Discussion Of Poetry Research Articles

Poetry as praxis: An exploration of poetry discourse as qualitative inquiry

To capture the essence of an experience, poetry as research may manifest itself in two ways: (i) creating a research poem from existing data, often transcripts, or (ii) using participants' poetry as a data-set for harvesting patterns and themes. This research focuses on the second form of poetic inquiry as a means of praxis by using the poetry of inservice teachers, preservice teachers, and elementary students to discover themes in regard to the teaching and learning process. As literacy teacher educators, creating praxis (moving from the theoretical to the practical) remains the ultimate goal of teaching and learning experiences. We gathered poems as data-sets in order to explore the possible benefits and limitations of poetic inquiry. As we approached the notion of poetry as a form of inquiry, we probed whether this art-based inquiry might also equate educational praxis. After considering several poetry data-sets, this research provides evidence of possible benefits related to the praxis that poetry as discourse and artistic inquiry affords, and presents the caveats of the research by identifying possible limitations.

Global Subjects of Poetry: Power and Discourse in Poetry

To argue for the utility of comparing poetic tropes across cultures, this essay takes up French and Chinese poems (by Baudelaire and Li Bai) using tropes of wine and inebriation. A critical analysis demonstrates how the base tropes are expressed in terms of their source cultures’ power relations.

Sounding/silence: Martin Heidegger at the limits of poetics

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger’s deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: He claimed that his Erlauterungen (“soundings”) of Holderlin’s poetry were not “contributions to aesthetics and literary history” but rather stemmed “from a necessity for thought.” And yet, the questions he poses—the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of “poetic language,” the relation between language and body, the “truth” of poetry—reach to the very heart of poetics as a discipline and indeed situate Heidegger within a wider history of thinking on poetry and poetics. Opening up points of contact between Heidegger’s discussions of poetry and technical and critical analyses of these poems, Nowell-Smith addresses a lacuna within Heidegger scholarship and sets off from Heidegger’s thought to sketch a philosophical “poetics of limit.”

‘More of your fancy kiss-my-hand’: A Further Note on Brian O’Nolan’s Nádúir-fhilíocht na Gaedhilge

This article analyses Brian O'Nolan's submitted-failed-and resubmitted master’s thesis on Medieval irish Nature poetry (Naduir-fhiliocht na Gaedhilge), with a focus on how the student O’Nolan’s discussion of poetry relates to theories of the modernists T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.To read the article, click Download or View PDF.

'Love and blackmail': Demeter and Persephone

This article discusses reworkings and re-interpretations of the myth of Demeter and Persephone in contemporary women's poetry. The importance of this archetypal narrative of women's experience to the formation of a female literary tradition is demonstrated in discussions of poetry including Rita Dove's Mother Love and Louise Gluck’s Averno.

Echo, not quotation: what conversation analysis reveals about classroom responses to heard poetry

This article applies conversation analysis to classroom talk-in-interaction where pupils respond to poetry they have heard. The phenomenon of repeating in discussion details from the poem, including patterns of delivery, is considered and named echo to distinguish it from quotation in writing. The phenomenon is significant to the pedagogy of literary study given the existing tacit and unexamined assumption that when pupils repeat textual details verbally this has equivalence with quotation in writing. Three episodes drawn from a single sequence of classroom interaction are presented together with a transcript of the stimulus heard poem. Each is accompanied by an interpretive commentary. It appears that echo in classroom discussions of poetry performs actions distinct from quotation in writing, for example that the acts of presenting and analysing textual detail occur simultaneously. The innovation of the research lies in the inclusion of the transcript-rendered poem as a turn in the sequence of interaction: as a verbally oriented method, conversation analysis provides an apt means of rendering response to poetry presented in the oral mode. More broadly, the discussion is consistent with the emergent popularity of conversation analysis as a method for considering classroom interactions with a view to reflecting on subtle aspects of learning.

