Contemporary Poetry Research Articles

Little Armageddon by Gregory Fraser

Reviewed by: Little Armageddon by Gregory Fraser Kathryn Pratt Russell (bio) little armageddon Gregory Fraser Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810143104/little-armageddon/ 79 pages; Print, $17.00 Of Greg Fraser's third collection, Designed for Flight, published in 2014, poet Richard Howard wrote, "What astonishes the reader is that the poems are not confident or even hopeful, but correct, obviously true." Now, with his most recent book, Little Armageddon, Fraser continues his clear-eyed gazing into the tiny and tremendous abysses of modern American life. This collection is a significant achievement that portrays the poetic speaker's experience of the comedy and the burden of midlife, sandwiched between generations. What makes Little Armageddon singular is Fraser's mastery of poetic form and his incorporation of both complex thought and nuanced feeling into his poetic meditations. The contemporary poetry scene (largely centered in academia) has a horror of sentimentality. This aversion has resulted in the small-press publication of many poems that are lyrical or intellectual at the expense of feeling. On the other hand, popular and spoken-word poetry have filled the resulting cultural hole with a churning mass of emotional melodrama for more mainstream readers. Fraser's collection transcends the incompleteness of both literary scenes. The truthfulness of the poems is achieved by the employment of a consistent, present-day speaker who ranges over past and present experiences with authority and compassion. Other than the rare venture into a dramatic [End Page 119] persona in the first part of the book, Fraser's voice is that of a father in middle age who empathizes both with his children's innocence and with the weary wisdom of his parents and in-laws. The first section (there are three) could quite fairly be described as "vast." The poems in this part range from poems of mystical (if comic) vision, like "Lucky Gnarl," to poems touching upon how one should live ("My Idea of Heaven") and self-judgment ("Little Armageddon"), to the ominous voicing of a conquering people's drive to dominate the weak in "Like Angels." The opening poem, "Business," is a study in the interweaving and balancing of opposite concepts to achieve an enlarged view of a man's life in the city, when this man not only works but also thinks: A man hands me his business card, and asks for mine.How should I know my business? The worldis my business, and the world is none of my business. In the hands of a lesser writer, this play on words might constitute the entire message of the poem, and be teased out and elaborated ad nauseam. Fraser's speaker, though, surges on to pile oppositions on top of this first one, questioning his own personal responsibility to take up a profession, in the fullest sense. And by the end of the poem, he does. The most formally fascinating poem here, "Nothing but a Few Bare Trees," employs both internal rhymes and end rhymes in an organic, nontraditional form to hypnotize the reader into seeing as the residents of the city neighborhood see: across acres of ice,something about their fixtureunder a hard white sky, caught and held the eye. Still, they werenothing but a few bare trees—nothing,nonetheless, a few of us at first, then more whose houses lined the south end'ssmoother shore, came to take for masts. As this first part of the book ends with an almost Yeatsian vision of a manger crèche, a forlorn, pregnant figure appears, in a foreshadowing of the explosion of childhood in the second section. [End Page 120] This next part of Fraser's collection features a speaker brought down from his intellectual and spiritual heights by the demands of fatherhood. The changing diction and mood of the first poem, "Hide and Seek," emphasize his inner fall: My kids humped under the bedspread lookLike a meal inside a python. SometimesI wish my kids werea meal inside a python. Fatherhood, I sometimes think,is a python that swallowed me whole. Then I remember my wifeis the python. The lumpy, misshapen lines here evoke hard-to-digest...

