several letters from the more spacious days following the war (exemplified in his letter of July 10, 1949) when he was traveling or staying in Europe with friends, and on his way, as it turned [End Page 29] out, to being selected as the first Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. During these ventures Hecht would further nurture a taste for European art and...

Virgil’s Aeneas as the Quintessential Social Entrepreneur: Juxtaposing Selections from Epic Poetry and Entrepreneurship Theory to Teach Social Entrepreneurship

In this paper we propose a pedagogical strategy of juxtaposing Virgil's Aeneid—a canonical epic poem in Western literary tradition—and foundational economic texts in entrepreneurship theory by Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner. Our utilization of foundational texts of Schumpeter and Kirzner convey the “entrepreneurship” piece in teaching social entrepreneurship. They present students with elements of sound entrepreneurship, such as the novel intuitions and entrepreneurial discovery, the distinct role of the entrepreneur, and the causal functionality of entrepreneurship. Our utilization of Virgil's Aeneid conveys the “social” piece in teaching social entrepreneurship. Certain features distinguish social entrepreneurship from entrepreneurship's other forms, such as a community orientation and private sacrifice for public benefit. The figure of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid embodies these features and, we argue, is the quintessential social entrepreneur. Additionally, the structure of the poem puts into fictional and imaginative practice elements of Schumpeterian and Kirznerian entrepreneurship theory. The advantages of our pedagogical approach to teaching social entrepreneurship are that it provides sound entrepreneurship theory; illustrates the “social” in social entrepreneurship; and recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of social entrepreneurship studies.

The Poetics of Loss: Erotic Melancholia in Agamben and Dickinson

Remarking upon "Mourning and Melancholia," Giorgio Agamben notes that Freud writes with "a certain discomfort" of melancholia "'that a loss has indeed occurred, without it being known what has been lost.'" Agamben's elaboration of how a fictive introjection of absence allows melancholy to "open . . . a space for the existence of the unreal" leads to a psychodynamic picture that fuses the mortuary with the erotic. I argue that this psychodynamic observation offers a means for understanding Emily Dickinson's highly erotized, death-driven work. The Dickinsonian "I" gains poetic power to the extent that she simultaneously "buries" the absent other and claims amorous possession as he departs. Through close syntactic and rhetorical readings of canonical poems, I demonstrate that Agamben's psychosexual speculations on melancholia can provide a conceptual frame for a psychoanalytically informed interpretation of this enigmatic, impassioned poet's work.

Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature

AbstractThis article explores the cultural meanings of the maritime world in early modern English literature. Placing English literary culture in the context of the massive ocean‐bound expansion of European culture that began in the 15th century, it suggests that the sea’s ancient meanings shifted in the early modern period as geographic experience and knowledge increased. The article examines some recent developments in maritime studies, sometimes called a ‘new thalassology’ (from the Greek thalassos, the sea); distinguishes these trends from now‐traditional New Historicist and Atlantic studies; and suggests how these methods can contribute to a ‘blue cultural studies’. The new maritime humanities speaks to a series of modern discourses, including globalization, postcolonialism, environmentalism, ecocriticism, and the history of science and technology. The article provides two examples of how these maritime discourses can change our interpretations of early modern English literature, first by examining a canonical poem – Milton’s ‘Lycidas’– and second through reconsidering a historical context, the ‘Bermuda pamphlets’ on which Shakespeare seems to have drawn in The Tempest.

Die Herz‐Turbine: Rhythm and Urban Experience in the Poetry of Gerrit Engelke (1890–1918)

Although once celebrated as a representative of “workers' poetry” (Arbeiterdichtung), the expressionist poet Gerrit Engelke (1890–1918) has, with the exception of a few canonical poems, largely been forgotten today. But Engelke's poetry merits a rereading on account of its early and sustained engagement with industrialization. More specifically, it offers an insightful case study into the cross‐currents linking expressionist aesthetics and industrial science on account of the author's efforts to imagine urban modernity and—the role of poetry in the modern world— through the lens of rhythm. Exploring the connections between Engelke's lyric and modern discourses on rhythm (work science, vitalist philosophy, dance and film), I argue that Engelke saw poetic rhythm as a means of overcoming, via aesthetics, what Georg Simmel had identified as the growing chasm between subjective and objective culture in the industrial world.