"Le Temps rhumain": Time in the work of Philippe Beck

Philippe Beck has published sixteen volumes of poetry since the mid-1990s, alongside prose works and essays that combine poetic, critical and philosophical modes. Frequently described as difficult, hermetic or didactic (this last term is one he applies to his own writing), with only a few dissenters among his critics and reviewers, (1) Beck's poetic writing appears to conform to much that is traditionally assumed to define poetry: he is more likely to choose verse as a privileged form than many of his contemporaries, and the question of rhythm recurs in his discussion of poetry in lectures, prose texts and interviews. His poetry is often elliptical and allusive, with a poetic persona whose identity is in question, as in much modernist writing. Beck cannot be aligned with either or objective tendencies in recent French poetry, although he participates fully in contemporary debates; he founded and edited the review Quaderno from 2000-2003, and published Quaderno: une idee de la poesie in Art Press, in which he set out its principles. (2) This article will consider three central aspects of Beck's poetic writing in verse and prose and consider what they reveal about his conception of time and the way time is embodied in his work. Two of those features--impersonality and citation--might seem to imply a focus on simultaneity, if the je is taken out of the linearity of an individual human life and the use of quotation assembles the words of others, from different times and places, in a simultaneous present. Meanwhile, Beck's interest in rhythm, the third feature to be examined, might appear to indicate that his time will be the unfolding of the poem. However, I shall argue that time in his work differs from both of these models and that he aims at producing what he names le temps rhumain that is neither linear nor simultaneous, neither outside human experience nor bound to teleological progression. Reference will be made principally to two works of 2007. Un journal subverts the conventions of the diary form because, despite its structure as a series of dated entries (it was first published in weekly installments on the website www.sitaudis.fr) this is not the record of an individual's thoughts and experiences. It is an impersonal diary. He writes at the start: Ici commence journal. Bien. J. est presque impersonnage principal. (3) Moreover, it is built on a complex and detailed engagement with the words of others. Chants populaires is predicated on the opposite of a diary because it does not emerge from a single voice; as a reworking of Grimm fairytales, it brings together the times of their composition and rewriting, as well as the oral and written traditions from which they came and future reinterpretations. (4) Chants populaires is written in verse, opening with an avertissement in prose, whereas Un journal is a prose text that includes two verse pre-journaux, one at the start and one at the end, as well as several short verse sections incorporated in the body of the volume. These two publications therefore appear to be the reverse of one another in ways central to the concerns this paper explores, but it will be shown that they nevertheless share a preoccupation with, and creation of, le temps rhumain. In Un journal, Beck rejects the confessional mode, the intimate and the lyrical expression of emotion. He expresses skepticism of sincerity and personal confidences, seeing these as a kind of sentimentality, mievrerie (126), which he categorizes as affected or stylized and overly hasty. In its place, he proposes l'extime (127), a neologism that is immediately comprehensible as it reverses l'intime and designates a general, impersonal, confidence, one that moves slowly, and accommodates variations and convolutions. (5) He writes that un mouvement au-devant de quelqu'un est lent et silr. (127) Movement, here, is not the property or capacity of a subject moving through life, but a phenomenon whose existence is independent of any given individual. …

Colorsteps in Modern and Contemporary French Poetry

Color fills an important space of coincidence and of difference between verbal and visual media, yet receives strikingly little attention in discussions of poetry (or, indeed, in studies of literature more generally). Bound by the monochrome world of the printed word, literary researchers appear prismatically indifferent, judging as a referent somehow not proper to their domain, viewing as improper even. (1) When engages us directly as readers and critics, we often deem it inconsequential or incidental; is perceived as decorative, supplementary, and secondary; synonymous with and reducible to local And a line is thus drawn--a black line. Unlike our co-workers in film, history of art, textile studies or musicology, literary researchers are remote from those perceptual and pleasurable pressure points that may be acoustic, tactile or visual, and which, in this instance, are prismatic. (2) Color practice is a blind spot in contemporary critical readings of French poetry and poetic writing, a paradoxical situation given critics' attentiveness to the interart and intermedial significance--manifest and latent--of French modern poetic practice. (3) The obscuring of is anomalous, too, given our concern to bring into dialogue concepts and tropes drawn from cognate research disciplines as part of a wider arts and humanities project. (4) Our color blindness as critics is ironic when counterpoised with the sustained reflection of modern and contemporary poets on the color-practice of painters, and the alertness of poets to their own verbal engagement with color. (5) Yves Bonnefoy's Le Nuage rouge: Dessin, couleur et lumiere (1977) and Francis Ponge's L'Atelier contemporain (1977) are signal contributions to the reading of Renaissance and modern painting, while Rene Char's work with Miro on Flux de l'aimant (1964) exemplifies the livre d'artiste, and Bonnefoy's collaboration with Genevieve Asse for Debut et .fin de la neige (1991) illuminates the interart impetus of twentieth-century poetic innovation. (6) And then there are the myriad instances where poetry, with or without a direct pictorial referent, moves beyond the evocation of the enduring tropes of art, such as landscape, and begins to reflect on the visual quality of poetry and its potential to stir acts of chromatic imagining in its narrators and its readers. Jean-Michel Maulpoix provides mesmeric instances of contemporary poetry's reflection on this prismatic project in Une histoire de bleu (1992): L'azur, certains soins, a des soins de vieil or. Le paysage est une icone. II semble qu'au soleil couchant, le ciel qui se craquelle se reprenne un instant a croire a son bleu. (Le Regard bleu) (7) The writing of has important implications for poetry's capacity, as the fragment from Maulpoix quoted above suggests with its speculative mode (il semble), with the intentionality it imputes to color, and with its stress on the tending of (L'azur [...] a des solos). By I want also to suggest poetry's potential to shape attentiveness. In this article I begin to address that occluded capacity of in poetry. My concern is with the movement of poetry (or of poetic writing in the case of Helene Cixous) towards (as artistic memory and as remembered--or imagined--visual sensation), and with readers' reception of color--of color-made-language--in poetry. I explore these issues in prismatic practice with reference to Apollinaire, Cendrars, Michaux, Maulpoix, and Cixous. Color instances in their work will provide illuminating points de repere, markers as we move towards a more focused reading of a range of texts by Jacques Roubaud, a poet renowned for writing black. First, I want to consider some of the conceptual, material and affective implications of writing. I begin with Helene Cixous's reflections on Rembrandt's Bathsheba bathing (1654) in an essay that is instructive for how may be written and how it might be read. …

