Contemporary Poets Research Articles

Guy Goffette: un lyrisme du quotidien

After the experimental poetic tendencies that have been developed in French poetry between the 1960s and the 1970s, some French contemporary poets seem to get some lyric characteristics back into poetry. The French contemporary poet Guy Goffette is one of the representative poets of this procedure that has been initiated with the “Nouveau Lyrisme” in the 1980s. Those poets want to accomplish a reinterpretation and an actualisation of poetic lyrism, without returning to the effusiveness and the sentimentalism of traditional romantic lyrism. To avoid this, some poets like Guy Goffette seem to approach everyday life in their poetry, to stay on the side of simplicity, austerity and sobriety that will provide them the opportunity to approach the lyric characteristics of poetry without falling into an overemotional lyrism. This article aims to study the presence of a lyrism that we have called “of everyday life” in the poetry of Guy Goffette, to determine if the procedure of everyday life represents a new way to explore lyrism in French contemporary poetry.

Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics by James M. Magrini and Elias Schweiler

Reviewed by: Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics by James M. Magrini and Elias Schweiler Shawn Loht MAGRINI, James M. and Elias Schweiler. Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics. New York: Routledge, 2018. xi + 234 pp. Cloth, $140.00 This study provides an overview of principal themes in Martin Heidegger's philosophy in the post-Being and Time work of the 1930s and 1940s. It also considers these themes as they offer new ways of regarding poetry, literature, and education according to the post-metaphysical turn contained in Heidegger's notions of Ereignis (commonly translated as "the event of Being") and philosophy's "other beginning." Although the book is branded within the series Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education, only one chapter addresses the subject of education. In the introductory chapter, the authors survey current perspectives on the "turn" in Heidegger. A middle-ground approach is adopted, according to which Heidegger's post-Being and Time thought is characterized by an engagement with thinking conceived from out of the domain of truth, rather than the transcendental subjectivism of Dasein; a receptivity to Being, as seen in notions like Gelassenheit and Being's "mystery"; a concentration on the "event" of Being, understood communally and historically; and philosophy conceived as a practice rather than an academic exercise. For the authors, the concept of language is an especial locus around which Heidegger's post-turn thinking takes shape. The first main chapter of the book examines the issues prompting Heidegger's turn by contrasting the Cartesian-Kantian framework pervading Being and Time's portrayal of Dasein with the historical, destiny-laden conception of being-there Heidegger comes to formulate in 1936's Contributions to Philosophy, the various Hölderlin lectures, and 1938's "The Origin of the Work of Art." The authors suggest that in these works, Heidegger aims to articulate a conception of Being not predicated on the metaphysical confines of describing Dasein; as a result, Heidegger's accomplishment is to articulate Being's aspect of transcending human existence, where Being is understood as an event, and where language is of a piece with this event. On the whole this chapter provides a very balanced and informative account of precisely why Being and Time's approach is problematic and the manner in which the later Heidegger attempts to correct it. The second main chapter, on the topic of Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin and Rilke, takes up the question of how Heidegger conceives poetry to exhibit a saving power from the dangers of modern technology, and why Hölderlin in particular reinvigorates the nonmetaphysical poetic thinking initially fostered in Presocratic thought. The authors hold that Hölderlin's poetry is nonrepresentational; it gestures toward images that communicate clues about the original event of Being and a time when gods were present to the human realm. The book's second half begins with a chapter on the poetry of French Arthur Rimbaud and the twentieth-century Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. What may seem an arbitrary pairing bears a fruitful [End Page 393] outcome; the authors read selections from these two poets in light of the later Heidegger's suggestion emphasizing the "path" or "way" of thought rather than its content (not out of step with the adage "ways, not works" with which Heidegger prefaces the Gesamtausgabe). Indeed, although greater poets could have been chosen from the canon of Western poetry, the authors aim to illustrate through modern and contemporary poets the "ways" poetic thinking can take when it is nonmetaphysical. Whereas, too often scholars rely on Heidegger's own preferred poets without making an effort to consider whether other poets might equally exhibit poetry expressive of the kind of poetic thinking the later Heidegger envisions. The penultimate chapter of the book explores a similar track with a reading of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, a novel whose main character appears to transcend metaphysical analysis. The book's final chapter, on education, is slightly out of step with the rest of the book; however, this chapter comes off as the most original in that...