Introduction: Contemporary Poetry and Affect Studies: Theoretical Approaches and Readings (Margalida Pons & Caterina Calafat)

Introduction: Contemporary Poetry and Affect Studies: Theoretical Approaches and Readings (Margalida Pons & Caterina Calafat)

Book review: Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis

Book review: Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis

Linguistic Proficiency of Sangam Women Poets' in Kurunthogai

The context of the poem is set as the entry of the far-off days within the language of Agam, Puram. It is a stage of language development. Land has also played a major role in building the background of this system, namely language. Every country became a gem, offering abundance, an endless quality of culture, wealth, and happiness. Great symbols were included in this. One of the main driving forces of the meeting was language. The secondary agent was poetry. Those who walk along these two lines can be called language promoters. These are the creators who poured out the feelings they had in their minds to create their respective ideologies. A great linguistic thought established by such people was declared in ancient times as "Sangam Poetry." Among them were the women poets who spoke in a multifaceted manner, carrying influences beyond their borders. This article examines how Sangam poetry's use of "language" relates to its poets' capacity for expressiveness and how contemporary poetry functions.

Eroso trauma Vitalijos Pilipauskaitės-Butkienės ir Tomo Petrulio poezijoje

This article aims to raise and reveal the relationship between eros and trauma in contemporary Lithuanian poetry. The object of the article is the situation of the trauma of eros in contemporary Lithuanian poetry, which manifests itself as a significant part of the phenomenon of eros for the experience of the lyrical subject and the perception of the world. This situation is represented by the most relevant contemporary poetry from the following authors and collections: Vitalija Pilipauskaitė-Butkienė’s “Breath” (2015) and Tomas Petrulis’ “Sterile” (2020). The problem of the article is the intersubjectivity of the human body in a relationship, allowing the subject to experience not only himself but also another who, through his bodily touch, causes suffering. The article uses the phenomenological perspective of trauma to attempt to answer the questions of what trauma is, what is the relationship between eros and trauma, and what identity of modern poetry is revealed by the violation of the body occurring in the social environment. The research is carried out using the methodologies of Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology and Husserl’s phenomenology. It is also based on the research of trauma theorists Gabriele Schwab and Sonia Sonia Baelo-Allué and the thoughts of other philosophers relevant to the article. In the poetry of Petrulis, the eros experienced by the subject marks aspects of modern everyday life from a philosophical, social, and cultural point of view. In poetry, the motif of the (used) body is clear, tense, and rich in erotic, pornographic images. In contemporary Lithuanian poetry, violence and traumatic experiences manifest as part of the phenomenon of eros. In Pilipauskaitė-Butkienė’s poetry, the body experiences constantly recurring physical and emotional abuse. Directing another force to the body of the subject is constructed in a frightening, open world in which not only the use of a body subjected to physical force constructs the concept of eros but also a motif of spiritual suffering when the subject reflects on the meaning, guilt, eroticism of the body.

NARRATIVAS FOTOGRÁFICAS NA POESIA DE MARÍLIA GARCIA

Apresentamos neste trabalho uma leitura crítica do poema “Parque das ruínas”, da poeta brasileira Marília Garcia, publicado no livro homônimo. A escritora coloca seu texto no limiar entre poema, diário e ensaio, com isso aborda a questão da fotografia como meio de registro capaz de narrar acontecimentos que podem ir além da narrativa da palavra, mas sem antepor uma forma a outra. Temos poesia e crítica adstritas no mesmo compasso narratológico. Para fins de análise, recorreremos aos estudos de Martelo (2012), sobre poesia e imagem; Rezende (2013), acerca da poesia contemporânea; Ludmer (2007), sobre a literatura pós-autônoma; entre outros.