Presocratic discourse in poetry and prose: The case of Empedocles and Anaxagoras

This paper explores the differences between poetry and prose in philosophical writing by examining two Pre-Socratic fragments, one in verse and one in prose, that express a very similar thought: Empedocles 59 B 17 Diels/Kranz and Anaxagoras 31 B 8 D./K. Although at first it might seem as though there is a simple division between Empedocles’ opaque and allusive hexameters and Anaxagoras’ sober prose, when we look in detail at the language used by the two authors, a close reading of the passages reveals a more complex picture. Both authors place rhetorical emphasis on their own role as innovator; Anaxagoras’ prose shows a careful attention to style and word choice no less than Empedocles’ poetry, and Empedocles’ poetry itself reflects the range of stylistic registers and types of material that hexameter could be used for in antiquity. There is no simple antithesis between prose style and hexametric poetry, and the words and stylistic devices an author chooses are constitutive of the thought he expresses.

Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (review)

Reviewed by: Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs Phyllis Brown Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson, and Finn Sinclair, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the Rose to the Rhétoriqueurs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2011) ix + 249 pp., ills. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay address questions about poetry and knowing with relevance far beyond the geographical, linguistic, and chronological scope of their study: French and Occitan verse between 1270 and 1530. Their discussions of poetry and knowledge are provocatively relevant to educators’ understanding of the transmission and shaping of knowledge in the early twenty-first century, when curricular and other educational changes are at least as influential as they were in the late Middle Ages. In addition, the extensive collaboration beyond the contributions of the co-authors reflects changes and opportunities in the transmission and shaping of knowledge today. Knowing Poetry has two evenly balanced parts, “Situating Knowledge” and “Transmitting and Shaping Knowledge” (three chapters each), framed by an introduction and conclusion. The authors’ aim is “to highlight the distinction between prose and verse, often overlooked by scholars, and to show how, contrary to expectation, verse not only continues—despite the rise of prose—to have a positive association with knowledge, but also develops—in the face of prose—new and privileged means of engaging with it” (197).Throughout the book, Armstrong and Kay carefully introduce and contextualize specific examples to make their analysis accessible whether the reader is familiar with the particular texts or not. They also conveniently conclude each chapter with a lucid summary. The structure of the book allows entry at the beginning of each chapter but also invites re-reading of earlier chapters in light of the analysis in later chapters. Chapter 1 explores “the inventive reaffirmation of live performance as a means by which verse works were made physically present to an audience” (27). Armstrong and Kay argue that the visibility of performance, whether a public reading, poetry competition, or drama, emphasizes epistemic value while it intensifies the impact of the meaning. Verse drama especially provides opportunity for audiences to witness actors, members of their community, engaging with ideological knowledge. Armstrong and Kay argue, after prose began to compete with verse as a medium, performance of verse texts could shape the audience’s understanding of the ideas explored even more than had been possible before. Chapter 2 examines changes in historiography, patronage, poetic forms, and representations of subjectivity to conclude, “although prose maintains the upper hand for the recording of historical events, verse remains significant as a means of evoking the way they are experienced” (70). Armstrong and Kay’s examples demonstrate that poetry not only “can record history,” the poetic form often implies “that there is more to history, thus recorded, than meets the prose chronicler’s eye,” that there might be “an absent meaning, a ‘truth’ about history that is not to be equated with factual detail because it is located not in external reality but in (not necessarily explicit or even conscious) subjective processes [End Page 153] of reflection, sentiment, commitment, or memory” (60). They conclude that poetry can evoke a sense of the truth of historical narrative, of the relevance of the facts and events to the audience, and even of a “formal surplus” that “stands in for” inexpressible knowledge. Chapter 3 examines the wide-ranging and complex influences of Jean de Meun’s continuation of Roman de la Rose, the Ovide moralisé, and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on poetry and intellectual inquiry in late medieval France. The authors argue that the three texts depict reason and understanding “in relation to the body, so that any attempt to separate knowledge from the body inevitably reinscribes the body” (72). They also foreground ways the three texts and later poetry influenced by the three texts explore contrasts between chance and providence and encourage “thought about embodied existence in a changeable world” (72–73). Some of those texts “assert the mind’s capacity to transcend fortune and the body and free itself by a process of sublimation from their...