“Ninguém” é o nome do autor: Leonardo Gandolfi e Ana Martins Marques sobre a Odisseia

Resumo Nosso trabalho se propõe a uma leitura de duas retomadas da Odisseia presentes nas obras de dois poetas contemporâneos, Leonardo Gandolfi e Ana Martins Marques. Interessa-nos observar nos dois escritores uma problematização da tensão entre o histórico e o contemporâneo: tanto no bloco “Piquenique”, de Gandolfi, quanto na série “Penélope”, de Marques, o que parece estar em jogo é uma remontagem da epopeia homérica de maneira que o confronto com o histórico não esteja resolvido. Essa questão nos levará a uma retomada da importância da Odisseia como modelo para a estruturação de uma história literária e para o próprio conceito de história em si através de autores como François Hartog, Erich Auerbach e, num contexto mais recente, Haroldo de Campos e Marcos Siscar. Buscamos ainda propor, a partir dos dois poetas, um conceito de contemporâneo que se dê em relação estreita com uma desautorização (como alternativa a um paradigma autoral) do histórico, o que, no contexto da Odisseia, se traduz em uma reabertura do problema da retomada, por parte de Ulisses, de seu nome.

R. K. Singh: The Poet Who Celebrates 'senses' to attain 'Nirvana'

This paper discusses a few of R.K.Singh’s characteristic poetic traits that make him stand apart from all his contemporary Indian poets writing in English. His poetry is an honest attempt to portray the contemporary world in its true hue and color; present an inside-out delineation of the modern man; and touch upon all the so-called ‘untouchable’ i.e., topics such as ‘Sex’, ‘Prostitution’, ‘Cultural Degradation’, ‘Stinking Politics’, ‘Religion’, etc. Reader finds Singh celebrating all his senses in his ‘unique’ attempt to attain the state of complete ‘Peace’ or ‘Calm’. His poetry serves as a medium for him to reach the state of ‘nirvana’. Reader finds Singh’s poetry as a prism that diffracts the worldly affairs into different spectrums, analyses each, and again sums it all into a single hue of liberation and peace with ‘detachment’ displaying the mark of a seasoned ‘yogi’. The paper aims to encourage other researchers and people in the academia to explore recent band of emerging Indian poets expressing themselves in English.

On Gulzar’s Poetry: Comparing the Three Versions of English Translation

Gulzar’s merit as a contemporary Indian poet rests on his use of Hindustani, which has a high degree of emotional intensity, expressiveness, naturalness and unusual vividness that strikes the head and the heart of the listener. The study pragmatically and stylistically probes a randomly selected poem of Gulzar and its English translation by three translators, underlining, in the main, the variations in the linguistic choices they make and the significant differences in their translation. The analysis discusses that which is complicated and complex in the poem; and how it is simplified by the translator, leaving out that which puzzles the poet. The pragmatic-stylistic approach effectively identifies the translation shifts and investigates the value and belief system of Gulzar encoded in the language.

«Figlio di una turbina e di d’Annunzio»: Marinetti edipico?