:The Value of Poetry

In light of Falci’s repeated turns to contemporary nonwhite authors to manifest “critical” modes of lyric subjectivity, it seems necessary to somehow move on from midcentury and postwar debates over lyric and language. Poetry is both more and less than an abstract defamiliarization of language through which poets and readers become more conscious of their language and its ideological underpinnings. It remains a huge leap from poetry revising language to “muster[ing] our will” and generating new “forms of attention” to face climate change (178–79). Falci’s luxurious phenomenological accounts tell a different story about contemporary poetry and its grappling with civilizational crisis. His readings recognize poems’ diverse needs; they prove the complexity and at times futility of reading “form,” which sometimes merits mimetic accounts, and at other times becomes a sign of modernism’s “metrical self-reflexivity” or even, in the work of Denise Riley, the “scourge” of “formal penance” (128). The same complexity attends genre. Caroline Bergvall’s programmatic collection of Dante translations in Via (2005) may register a “pathological form of lyric speaking,” yet it only appears as such because of our own tendency toward “bad lyric reading” (148). Perhaps Bergvall anticipates and allegorizes our critical projection of lyric voice. Yet whether the work is then a critical lyric or just the critic’s lyric, its real value stems from Falci’s patient exploration of the feeling of not-quite-reading, not-quite attending, while remaining fascinated.

Transculturalism, Transformation and the Visual Arts in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry

This article establishes the works of women poets in the UK, especially those of non-white and mixed-race ancestries, as major players in poetic ekphrasis. Ekphrasis has been defined as ‘the verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 3). Building on the critical studies of the ekphrases by twentieth-century women poets, this article recognizes the increasingly multicultural landscape of contemporary British ekphrastic poetry and engages in detailed studies of the ekphrastic poems from Grace Nichols’s Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (2010). The two case studies demonstrate how women poets of non-white and mixed-race ancestries return to engaging with art from a diasporic perspective or art from a foreign culture and to exploring the potential and limits of art as a life-, self- and trauma-transmuting agent. The article simultaneously reveals the diverse purposes of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, as seen in the ekphrastic practices of Nichols, Petit and other women poets.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Black Mountain Poets

The New American Poetry was an anthology engendered by poet Donald M. Allen in 1960. The New Poets of England and America was edited by the poets Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson just three years prior. These publications, while each claimed to represent a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry, did not apportion a single poet.Academic poets who primarily inscribe in traditional form, influenced by the relishes of T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, made up The New Poets of England and America. There were popular poets like Richard Wilbur, John Hollander, and Adrienne Affluent. However, Allen's anthology gave the several experimental poets active in the US a platform. He visually perceived these poets as the heirs to the developments made by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound.The only ways this new generation's work had antecedently reached its expanding audience were through readings, publication in diminutive magazines, and independent presses. There were poets from the New York School and the San Francisco Renaissance, as well as the Beats, which included Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Allen additionally gave a group of writers who were anteriorly hard to relegate a new name: the Black Mountain School of poetry. Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, Paul Blackburn, Jonathan Williams, Paul Carroll, Robert Duncan, and Larry Eigner were among the individuals he delegated to this school. They bore the designation of the ephemeral but illustrious Black Mountain College, whose rector Olson accommodated from 1951 until its dissolution in 1956.

Back to the (invisible) Académie? The organization of poetry as a “pure” art form

Using the case of French contemporary poetry, this article investigates the organization of “pure” art forms. These are highly legitimate art forms which, instead of being profit-oriented, comprise actors who strive primarily for esthetic recognition. The organizational life of such arts is based on a new academy system which is in some regards comparable to that of the 17th century—leading me to call the current system a “return to the academy.” I define an academy system as an assemblage of artistic institutions coupled with public funding for artists and artistic organizations. This two-pronged system organizes the arts along four dimensions: strategic, administrative, ideological, and professional. Its strategic mission is to support artistic creation, spread cultural democracy, and guarantee the construction and transmission of literary heritage. Paradoxically, the State cannot make these choices directly, firstly because of the widely accepted autonomy of art, and secondly because, in a democracy, the State can no longer select artists according to an explicit ideology. The academy is thereby “invisible.” Second paradox, its organization has led to the marketization of pure arts, and the transformation of artists into independent workers providing goods and services. Finally, I discuss how this system fits a new consumerist definition of culture, based on “traces” that have to be recorded and managed as heritage. These findings question the typical narrative that the arts were emancipated from the patronage system thanks to the market, as this does not apply to most artists.