Resting Places

Resting Places Jeffrey Gray (bio) Marit J. MacArthur, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned. New York: Palgrave, 2008. 257 pp. $80.00. Marit J. MacArthur's The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned offers an unabashedly biographical reading of three of the most important twentieth-century poets. Coming after several decades of a largely anti-subjective bias in poetry criticism, MacArthur's approach prompts questions. Does this book constitute an intervention to correct a critical view that assumes that language is not representative but constitutive of our reality? Is it biography as of yore, or is it biography the second time around, informed by what heretofore discredited it? That is, are we to retire what has been seen as indispensable in discussions of poetry and poetics—poetry's complex relation to "reality," and the constructedness of biography? The tripartite organization of the book reflects its three purposes; as the jacket description explains, MacArthur "scrutinizes the popular notion of Frost as a deeply rooted New Englander, demonstrates that Frost had an underestimated influence on Bishop—whose obsession with travel is the obverse of his preoccupation with houses and dwelling—and questions dominant, anti-biographical readings of Ashbery as an urban-identified poet." The first of these three projects is familiar. Frost, a San [End Page 874] Francisco native who established his reputation first in England, was little rooted in New England, though, as MacArthur ably demonstrates, a few important years on a farm in Derry sustained him thematically and imagistically for a lifetime. The second point is less clear: Elizabeth Bishop's fascination was arguably more with the Other than with home, "wherever that may be" (as she wrote in "Questions of Travel"), and more with the surrealists and the modernists than with Frost and the Georgians. But it is the third section of the book that is the most counterintuitive, since Ashbery is seldom read literally, much less biographically. (Exceptions are David Lehman, David Herd, and John Shoptaw, who, in On the Outside Looking Out, makes a case for Ashbery's "homotextuality.")1 The biographical emphasis simply becomes less instructive—both less cogent and less persuasive—as we move from Frost to Ashbery. But the payoff where Frost is concerned is substantial. One of MacArthur's key insights is that the image of the cellar hole is central not only to "Directive" (that "dent in dough" that rises back to erase all trace of human presence or, alternatively, to heal the wound made there) but to quite a few other poems—among them "Ghost House," "The Generations of Men," and "The Census-Taker"—and that the image derives from the abandoned farmhouse across the road from Frost's farm in Derry, where he and his family lived from 1900 to 1909, the longest residence of his life. "Directive" may seem to stand apart from these other poems of failure and abandonment, since at its end it fulfills the Romantic promise: arrival at the source, the secret spring from which one can drink and "be whole again." But MacArthur reminds us that this occurs only in imagination, that the "grail" of the poem is just as inaccessible as Bishop's "crypto-dream-house" in "The End of March." Biography also informs the poem's first line, where "all this now too much for us" is conventionally read to [End Page 875] mean the modern condition but may also be read as referring to the deprivations of the Depression and World War II—and even more specifically to Frost's profound familial losses. By the time "Directive" was published, Frost's fifth child, Marjorie, and his wife, Elinor, had died, his son Carol had committed suicide, and Frost had had to have his daughter Irma institutionalized, as he had done with his sister Jeannie in 1920. Thus the guide's directive to "weep … for the house that is no more a house" makes the desolation sadder even than the abandoned homesteads of the other poems. The recent publication of Frost's notebooks enhances MacArthur's approach considerably, even while Frost's entries sometimes lead her afield. In...

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. * Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds).