From the 1900s to the 1930s Marinetti’s attitude towards d’Annunzio gradually changed from blame to unconditional praise. The steps of this evolution and the reasons behind it emerge from an analysis of a number of Marinetti’s texts dealing with d’Annunzio’s life and works. In his early French writings (1903-1908) Marinetti had mixed feelings about d’Annunzio, whereas in his first Futurist manifestoes (1909-1915) he despised d’Annunzio as a prominent symbol of passatismo. This hostile attitude changed with the Great War and with the seize of Fiume, as after these events Marinetti increasingly represented d’Annunzio as a Futurist man and writer. He traced heavy Futurist influences in the Notturno (1922), and in a number of later writings (1937-1938) made frequent references to d’Annunzio’s undoubtedly Futurist fibre. Through these declarations Marinetti aimed at seizing d’Annunzio’s literary legacy, thus elevating the contemporary Futurist poets as his legitimate successors.

The Exploitation of the Elements of Nature in the Poetry Collection" (La Ghurbata) by Muhammad Omar Othman

Nature has a prominent and influential role in human life. And has an important place in poets' poems; it has become one of the sources inspired by the poet's creative work. Among these poets is the poet Mohamed Omar Osman, a contemporary poet, who has a distinctive imprint in Kurdish poetry because of his creative presentation and his creative abilities in his poetic productions. This study, entitled Exploitation of the Elements of Nature in the Poetry Collection (La Ghurbata) by Muhammad Omar Othman, is an attempt to explain the location of the elements of nature in the world of his poetry, because the elements of nature took great place in the texts of the poet. The study consists of an introduction, two axes and a conclusion, as follows: The first axis dealt with the concept of nature, in terms of significance, terminology and definition. This was covered by the opinion of specialists, as well as the role of nature in literary space, in an attempt to demonstrate the influence of literature on the poet and his literary works. The second axis was devoted to the nature of rigid and dynamic nature of the poet's output; with a statement of the poet's efforts in how to employ these natural elements in his poetry; in a painting filled with beautiful pictures and careful and deep consideration. In the end, the research reached a number of results with the sources mentioned at the end.

Phantoms and Phantasms: The Dialectical Image and the Practice of Translation in Contemporary American Poetry

AbstractThis paper employs an essentially Benjaminian method to examine recent translations of canonized poetry by contemporary American poets. In doing so, I posit a broadly applicable methodology for the critical study of translational texts. This methodology draws on Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image as well as Kenneth Goldsmith's recent problematization of the act of translation in order to consider the relationship between an original text and its translations—the commonalities and dissonances between the literary work and its reiterations. In doing so I suggest that this relationship between the text and its translations can be a productive site of examination for contemporary literary scholarship. Offering a case study for this methodology, this article explores the recent translations of Guillaume Apollinaire by Donald Revell and Ron Padgett as well as Anne Carson's translation of Sappho. Therein, I consider the ways these translational texts characterize and connect with the poetic past while responding to Marjorie Perloff's recent call for literary scholarship that engages foremost with literary concerns.

“Passages”: The Robert Duncan Centennial Conference in Paris

Last June the Sorbonne hosted the Robert Duncan Centennial Conference to celebrate the birth of the poet and take stock of his ever-growing influence both in the field of English studies and in contemporary poetics. The idea for the conference came from the exchanges between the participants of the 2006 “(Re:)Working the Ground” Conference at Buffalo. Among those, Clement Oudart (Sorbonne), Stephen Collis (Simon Fraser University), and James Maynard (University at Buffalo) organized the June ...

No existen mapas para estos territorios: Rubén Martín (Díaz) y la topografía estética de la poesía española reciente

Partiendo de la premisa que el mundo poético español actual no es un espacio discursivo neutro abierto a toda aproximación textual este estudio traza las estrategias estéticas de dos poetas españoles contemporáneos cuyos nombres similares—Rubén Martín Díaz (1980) y Rubén Martín (1980)—nos obligan a ir más allá de la firma literaria y adentrarnos en las propuestas de escritura que caracterizan su quehacer poético. Aunque la obra de cada poeta establece un diálogo sugerente con muchos de los mismos conceptos—la mirada, el mundo natural, el yo y el lenguaje—su modo de concebir estos conceptos y su interacción compleja es diferente. En el caso de cada poeta se estudian textos ecfrásticos al lado de otros textos que, juntos, ofrecen una visión de la actitud de cada propuesta de escritura hacia el mundo fragmentado en el que vivimos. Esta exploración nos provee una imagen más clara de las posibilidades estéticas de la poesía española actual y su relación con la tradición literaria española. Aunque este trabajo sólo se enfoca en la obra de estos dos poetas también busca situar su obra en el contexto más amplio de la poesía española actual.