All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden

Reviewed by: All For Love; or, The World Well Lost by John Dryden Víctor Huertas-Martín Víctor Huertas-Martín. Review of John Dryden, Todo por amor, o el mundo bien perdido (All For Love; or, The World Well Lost), edited and translated by Rocío G. Sumillera. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España, 2018. ISBN: 9788417189112 In his preface to All for Love; or, The World Well Lost, first performed at London's Theatre Royal (1677), John Dryden claimed to have outdone himself by using Shakespearean blank verse, albeit having adjusted Shakespeare's model to the neoclassical rules of the Restoration. In writing the first Spanish translation of All for Love, Rocío G. Sumillera did not copy Dryden uncritically either. While she accurately followed Dryden's text content-wise, the formal features of her translation bring potentialities to the play. Sumillera's translation was produced for a collection of Spanish versions of early modern English plays. These were carried out as part of "Entorno Digital de Investigación y Traducción del Primer Teatro Moderno Inglés" (GVAICO 2016–094), a research project led by Jesús Tronch-Pérez (Universitat de València, Spain). It was published with a preliminary study by Publicaciones de la Asociación de Directores de Escena de España and, with the publisher's permission, later appeared online on the EMOTHE Digital Library.1 Despite the dearth of Spanish translations of non-Shakespearean early modern plays, Sumillera could take vantage point from precedents to translating Dryden's work into Spanish. Her first model was José Luis Martínez-Dueñas Espejo's use of free verse to translate The Conquest of Granada; her second model was Mercedes Vella Ramírez's use of alexandrine verse to translate Dryden's satiric poetry.2 One benefit of using non-rhymed alexandrines to translate All for Love is that, as Sumillera explains, often, single lines suffice to express thoughts which, in Dryden, required enjambments.3 The length of alexandrines is balanced by a consequent shortening of the play from 2,613 to 2,561 lines, without any loss of content. The 332 truncated lines in Robert G. Lawrence's edition of All for Love, which was published in his anthology Restoration Plays and formed the basis for Sumillera's translation, are turned into shorter, complete lines, avoiding monotony in the pattern. These decisions favor suggestive [End Page 183] off-beat interventions and pauses in the alexandrines. Some select sequences maintain the original truncated lines—for instance, during Ventidius and Mark Antony's first encounter, a scene Dryden himself regarded as particularly successful—to highlight the scene's import. This stylistic variety permits a multi-faceted stageability, consistent with the heteroglossic features of contemporary verse drama, described by Kasia Lech as "a dialogical interaction between often contradictory viewpoints … [reflecting] the globalized world's multifaceted and pluralistic nature."4 A sense of relevance is, likewise, encouraged by the translation's bridging of present and past through its paratexts. As an overture to the edition, Sumillera inserted a quotation from C. P. Cavafy's "The God Abandons Antony" (1911): When suddenly, at midnight, you hearan invisible procession going bywith exquisite music, voices,don't mourn your luck that's failing now,work gone wrong, your plansall proving deceptive—don't mourn them uselessly.As one long prepared, and graced with courage,say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.5 The passage evokes Plutarch—a source for Dryden, as well as for Shakespeare—: the night before Caesar's arrival in Alexandria, a merry dance troupe is seen walking towards the city gates. It is a sign that Dionysus has turned away definitively from Antony. Cavafy's call to Antony to gather courage finds echoes across Sumillera's interpolations. Such interpolations implicitly resist a possible endorsement of Ventidius' sanctimonious diagnoses of Antony's daydreaming. It was, as Sumillera's conclusion reads, "worthwhile losing the world for love."6 Unsurprisingly, the translator's interpolations emphasize Antony's need to gather bravery more explicitly than it is done in Dryden. See, for instance: … Now she's dead...