New Media Poetics is an interesting volume for readers who are studying digital writing, reading, hypertext, poetry on the web, and new media art. Although there are a number of well-written and researched chapters in this book, there are also a number of dubious chapters that read as marketing pieces for the authors’ various new media projects. There are multiple perspectives in this anthology and some provide more valuable insight while others offer a subjective point of view quite distant from a well-researched and objective academic study. Overall, the good chapters within this book make it a worthwhile read for students and researchers interested in the subject of new media poetics. New media poetics, as defined by Adalaide Morris in the opening chapter, ‘includes a wide variety of configurations of language, image, and sound produced, distributed, archived, accessed, and/or assimilated on computers’ (p. 7). The discussions within this book therefore extend beyond the hypertext theorizing of the late 1990s; Morris contrasts digital poetry with the hypertext narrative that normally depends on lexia or blocks of semi-autonomous text joined by links into various configurations. The digital poem is also contrasted with computer games and interactive fiction in that it does not usually depend on a combination of rules, a simulated game world, or traditions of game playing. Although these contrasts are important for defining new media, some may appear a bit forced; for example, when contrasting the digital poem with the print poem Morris states that ‘unlike traditional print poetry, finally, new media poems are not often lineated or rhymed, do not necessarily maintain stable or consistent configurations, and seem by nature to bend—if not break—the founding constraints of the lyric as violently as hypermedia, computer games, and interactive fiction bend or break the constraints of narrative’ (p. 7). One might wonder if many works of new media poetry are created only to reflect on the medium (or how it differs from its predecessors) and, in this respect, will only be one subset of a passing phase in discussions of poetry. In other words, at this point in time digital and online media are still relatively new, although we can see signs of new media becoming more ubiquitous and therefore less foregrounded in the attention of writers working with digital media. As digital media incorporate even more seamlessly into our everyday interaction with the world this fetishizing of the medium and contrasting of its conventions with print may subside. There are acknowledgements of this coming of age in our relation to the digital medium even within this anthology: in Morris’ chapter—‘If early hypertext theory overestimated the electronic reader's agency, it underplayed the complexity, energy, and undecidability of print’ (p. 13)— and in Katherine Hayles’ assertion that ‘it would be more accurate to call a digital text a process rather than an object, an attribute I highlight by referring to the time of performance for an electronic text versus the time of production for print’ (p. 185, emphasis in original). This movement to study texts as a ‘performance’, whether digital or print, has also been occurring in book history and print culture studies in general that look at the processes surrounding the production of texts rather than just their archived state on the page. In other words, the movement to focus on the materiality of the text has also helped us to reflect on the processes surrounding the material production of print texts. Morris also points to the distinction between first-generation and second-generation electronic literature and the different critical approaches used when encountering these different time-periods of theorizing on digital literature—critics initially used terms from analyses of narrative classics but then moved from narrative to poetic models by using strategies developed to read the texts of avant-garde or experimentalist poets. This shift from analyses to strategies also highlights the shift from seeing a digital text as a product to seeing it as a process—‘an ongoing, elastic, capacious process rather than a taxonomically precise product: as benefits the processual or process-driven nature of computers’ (p. 7). Part of what this anthology hopes to do, it seems, is to draw a distinction between the hypertext poetry and theorizing of the 1990s and the poetry made post-1995 with DHTML, JavaScript, Java, QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, and other programs that ‘go beyond the plot-driven verbal lexia of Storyspace’ (p. 14).

French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music (review)