The Hunt In Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic

The Hunt In Arabic Poetry: From Heroic to Lyric to Metapoetic

‘So am I detached / From the fabric which claims me’ Women, Fabric, and Poetry

Women are immemorially associated with fabric, an association both metaphorical and metonymic, and one widespread in myth, legend and folklore. Spinning and weaving are bound up with women and femininity in fundamental ways, entwining socio-economic histories with deep and persistent trans-cultural symbolic and ideological systems. Women spinning or weaving are figures for both death and birth, and ancient equivalences represent gestation itself as a process of weaving. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s revisionary theorizing of maternal subjectivity as both seamless and a paradigm for human creativity, this article teases out significant strands in the representation by contemporary poets Boland, McGuckian, and Ni Chuilleanain of the women-fabric association and its meanings. If there is a powerful cultural given that women in some sense are fabric, that which has been woven, these three poets have fabricated powerful and various accounts of the different proposition that women are agents of their own weaving, in McGuckian’s words both ‘detached’ and constituting ‘the fabric which claims’ them.

The elephant in the room

We often think about the challenge of translating literature in terms of form and content. Should one attempt to preserve the semantic content of, say, a Chinese poem in English translation, or should one attempt to replicate such formal devices as rhyme and rhythm? This form‐content way of thinking leads most accounts of global modernism and world literature to neglect the importance of literary theory. The failure to address the uses, translations, and adaptations of theory constitutes a blind spot in attempts to read modern and contemporary literature closely or distantly on a local or a global scale. I illustrate theory's crucial role in world literature through the work of two influential contemporary poet–translators: Chinese poet Bei Dao's 北島 use of Russian Formalist theory; and Anglo‐Canadian digital poet John Cayley's deployment of aesthetic theory derived from Huayan 華嚴 Buddhism. Both Bei Dao and Cayley adapt and develop theories that undermine the form/content and local/foreign dichotomies that still plague discussions of translation and comparative and world literature. Their examples suggest that in developing our own theories of world literature we should not simply recognize but also learn from the role of theory in literature's global circulation.

‘So am I detached / From the fabric which claims me’ Women, Fabric, and Poetry

Women are immemorially associated with fabric, an association both metaphorical and metonymic, and one widespread in myth, legend and folklore. Spinning and weaving are bound up with women and femininity in fundamental ways, entwining socio-economic histories with deep and persistent trans-cultural symbolic and ideological systems. Women spinning or weaving are figures for both death and birth, and ancient equivalences represent gestation itself as a process of weaving. Drawing on Bracha Ettinger’s revisionary theorizing of maternal subjectivity as both seamless and a paradigm for human creativity, this article teases out significant strands in the representation by contemporary poets Boland, McGuckian, and Ní Chuilleanáin of the women-fabric association and its meanings. If there is a powerful cultural given that women in some sense are fabric, that which has been woven, these three poets have fabricated powerful and various accounts of the different proposition that women are agents of their own weaving, in McGuckian’s words both ‘detached’ and constituting ‘the fabric which claims’ them.