PROPEDEUTICS OF POETIC DECLAMATION IN MAOIST CHINA

The paper examines the first attempts at a structured written fixation of the rules for voicing Chinese contemporary poetry, appearing since the late 1950s. These are manuals for teaching poetry recitation, created until the end of the Mao era, which contain detailed technical instructions for the preparation of reciters. They serve as unique material for describing how declamatory practice was regulated in line with the general language regulation of the PRC and, above all, promoting the new standard in prejudice of various regional idioms. These texts make it possible to see general trends in the evolution of "new poetry" ( xin shi ) towards the revival of certain techniques and characteristics of various forms of traditional verse and to assess the relations of the oral and the written in a Chinese poetic text composed and articulated using contemporary diction.

최승자 시에 나타난 예언성과 우주적 상상력

The purpose of this paper is to understand how Clara’s prophetic ability and cosmic interest in the text translated by Choi Seung-ja, Isabel Allende’s first full-length novel, The House of the Spirits(1991), appeared in Choi Seung-ja’s 5th collection Lovers(1999) and 6th collection Lonely Far Away(2010) from the perspective of receptive aesthetics. As Choi Seung-ja, not only did she read The House of the Spirits as a reader and read it again by translating it, but she used it for her poetry creation. As such, poet Choi Seung-ja showed the interaction between the receptive aesthetics as a reader and the aesthetics of influence on her own beginning. Her ‘prediction and cosmic imagination’ has expanded the realm of Korean contemporary poetry indefinitely, and this attempt of ‘new method of reading’ is the core of this article.

Unveiling the Implicit Message: A Comprehensive Exploration of Qur'anic Democracy using Ma’na-cum-Maghza Approach

Democracy has become a subject of debate among Muslim intellectuals due to its non-primary source origin from Islam. The journey of democracy in the Islamic world is accompanied by both support and opposition. Nevertheless, this does not imply that the Qur'an is incapable of addressing these issues. Despite not being explicitly mentioned, the concept of democracy can be discerned through implicit messaging and the process of interpretation. One of the verses that encompasses this concept is QS. Ali Imran: 159. This article aims to unveil the implicit message by employing a contemporary verse interpretation approach known as mana-cum-maghza. This approach results in the identification of five elements that constitute Qur'anic democracy. Firstly, upholding divine values. Secondly, exhibiting a humanitarian and unifying attitude. Thirdly, implementing decisions that arise from conferences, which can take the form of regulations and power transfer (democratic in nature). Fourthly, adhering to legal sources that are applicable to all citizens. Lastly, entrusting specialized individuals with the responsibility of managing specific fields.

An Interview with the Poet Glenda George

This interview with the poet Glenda George and Lewis Johnson (PhD student, University of Liverpool) took place over email during December 2021–March 2022. George discusses her early work in the British Poetry Revival, examining the impacts of class and gender on her experience as a writer. George describes her role in the development of the poetry magazine Curtains (1971–1978), discussing her translation process and her reason for translating the French avant-garde into English. George concludes by tracing her poetics from the 1970s and 1980s into the present, offering her views on contemporary poetry and poetics.