Reviewed by: French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music Heath Lees Acquisto, Joseph . French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. 202. ISBN 0-7546-5641-1. Nowadays, no reader approaching this book through its title will be naive enough to expect one single "idea of music" to emerge by its end, far less one that sounds out all the overtones that characterize the symbolists. If there is any finite search running through Acquisto's book, it is as much a search for the symbolists' idea of poetry as it is for their idea of music – or for their idea of the idea of music. This is not mere word-play. The symbolists' territorial jousting with music could never amount to more than a second- or third-order activity, since they were poets by vocation, not musicians by profession. Acquisto's opening picture of the unplayed harmonium in the meeting-room of René Ghil's circle captures their musically outcast state through its paradoxically eloquent dumb show. Never, he says, was a literary movement so fascinated by music, yet none of its members was a musician. Their engagement with music was ncecessarily theoretical rather than practical, but it was their very theorising about music that led them from their idealistic pretensions toward a more musically performative type of writing that was to become central to their poetics. In the end, says Acquisto, with music's considerable help, the symbolists eventually outgrew music itself. Acquisto's method is to present a wide-ranging textual symposium from four symbolist figures, the first two definitely central (Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and the latter two definitely fringe. (René Ghil, and Jean Royère). Wagner appears as a fifth author, fortissimo at the start through his much-neglected text the Lettre sur la musique, but as Acquisto's four-movement sinfonietta progresses, Wagner undergoes a strangely gratifying diminuendo al niente. As the symbolists outgrow music, so too does the reader outgrow Wagner. Using well-chosen, music-dominated works for his podium, Acquisto conducts a verbal fantasia of texts and intertexts, where music and poetic language often emerge as each other's "other." Their relative claims to superiority, once a hot topic, becomes a calmer, more fruitful discussion about means and ends. Instead of poetic language being challenged by music – Mallarmés "singulier défi" – music transforms itself into a lens through which the idea of poetry is itself re-envisioned. Acquisto sees music as poetry's agent for self-discovery and thence for change; a change in favour of music's instant but unverbalised effet, its wide, performative sway over its audiences, and its (Wagnerian) ability to integrate with other arts. The symbolists, in grappling with these enormously current ideas about music, were not so much propelled towards an expanded domain for poetry, but, in Acquisto's admirable phrase, "towards other semantic spaces that interact with the discourse of poetry." In pursuit of his elegant and original hypothesis Acquisto takes his reader through his own choice of spaces, including Baudelaire's lyrical forest, now [End Page 152] as much displaced by Wagner's "mélodie de la forêt" as it is uprooted by the modern urban environment. Mallarmé's space is one of text and blanks, or notes and silences, through which one arrives at the performative goal of "radical undecideability" (70) in the sonnet Hommage (à Wagner) and then into a refreshing clearing where La Musique et les lettres gets a new and very convincing treatment. Ghil's space is that of the pseudo-scientist, some might say the charlatan, while Reyer's self-cancelling domain is just an interesting coda, vainly theorising on works of "catachresis in repetition" (156). Like the symbolists of whom he writes, Acquisto is sympathetic and revealing of his authors and texts, but musically speaking, he hits a few bum notes. A town named Beyreuth appears, with its Wagner festival in 1869 (half a dozen years before the Bayreuth theatre was actually built), and there is a non-existent composer, Anton Weber, whose music, we are told, Baudelaire listened to. Still in historicizing mode, one might challenge the author's own "idea of music" at...

Cultural and communication awareness for general practice registrars who are international medical graduates: A project of CoastCityCountry Training

(1) To generate discussion about Australian culture and language with GP registrars using the medium of poetry; and (2) to introduce discussion about language and communication skills in a role-play format that GP registrars would embrace as part of their clinical training. (1) A variety of Australian poems was selected to reflect six themes: men, women, the Bush, ANZACS, Aboriginal Australia and migrants, which would provide a basis for discussion on a range of cultural issues to aid a medical professional trained overseas in developing further understanding of aspects of Australian culture. (2) A series of role plays was developed to reflect the clinical themes of each Day Release education program. These were enacted in a small group setting by preselected GP registrars with feedback from a medical educator and an English as a Second Language teacher. The Riverina/Murrumbidgee area of New South Wales, one of the three local training groups of CoastCityCountryTraining. GP registrars attached to the Riverina/Murrumbidgee Local Training Group. To show that discussion of poetry and participation in role plays are active language- and cultural-learning environments capable of enhancing understanding of a range of issues about Australia that are relevant to a GP registrar. There was increased participation by GP registrars in accessing the set material prior to each session. It was noted that there was also increased active involvement of all registrars in discussion within the group throughout the year. Discussion allowed clarification of aspects of Australian culture to participants with different international medical backgrounds, as well as providing an opportunity for GP registrars to share their own experiences.

Reconstruyendo el camino de Ercilla... Bello, Mistral y Neruda

Si los personajes de La Araucana han ocupado un visible espacio en la literatura contemporánea, sin embargo su creador, Alonso de Ercilla, es ante todo una figura histórica que ha sido reivindicada en textos de análisis crítico, a excepción de algunos poemas y obras teatrales. En este artículo, analizo cómo los trabajos de Andrés Bello, Gabriela Mistral y Pablo Neruda ponen su objetivo en destacar la nobleza moral del Alonso de Ercilla, y en resaltar su figura como inaugurador de un discurso crítico americano en la poesía escrita en castellano. A esos valores Neruda añade la visión de Ercilla no sólo como inventor sino también como “libertador” de Chile. En definitiva, la recuperación contemporánea de Ercilla por todos ellos estaba trazando un camino que canonizó a Ercilla como inaugurador de la literatura chilena.

The Effects of Interpretive Authority on Classroom Discussions of Poetry: Lessons from One Teacher

In this study we investigated the impact of a teacher's interpretive authority on the content and conduct of discussions of poetry in two ninth-grade classes. Three authority conditions were examined: a condition in which the teacher taught a poem he had written, a condition in which the teacher taught a poem he had taught many times previously, and a condition in which the teacher taught a poem that he saw for the first time along with his students. Transcribed discussions were segmented into turns and communication units. Turns were analyzed for how they related to the previous turn and informative statements were analyzed for the kind of reasoning and knowledge source speakers employed. Within-class chi-square analyses identified significant differences in all three variables in both classes. Coupled with an examination of the proportion of teacher talk in the discussions and of particpants’ evaluation of the discussions, these analyses suggest that reducing a teacher's authority over the text under discussion fosters dialogue. However, the social dynamic at play in school discussions of literature may affect the potential of this instructional strategy.