R. K. Singh: The Poet Who Celebrates 'senses' to attain 'Nirvana'

This paper discusses a few of R.K.Singh’s characteristic poetic traits that make him stand apart from all his contemporary Indian poets writing in English. His poetry is an honest attempt to portray the contemporary world in its true hue and color; present an inside-out delineation of the modern man; and touch upon all the so-called ‘untouchable’ i.e., topics such as ‘Sex’, ‘Prostitution’, ‘Cultural Degradation’, ‘Stinking Politics’, ‘Religion’, etc. Reader finds Singh celebrating all his senses in his ‘unique’ attempt to attain the state of complete ‘Peace’ or ‘Calm’. His poetry serves as a medium for him to reach the state of ‘nirvana’. Reader finds Singh’s poetry as a prism that diffracts the worldly affairs into different spectrums, analyses each, and again sums it all into a single hue of liberation and peace with ‘detachment’ displaying the mark of a seasoned ‘yogi’. The paper aims to encourage other researchers and people in the academia to explore recent band of emerging Indian poets expressing themselves in English.

On Gulzar’s Poetry: Comparing The Three Versions Of English Translation

Gulzar’s merit as a contemporary Indian poet rests on his use of Hindustani, which has a high degree of emotional intensity, expressiveness, naturalness and unusual vividness that strikes the head and the heart of the listener. The study pragmatically and stylistically probes a randomly selected poem of Gulzar and its English translation by three translators, underlining, in the main, the variations in the linguistic choices they make and the significant differences in their translation. The analysis discusses that which is complicated and complex in the poem; and how it is simplified by the translator, leaving out that which puzzles the poet. The pragmatic-stylistic approach effectively identifies the translation shifts and investigates the value and belief system of Gulzar encoded in the language.

Nazik's poetry in the balance of social criticism

Many contemporary poets have been interested in explaining social issues, and this was evident in their poems. Among these poets, Nazik Al-Malaikah, the contemporary Iraqi poet, (The Lover of the Night and the Consort of Pain), where she touched on showing reality in society and made many achievements in the field of social criticism in general. Most of her poems are about estimation of alienation and nostalgia, political and social issues, sentimental poetry, human beings, life and death, life, the pursuit of happiness, and lofty ideals. In the field of social criticism, the poetess dealt with the issue of women's liberation, the concept of freedom, the writer's relationship with societies, and other topics, and she presented important books

Translingualism as Dialogism in Romanian-American Poetry

Abstract This essay examines how translingual poetry by immigrant Romanian writers who live in or travel to the United States requires a transnational community framing rather than a national one and raises new questions about cultural and linguistic identity formation that reflect on both national and world literature issues. This analysis of the Romanian-American contemporary poets Mihaela Moscaliuc, Andrei Guruianu, Claudia Serea, and Aura Maru uses literary and rhetorical translingual theory to show that the “national literature” framing is no longer sufficient to address works created between two languages in a globalized world—Romanian and English, in this case. Born between two cultures and languages, their poetry does not belong entirely to either. In its turn, the national framing—both the Romanian and the American one—can become more porous and inclusive if read through a sociolinguistic “regime of mobility” (Blommaert) lens that gives a more powerful voice to migrant writers.

Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic responses to Emmett Till

ABSTRACTPhotographs that bear witness to the violence and suffering of history clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for contemporary poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of such images attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions, including: How can the ekphrastic poem empathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This article addresses these questions via the timely case study of poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, a subject of renewed interest in the wake of the furore surrounding artist Dana Schutz’s contentious 2017 ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This article considers poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of Till by contemporary poets Kevin Young and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism—drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image.

The Poetic Innovation in the Poetry of Ahmed Hijazi

The contemporary Egyptian poet, critic, editor and convener of many conferences and cultural committees Ahmed Abdul Mu'tiHijazirepresents a case of dispute and discussion thanks to the selection of the material of his poems as well as the distinct shape and innovative aspects of his verse. As will be shown in the following pages,Hijazi's version of poetic modernism is devoid of mythology, intersexuality and deliberate obfuscation or self-indulgence. Every word in his poem is aligned in a seamless mosaic that eventually succeeds in conveying the poet's message in clear and lucid but highly suggestive discourse. It is this particular side of his verse that will be highlighted in the present study.