寒暄堂 金宏弼, 그리고 道東書院을 기억하는 방법

This paper was written to examine descendents’ views and memories on Han Hwondang Kim Goengpil and Do-dong Seowon in Hyeonpung, Daegu, which has enshrined him, by referencing to others’ Chinese poems collected in anthologies. There remains no Kim Goengpil’s anthologies, so only Gyeonghyeonrok(景賢錄) may seem to be selected as a reference for him, but there are, however, few writings of him, and therefore, it is difficult to investigate his scholarly career and guarantee the objectivity of the contents collected in them, as there are a lot of literature regarding the post-evaluation for Chujeung(追贈) and Gajeung(加贈). Hence, the Chinese poems collected in others’ anthologies were examined to show that the birth and death dates of authors from the contemporary figures who directly interacted with Kim Goengpil to Myeon-u Gwak Jongseok who lived in the 20th century are evenly distributed, and that the subjects of Chinese poems recited primarily include the text of ‘Sohak(小學)’ on which he concentrated his efforts for a life; Hapcheon and Geochang, in which he often stayed when he was young; Huicheon and Suncheon, in which he stayed twice due to Sahwa(史禍); and Hyeonpung in which Do-dong Seowon is placed. Main places recited in the Chinese poems include Sohakdang(小學堂) and Jidongam(志同巖), the spaces used for the lectures conducted together with Jeong Yeochang in Hapcheon; Supodae(水瀑臺) in which he strolled about together with his sister’s husbands, Choi Sukryang and Jeong Yeochang and Mohyeongjeong(慕賢亭) which Choi Sukryang’s decendents constructed to celebrate the meeting of them in Geochang; and the site in which an old house is located and Do-dong Seowon in Hyeonpung. In the process, the contemporary poetry and prose about Kim Goengpil were created by concentrating on grief and reverence for him who suffered from political vicissitudes, but shifted the authors’ focus to the space of Do-dong Seowon, generation after generation, probably implying that the descendents regard Kim Goengpil as a past figure, but view Do-dong Seowon as an existent space before their eyes. Although the title board for Do-dong Seonwon was bestowed in the first half of the 17th century, Jeyeongsi(題詠詩) about it primarily consist of works created by literary men who lived in the 18th-19th century, which may be associated with the situation in which the contemporary intellectuals suffered from serious chaos caused by foreign countries’ reckless invasion. Do-dong Seowon was memorized by intellectuals who faced the modern transition period, not only as the space for reverence for Kim Goeingpil and for junior scholars’ lectures. The intellectuals, who might be more concerned about the role of Confucianism than ever, thus attempted to memorize Do-dong Seowon as the space for wishing the recovery of the national destiny, the revival of Confucianism and the succession of Confucian philosophy.

“A PEREMPTORY ADIEU TO BIODIVERSICALS”: ECOLOGICAL DECLINE AND EXPERIMENTATION IN PETER READING’S -273,15

Peter Reading (1946-2011), pronounced as “the unofficial laureate of a decaying nation, Junk Britain” by Tom Paulin, has always been concerned with environmental deterioration, climate change, and decline of the species in many of his work from the 70s onwards. His poems of the new millennium advocate a more robust critique of the neo-liberal economic systems and human beings’ involvement in the current ecological crisis. Reading’s -273,15, [Absolute Zero], revisits his decades-long efforts to experiment with various poetic forms, registers and a grief-stricken tone presiding over most of his previous work with his suspicion of human language to convey the complexities of anthropocenic experience. Reading’s text combines his efforts not only to experiment with various poetic and non-poetic materials, registers, but also look for ways to cope with an approaching catastrophe. The verbal and visual collage pieces as the most frequently employed procedures in Reading’s poetry draw his poetry closer to the ‘entropological register’ Skinner puts forward and bring together the sources to show how Reading’s environmental agenda is conscious of its shortcomings. Drawing on Lynn Keller’s recent work on ecopoetics and the concept of the “self-conscious Anthropocene,” this paper aims to explore how Reading’s ecological agenda and experimental practices in -273,15 might forge an improved understanding of the connections between contemporary poetry and environmental justice.

Nietzsche als Leser

Abstract Nietzsche as Reader. This collective review summarizes and critically reflects on the results of four recent publications. On the one hand, this involves a typology of the specific mode of reception with which Nietzsche often incorporates seemingly selective readings into his thought and subsequently allows them to become productive in his writings; on the other hand, I am also dealing with the exceptional importance of Italian philology for current research into the influences on Nietzsche. The German-Italian conference volume Corrispondenze estetiche focuses on Heinrich Heine’s influence, but it also discusses in a sophisticated way the tension between the two authors in the context of the history of nineteenth-century aesthetics. Vivetta Vivarelli’s study discusses the motif of eternal recurrence in various references to contemporary poetry, while Benedetta Zavatta presents the ultimate study of Nietzsche’s reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sabbagh Omar, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics

Sabbagh Omar, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics