Epistolary Poem Research Articles

Terraqueous

<p>Harriet Ann Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, was more than a fugitive freedom seeker. She was also known, loved, and held by Black South ecosystems of witness. Michelle Lanier archivally and ecologically roots the epistolary poem, ‘terraqueous,’ in an effort to shrink the distance between the commemorative echoes of Jacobs’s story and the soils and waters that held her first breaths and acts of resistance.</p>

The Unpublished ‘Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg’ by C.S. Lewis: A Critical Edition

As the title of this edition indicates, it provides a critical apparatus for a holistic understanding of this alliterative epistolary poem by C.S. Lewis, which has never appeared in print before. With this in mind, all points requiring clarification are addressed: a description and history of the manuscript, Lewis's relationship with the addressee, the dating of the work, the Old English phrases and connection to Beowulf, and the poem's alliterative nature. It is the editor's hope that the edition provides a solid foundation for all further work on ‘Mód Þrýþe Ne Wæg', a poem which highlights once more that Lewis the scholar and Lewis the author often operated under the same guise.

Caring for our futures: Epistolary praxis and the promise of slow

This creative–critical article advocates for the promise of letters in imagining possible futures. The piece includes ten of my Letters to the Future, epistolary poems written as fictocritical conversations between the texts that I read and imagined future readers. In the letters, I write of listening and care, patterns and methods of making passed between our hands, embodied forms of knowledge and slow practices, as I imagine and speak to our future caring communities. The letters are interspersed with short scholarly reflections on feminist epistolary history, traditions of matrilineal knowledge and slow reading as maternal performance. As part of my multimodal research-creation project on listening as artistic practice, this epistolary work takes visual form in drawings, paper-cut installations and letterpress prints, exhibited most recently at the University of Alberta in 2022.

Fields of Revision: Adaptations ofWren’s Elegyby Mo Yun-suk and Kim Ki-young

AbstractThis essay investigates the ‘field of revision’, in which multiple texts permeate each other to question and transform a given story. To do so, it examines the adaptations of Wren’s Elegy, a South Korean epistolary poem that narrates the story of its titular character’s love for a married man named Simon. The decades-long development of its story—from Mo Yun-suk’s initial publication in 1937 as a revisionist project based on Yi Kwang-su’s Heartless, to three revisions made by the author herself, to its film adaptation by Kim Ki-young—shows how adaptation involves multiple texts, authors, and historical and cultural conditions that create broader networks of elements for stories. By identifying and exploring the blind spots of previous versions, each revision updates the story of Wren and Simon to introduce a different vision. Through our analysis of Mo and Kim’s works, we argue that revision is not just about newly introduced ideas and perspectives, but also about critiques of a story’s previous forms. By viewing revision as such a method, the study of adaptation can become more than an inspection of the difference between texts based on a rigid hierarchy of originals and adaptations.

I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark

I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark Jennifer Schomburg Kanke (bio) Clark, Tiana. I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Blurbs on the backs of books can be misleading. Our expectations rise when we see that Kaveh Akbar, who has been awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and keeps our Twitter feeds gloriously overflowing with amazing poetry links, says the book is "one of the best first books of poetry" and NAACP Image Award nominee Allison Joseph calls on us to "Read it, and be changed and redeemed." Can a book possibly live up to all this praise? Yes, absolutely, yes. Tiana Clark's first full-length collection, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winning I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, presents readers with a commanding cinematic lyricism that envelopes them in the history of American race relations and the narrator's personal history. In the poem "800 Days: Libation," Tiana Clark says, "I don't want to watch another black man die/today or know the story of how," in explanation of why she doesn't want to watch Time: The Kalief Browder Story about a sixteen-year-old awaiting trial at Rikers Island who spent two years in solitary confinement. My reaction to the poem is similar to my reaction when viewing a silhouette by visual artist Kara Walker. The works are a mixture of beauty and horror, which is to say, truth. The poem is potently self-aware about how these intersections in art are sometimes problematic, yet often necessary. It covers some of the same ground as Roxane Gay's meditation on happy endings found in "The Smooth Surface of Idylls," but sets the ideas to music, lineates them with skill and precision. "800 Days: Libation" reminds us that there are things poetry can do that other formats can't. As Yeats has said, "we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry." The collection invites us into Clark's inner journey with prosody, allusions, and images. On the journey, she often puts herself in conversation with African American women of the past. In the epistolary poem series "Conversations with Phillis Wheatley," she imagines responses to Wheat-ley, the first published African American woman poet, from her friend Obour Tanner, while also pulling in the overarching narrative of the collection. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," she uses the voice of the singer/songwriter/activist to interrogate herself about her relationship to her own art and the powers that be of the literary world. I wanted to play Bach and Beethoven for endless encores. But they wouldn't let me and they won't let you. Things have changed Miss Simone.I have a scholarship. They want me here. [End Page 186] They want my poems. They want— Do they want you, she says, sucking her ghost teeth, or your black pain? This excerpt is fairly representative of the collection. The personal is political and vice versa. Lyrical and disjointed, but not hard to follow if you pay attention. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," the voices weave back and forth between the primary narrator of the collection and Nina Simone. Nothing is labeled or in quotation marks. The "I" can be either Clark or Simone. But, at least to me, it's always clear who is speaking even without the overt markers we get from prose or more traditional narrative poems. "Self Portrait as Hannah Peace" weaves between lines from Toni Morrison's Sula and Clark's own description of her mother on the dance floor at a country bar called the Cotton Eyed Joe in Knoxville, Tennessee. But isn't it all Clark's description? Though Morrison wrote some of the lines, Clark selects them, adapts them, helps us see another layer to their power. All of the poems in the collection using this (or similar techniques) reify the slipperiness of authorship and palimpsestic nature of identity. Her explorations of her biracial heritage, in poems such as "Mixed Bitch" and "After Agon," also reinforce these notions. All the...