Obsessions

Rauschenbusch continuedfrom previous page did we see You'V This book of poems contains Kenyon's life in all of its moods, from the recognition of being happy ("The Suitor") to the observation that a child's sweater in a psychiatrist's hands can be a straitjacket ("Starting Therapy"). The book is full and alive. bursting at the seams with its wonderful ElizabethBishop -like tropes and incisive observations. It is also, like much of Robert Lowell's poetry, ajournai of madness— a fine madness full of existential dread, an occasional hallucination, and a great deal of hardwon clarity. Stephanie Rauschenbusch is a Brooklyn artist whose poems have been published in Western Humanities Review, Heliotrope, New York Quarterly, ana* FIRE (Oxfordshire). Her chapbook The Heart's Ice Thaws, was published in Maastricht, Holland, by the artist Ben Leenen ofthe Elephantine Press. Obsessions Michael Benigni Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments Elizabeth Bishop Edited by Alice Quinn Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com 390 pages; cloth, $30.00 Let us say outright that this is not a book for everybody. For Bishop scholars and fans it is a must buy, of course. Those who teach Bishop on a regular basis may find it useful, particularly for the extensive notes and the material in the appendix. Poets and poetry lovers may enjoy it for their own quirky reasons. EdgarAllan Poe & the Juke-Box, edited by Alice Quinn (poetry editor of The New Yorker and executive director ofthe Poetry Society ofAmerica), over a decade in the making, contains 105 poems/ fragments that Bishop chose not to publish but, for whatever reason, to preserve in her notebooks and elsewhere. It is not a facsimile edition, as Quinn points out in her note on the text, but it does contain some facsimiles "to illustrate the range ofmanuscript material." It also contains an appendix with several short prose pieces as well as photographs of sixteen sequentially ordered drafts of her famous villanelle "One Art." The remainder of the book comprises an extensive set of notes, which contains variant versions of the poems, notebook entries and correspondences , revealing anecdotes, informal critiques, links to canonical poems, and other miscellaneous glosses, often all in a single note. Virtually all the material here has been gleaned from the more than 3,500 pages of manuscripts now housed at the Library for Special Collections at Vassar College. Whatever else this book is, however, it is certainly not a book for those who may be coming to Bishop for the first time. Except for a few short lyrics and one or two of the longer pieces, the material here rarely approaches, let alone sustains, the exacting standards Bishop demonstrated everywhere in The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (1983). As Helen Vendler notes in her searing April 3 review in The New Republic: "Students wanting to buy 'the new book by Elizabeth Bishop' should be told to go back and buy the old one, where the poet represents herself as she wished to be known." 1 was a bit surprised by the vituperative verve Vendler displays in her trouncing of what clearly was, for Quinn, a long labor of love. Vendler suggests that a better title for the book would have been "The Repudiated Poems," and believes that had Bishop been asked beforehand whether her unpublished poems, as well as her fragments , should be published after herdeath, she would have replied with a horrified "No." Not only are these pieces embarrassingly flawed or inferior in Vendler's eyes, they are in fact not "real poems" from the "real" Elizabeth Bishop at all. And yet there is something a bit disturbing about the relish Vendler takes in excoriating these "maimed and stunted siblings." as she calls them. Of course, what to do with a dead writer's unpublished work is an age-old conundrum. Part of the problem, I think, is that this volume doesn't quite know the kind of book it wants to be. Quinn seems to have anticipated some ofthe reaction the book would receive. In an e-mail response to a New York Times reporter she states: "I knew that this perspective on it would be registered...

Virgil and Bacon in the Schoolroom

Virgil's Georgics is an elusive text and scholars have consistently sought to gain some kind of interpretive purchase on it by driving it into the dirt. The desire to read the Georgics in this fashion—to track its hexameters towards the horizon line of the English countryside, or into the reforming programs of institutions such as the Royal Society's Georgical Committee—has dominated recent accounts of the poem's early modern legacy. This particular approach to the Georgics has yielded valuable insights concerning the transformations to which literary texts (and indeed the practice of interpretation) are susceptible. Douglas Chambers, for instance, has argued that seventeenth-century georgic is characterized by a desire to "extend the exegesis of Virgil's text into the practice of agriculture."1 We can detect in this particular act of exegetical extension a response to Virgil's self-presentation in the Georgics as poet-preceptor, and an attempt to recast conventional claims about the instrumentality of literary texts. This pragmatic version of georgic may constitute a direct response to the educational legacy of Virgil's poem. From Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Francis Bacon to John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and a host of English schoolmasters, adventurous readers explored and codified the epistemological resources of the Georgics. These readers consistently understood the poem's formal structures and discursive logic in relation to the educational institutions that sponsored first encounters with literary texts. Their efforts suggest that we need to reassess the kind of cultural work in which Virgil's poem has been said to be engaged in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Given its relatively stable position in grammar-school curricula throughout this period, we would do well to inquire how and to what purpose the poem became enmeshed in a network of self-reflexive educational discourses, and how this pedagogical mode relates to the more familiar versions of georgic that emerge during the course of the seventeenth century.2 When Virgil's poem is reimagined by agrarian reformers and green-thumbed gentlemen, its nascent agricultural legacy is the offspring of an educational fantasy. Accordingly, the following discussion pursues the Georgics into the schoolroom rather than the fields. [End Page 161] I. "The Rurall Part of Virgil" In The Book Named the Governor (1531), Elyot praises Virgil as a poet whose variety makes his poems uniquely suited to the education of children. He anatomizes the benefits of a curriculum that includes all three of Virgil's canonical poems, but his praise for the Georgics can be read as a statement about the goals to which instruction in literary texts might aspire: In his Georgics, Lord, what pleasant variety there is; the divers grains, herbs, and flowers that be there described, that, reading therein, it seemeth to a man to be in a delectable garden or paradise. What ploughman knoweth so much of husbandry as there is expressed? Who, delighting in good horses, shall not be thereto more inflamed, reading there of the breeding, choosing, and keeping of them? In the declaration whereof Virgil leaveth far behind him all breeders, hackneymen, and skosers. Is there any astronomer that more exactly setteth out the order and course of the celestial bodies, or that more truly doth divine in his prognostications of the times of the year, in their qualities, with the future estate of all things provided by husbandry, than Virgil doth recite in that work? If the child have a delight in hunting, what pleasure shall he take of the fable of Aristeus; semblably in the hunting of Dido and Aeneas, which is described most elegantly in his book of Aeneid.3 It is difficult to account for the terms in which Elyot praises the poem (to say nothing of his odd suggestion that "the fable of Aristeus" is just the thing for the child who delights in hunting) without reference to the theory and practice of humanist pedagogy.4 Although at least one modern classicist interprets Elyot's remarks as proof of his utter...

THE POLITICS OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN ANTON SHMAMAS'S ARABESQUES

How can an Israeli Arab writer participate in a Jewish literary tradition that perceives the writer as a biblical prophet, a “watchman unto the house of Israel”? This paper explores the ways in which Israeli-Arab writer Anton Shammas employs a poetics of intertextuality to carve out a space for himself in a language not fully his own. My reading of Shammas's 1986 novel Arabesques focuses on a paragraph in which Shammas alludes to, indeed rewrites, a passage from Bialik's “Habrekhah” (“The Pool”), widely considered one of the greatest ars poetic texts in Hebrew literature. In re-reading and rewriting Bialik from the margins of Israeli culture, Shammas makes a surprising use of this canonical poem by positioning it in a new context of identity politics. Through this intertextual practice, Shammas challenges the national and ethnic boundaries of Israeli culture.

Does David Still Play Before You? Israeli Poetry and the Bible (review)

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 277 Reviews DOES DAVID STILL PLAY BEFORE YOU? ISRAELI POETRY AND THE BmLE. By David C. Jacobson. pp. 283. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Cloth, $34.95. That modem Hebrew literature is steeped in the Bible is no revelation: the very use, revival, and development of the biblical language and its application to the modem experience of life and the expression of its exhalations and tribulations carries the biblical idiom automatically. One might even say, by default. Likewise. the cultivating and the building of the historical territory marked by biblical names of places and remembered events are naturally laden with biblical reverberations. The questions posed by this study are: What role does the modem poetry of biblical allusion play in the current culture and in what manner is the old text recycled in its modem context? The first two chapters introduce the topic by a discussion of biblical citations in public, official and social contexts as they are used as pretexts and are rhetorically manipulated for the purpose of justification and motivation for creating policies and taking action. These provide the English reader with some of the basic national concerns of Israel, and although they often seem naive and simplified. journalistic rather than scholarly. Jacobson's implied reader might find them informative as an introduction to the problematics involved in the revival of the people as a sovereign state. In the following four main chapters of this study, Jacobson sets out to examine the particular employment of biblical language in fifty modem short lyrical poems which he divided into four themes: Responding to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Those who experienced the Holocaust and those who did not, Men and women in ancient and modem Israel, and Secular Israelis and religious faith. This thematic approach carries an intrinsic difficulty in as much as the selection of the poems is dictated by an a priori inclusion of those illustrating a point, often with disregard for quality or for a better representation of some major poets whose works do not clearly fit into the prescribed categories. One wonders how a central poet such as Yona Wallach, for instance. is omitted from the book, unless, of course, her already canonical poem of biblical allusion, "Yonatan," just did not fit into the "Men and Women" chapter, as the protagonist is both male and female. Ambiguity, whether in gender or in language. as well as irony. which is probably the most obvious characteristic of modem Hebrew poetry. does not lend itself to neat thematic classifications. The interpretation of poems for the purpose of a social-cultural statement confronts the author with an obvious need to juggle the methodologies . Although Jacobson refers to a number of literary critics and theo- Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 278 Reviews retical approaches, none is actually applied to the reading of the texts. The poems are analyzed for the sole purpose of pointing out their declared and obvious relations with the biblical text, and only for their relevance to the theme in question, thus often ignoring other poetic attributes and therefore rendering only partial readings. A case in point is the all-too-known "Iyitshaq" by Arnir Gilboa, a reversal of the Akkeda story, where the allusion to Shir Hashirim in the third line is missing from Jacobson's analysis. This allusion sets the poem into the ironic mood and by missing its significance one is lead to a one-dimensional reading of a very complex poem. The very question of the allusion as a poetic device poses questions of definitions: it seems that a distinction between allusion, metaphor, intertextuality and, even more so, the semiotic definition of hypogram would be prerequisites to this study. Although Jacobson cites M. Riffaterre's theory of the semiotics of poetry, he chose not to adopt this rather appropriate approach , since indeed the book deals with hypograms and not with allusions, which are used here to denote mainly direct references to biblical people and events. The fact that Hebrew poetry is steeped in the biblical language from its very birth should have been addressed from, at least, the viewpoint of the literary tradition. Seeing the modem poetry as leaping over...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: the Canonical Sieve and Poems From an Egyptian Avant Garde

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: the Canonical Sieve and Poems From an Egyptian Avant Garde