Women, poetry and song in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland

An important aspect of eighteenth-century Scottish culture was its transitional, interactive nature in relation to oral and written forms in literature and music. Its song culture, in which women played a primary role, is of particular significance. Scottish academic studies of the period, however, are still to a large extent male oriented in their focus and word and print based. This article seeks to draw attention to the marginalisation of both the song culture and the women of the period through a discussion of poetry and song transmission by a representative selection of women in eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland. It argues that “listening to the women” in poetry and song not only means bringing back into the eighteenth-century world picture the place of song alongside Enlightenment philosophy, historical studies and the printed poetic forms of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns. It also means bringing what Virginia Woolf called “women's values” into our understanding of this important historical period.

A Conversation about Living Root Between Michael Heller and Burt Kimmelman

A Conversation about Living Root Between Michael Heller and Burt Kimmelman BK A thematic and aesthetic agenda of Living Root is the uniting of, a making whole of what has been torn apart, a world of fragments, which is perhaps accomplished through the book’s ongoing meditation on ritual. Your own life, especially your early years, was one of dislocation and parental illnesses, which in a way parallels the history of your family’s passage across the Atlantic Ocean to America from Poland, which also, the book seems to suggest, is an artistic parallel to, even as it is a historic part of, the Jewish Diaspora. Indeed, this memoir finds ritual taking many forms, in your dis cussions of poetry, religious heritage, ethnic heritage, and personal relationships, as well as in your contemplation of ritual’s nature itself. Was the writing of Living Root, which took a number of years, now in hindsight a sort of ritual as well? MH Ritual and the undoing of ritual are at the heart of the book. I took ritual to be a kind of protection, like a soul being sheltered, placed under a bell jar, enclosed within the sacred. But I had come into that ritual space by the accidents of birth, upbringing, environment. It was not truly my own; in that sense, the bell jar also stifled. And given the life around me, my mother’s non-belief, my father’s uneasy relationship with his grandfather, the Rabbi, writ large, I was seeing cracks and flaws in that ritual space, in the conventions and acts of faith that I had not truly made my own. At the same time, the aspects of Jewish tradition which deeply drew my allegiance were those involving writing and rewriting, midrash, commentary upon commentary, all those activities which allowed one to re-imagine the meaning and space of the rituals. And, in truth, as I began and wrote, a kind of Proustian involuntary memory kept taking place, ignited into language, as it were, by the artifacts, the picture albums and letters, the detritus of my parents’ lives, which I had acquired after their deaths. And the parallels which you mention, the large-scale movement of the Diaspora, and the scattering of one, Michael Heller, outside the house of his received rituals, were part of the substance of that matrix of old yellowed paper, curling photographs and what came to me unbidden out of my past. BK In other words, from early on you have been an outsider—not unlike those in the scriptural tradition whose faithful are devoted to words, words that stand apart from things—even to the extent that the most intimate details of your own origins are both within you and apart from you somehow? [End Page 111] MH As I wrote in the memoir, “I am remembering then, not for the sake of what was, but, in a sense in order to be.” As I reflected on the sheer unaccountability of origins, their arbitrariness, their unchosen quality, the “quantum mechanics,” as I put it, of autobiography, I sensed also my going out toward much that is in tradition and in the histories I was exposed to of my family and of the Jews and of poetry. The act of reflection on the details of one’s life in this sense is dynamic in much the same manner that the literal words of the Bible become dynamic once subjected to the ongoing process of Talmudic or midrashic reflection. The Ba’al Shem Tov says that memory is the secret of redemption, and Yosef Yerushalmi, in Zakhor, reminds us that Jews, while not the fathers of history, are “the fathers of meaning in history.” I would hope that on a small, personal level, my work is in that tradition. BK But doesn’t this mean that you, as a Jew, as both a reader and writer, are begging the question implied by your memoir’s title: how is there a “living root” if one sees oneself as in some sense an indirect outgrowth of family and heritage? MH In the book I speak of “the juncture,” the “boundary membrane” of the root where “what is...

Slaves in Heaven, Laborers in Hell: Chartist Poets' Ambivalent Identification with the (Black) Slave

CHARTIST LEADER ERNEST JONES'S THE POET'S MISSION (1855) OPENS with question: [1] Who is it rivets broken bands And stranger-hearts And with fast-decaying hands A to last for ever? (II. 1-4) As poem's title and last stanza tell us, answer is or The Bard (I. 25), and striking image at heart of this initial question tells us much about Jones's vision of that poet's role and mission. Rivet[ing] broken bands / And stranger-hearts together, poet acts like smith or mechanic. Yet where smith welds together bits of metal, poet welds together people, forging an affective community out of isolated stranger-hearts. As subsequent stanzas make clear, poet does so in part by call[ing] up glories (I. 9), connecting people together in present, so poet implies, by connecting them to their history. Thus, just poets voice defies and death (I. 17), to ring thro' advancing years-- / And history--and time (II. 19-20), so, too, does community he forges with that voice. As result, community itself may well be death- and time-defying, eternal home that Jones initially insists that poet builds with fast-decaying hand s. In emphasizing role of poet and of poetry in actively creating mutually sustaining sense of both community and history, The Poet's Mission arguably takes up position somewhat like that advocated in Gareth Stedman Jones's Rethinking Chartism. For in this well-known essay, Stedman Jones insists that we must see of Chartists like Jones merely reflecting experiential reality or hailing working-class community always already united by shared material situation, but rather actively constituting that reality and that community by organizing particular understanding of both oppression and an alternative to it. [2] Because it was thus, for Stedman Jones, not simply experience, but rather particular linguistic ordering of experience that inspired and shaped Chartism, Chartist language--what Chartists said or wrote--should itself be vital object of scholarly attention (pp. 101, 94). If The Poet's Mission reminds us that at least some Chartists believed, with Stedman Jones, that their task was to wield to create sense of community, of present-day reality, and of past history, it may also remind us of something that Stedman Jones and many other labor and literary historians tend to forget--that much of what Chartists actually said or wrote took form of poetry and that this was so, in great part, because they envisioned poetry one of most vital forms of what Stedman Jones calls public language (p. 95 n10). In The Poet's Mission, after all, it is just any that creates (political) community but that particular linguistic form called poetry. That Jones's sentiments were widely shared within movement is amply illustrated by ubiquity and prominence of activist-poets like Jones; by amount of space Chartist periodicals devoted to poetry, poetical extracts, and discussions of poetry and particular poets; by amount of Char tist meetings large and small gave over to mass singing ... of hymns or anthems or other forms of verse; [3] and by frequency with which Chartist speakers quoted from, and alluded to, poetry. In all of these ways, Anne Janowitz notes, Chartists used poems mere representations of political situations but as interventions of especial importance in creating a sense of common identity or what Ulrike Schwab helpfully calls distinctly Chartist we-consciousness. [4] As result, attending to what the Chartists said or wrote should, in practice, mean investigating Chartist poetry in order to discover exactly what vision of community, of present-day reality, and of past history it sought to create--an investigation begun in work of Janowitz and Schwab, well Isobel Armstrong, Timothy Randall, and Peter Scheckner. …

The Overqualified Artist: The Regulation of Mimesis in Plato's Republic

The first-time reader of Pla to ' s Republic is often shocked at the rough treatment and eventual exclusion of art in P la to ' s ideal state. The Republic has been described as one of the greatest attacks on democracy and freedom in the history of Western thought, and the restrictive treatment of art in Book III can seem unduly harsh to the modern reader. By the time that the interlocutors reach Book X it seems that all non-craft art has been entirely banished from the polis due to its corrupting impurity. T o the modern reader, the extreme nature of this proclamation is highlighted by our historical knowledge . Even the more brutal and repressive totalitarian states of the last century—for example , those of Hit ler ' s Third Reich and the Soviet Union under Josef Stal in—did not go so far as to completely outlaw art. 1 There is a second surprise for the first-time reader of the Republic in Book X insofar as this final book seems to contradict, disregard, or forget the conclusion that the interlocutors reached concerning art in Book III. This apparent contradiction calls for a close reading and interpretation of the text in light of both Pla to ' s conception of mimesis and the overall project of the Republic. The problem lies in the apparent incommensurabil i ty of the discussions on the suitability of art, specifically poetry, for the polis as put forth in Book X and Book III. Book III seems to al low that some forms of poetry and imitation will be acceptable in the state while others will be rejected. The discussion of poetry in this section concludes that ourselves,/*?/' our souls' good, should continue to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and taleteller, who would imitate the diction of the good man and would tell his tale in the patterns we prescribed in the b e g i n n i n g . . . [italics mine I (398b) . 2 However , in Book X it appears that all imita-