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Uusklassikaline luuletraditsioon varauusaja Tallinnas ja Tartus / Humanist Greek and Neo-Latin poetry in Early Modern Tallinn and Tartu

Dear Memory, and: Dear Horizon

Abstract for Dear Memory: A fragmented contemporary epistolary poem about the inevitability of the desire to remember from the perspective of someone who is frustrated with memory’s unreliability. Abstract for Dear Horizon: A lyric contemporary epistolary poem about the speaker’s perception, and performance, of silence in regards to the injustices that go on around him.

The Epistolary Poem in Modernist Lithuanian and Polish Poetry

The Epistolary Poem in Modernist Lithuanian and Polish Poetry

Reflections: Two Letters, and two poets

The subject of this paper is the rapport of two epistolary poems of Catullus (poems 50 and 65) to the rendition of earlier poets that follow them (poems 51 and 66) as read through the prism of a Callimachean epigram (34 G.-P. = 2 Pf.). The paper seeks to further not only our understanding of Catullus’s use of Sappho and Callimachus as both artistic models and actual poetic figures of his own work, but to demonstrate how widely the intertextual resonance of one poem, here a sepulchral epigram for a dead poet, can be spread throughout the composition of a later author.

The study of the feature of Dufu’s Epistolary poem in QinZhou

The study of the feature of Dufu’s Epistolary poem in QinZhou

Adresse lyrique et refus de correspondre dans la poésie de Frank O'Hara

Hovering between biographical precision and lyrical elaboration, Frank O’Hara’s poems are often addressed to friends and lovers. As the mock manifesto “Personism” reveals, the issue of communication lies at the heart of his poetics : instead of picking up the telephone, the poet, O’Hara says, can write a poem to the person he wanted to call. Instead of writing letters, O’Hara wrote a number of epistolary poems to his would-be addressees. Feeding on aborted telephone calls and unwritten letters, O’Hara’s lyricism explores a new mode of communication, which he deemed more “personal”. His poems create the illusion of an ongoing conversation between friends and lovers, while really aspiring to “the ideal possibility of not communicating” (Kaufmann). Perverting the impulse to communicate even as it claims to be nourished by it, Frank O’Hara’s poetry calls for the dispersion of the author’s voice by invoking the reader, who eavesdrops on every exchange, yet whose intervention is necessary to the poem’s survival. O’Hara’s messages never seem to reach their addressees without giving them the reassuring or disheartening impression that they are not alone in receiving them.

Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics by A. C. Spearing

MLR, 102.3, 2007 835 in tale-telling on the evidence of 'grys' and 'gold' inhis array (pp. I I9-20, I28-29). The fur-edging to his sleeves is a sign of social status asmuch as of ostentation, for the abuse is a commonplace matter (pp. I 19-24). With the Friar there is amarked descent inboth the social and moral orders. The double worsted is a good ifnot fine material but even so at odds with the ideal of evangelical poverty (pp. 145-48). Worse still is theuniquely significant detail of the tippet transformed into a receptacle for a pedlar's wares (pp. I3 5-44). The criticism of the Friar is generalized in so far as no detail of his clothing identifieshim with a particular order of friars (pp. I38-39). The Physician is 'the most lavishly dressed' (p.2 I9) of thepilgrims inhis 'sangwyn and [. . .]pers' (A 439) and silk linings of taffetaand sendal. These are indispensable asmarks ofworldly success and guarantees of futurebusiness (pp. 220, 225). Further down the social and moral scale is thatunamiable pair, Summoner and Pardoner, the one grotesque with garland and cake-buckler (pp. 25 I-55), theother odious with his vernicle, prominently and inappropriately displayed on his unhooded head as a badge of faithand of thepilgrimage toRome (pp. 230-37). The Pardoner's religious status (whether that of friaror minor orders) is impossible to discover from his outward appearance (pp. 243-47). How different from the Parson, whose staff is a sufficient indication in itselfof the lifeof a good shepherd (pp. 26i-62). The least convincing chapter is thaton theClerk ofOxenford, an intellectual novice of twenty-onewhose collection of twentybooks is 'excessive' (p. I93) and whose love ofAristotle a sign of intellectual narrowness (p. I9 I).On this analysis the threadbare 'courtepy' (A 290) is tobe taken as a sign ofworldly pride and curiosity (pp. I84-89) rather than of humble devotion to learning (pp. I75-77). This book iswritten in a clear style, although the pressure of an argument some times leads to infelicities such as 'the speculative, escalating-as-rumors-do types of critical comments' (p.29). There isa case forseemliness of style aswell as forpropriety of dress. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN GERALDMORGAN Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding ofSubjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics. By A. C. SPEARING. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. Viii+ 273 pp. ?50; $95. ISBN 978-0-I9-8I8724-0. Textual Subjectivity does not deal with the thoughts and emotions of individuals in literary texts,but with subjectivity elsewhere in such writing. So it isnot concerned with Troilus's feelings forCriseyde, or theWife of Bath's views on husbands. In stead, we learn of elusive narrators (of Troilus, Pearl, the Man ofLaw's Tale), forms of love-lyric,verse-letters, and so on. It has seven chapters. The firstis inpart theo retical, surveying the ideas ofBakhtin, Banfield, Barthes, Derridas, Fludernik, Lacan, and others, which it then uses in an account of thenarrators inLa3amon's Brut and Mannyng's Chronicle. Chapters 2-5 discuss narrators inKing Horn and Havelok; Troilus and Criseyde; theMan ofLaw's Tale; and Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight, Cleanness, Patience, and Pearl. The book's lastpart concerns lyric.Chapter 6 analyses Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity, and love poems from the Findern Manuscript and Humfrey Newton's commonplace book; Chapter 7 examines epistolary poems by Ovid (Heroides) and Charles ofOrleans, plus twoEnglish poems ofCharles's time. The result is criticism of the highest order, both subtle and impressive. For forty years Tony Spearing has been among themost perceptive critics ofMiddle Eng lish literature.Yet Textual Subjectivity goes further than his previous books in its acknowledgement thatpostmodernism exists, even thoughmany pretend itdoes not. Spearing's intelligence shows how much can be gleaned from it.He performs a 836 Reviews brilliant act of dissolution on concepts of author, narrator, and narrative, which he persuasively shows asmore evasive and flickeringentities thanmost ofus imagine.He also gives a sharp call toorder on 'narrator abuse'. This is an intellectual vice, com mon in theUSA, which allows interpretations of teller and tale that are 'limited only by the powers of human fantasy' (p. I05), and which enables critics of...

The Difficulty of We: The Epistolary Poems of Michael Longley and Derek Mahon

Epistolary poems and prose letters written between Michael Longley and Derek Mahon in the early 1970s deliberate upon the idea of a coherent poetic group in Northern Ireland; they reveal a concurrent need for these poets to find their own distinctive poetic voice; and their meditations on group versus individual, as well as on the role of the artist in the community, stem from their poetic maturation and the immediate pressure of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 by Leonora Neville (review)

REVIEWS 268 contemporary of Abelard, whose largely epistolary poems belong to the first metrical category. Hilary’s poetry is the most explicitly sexual of the poetry addressed in this book and speaks to the tension of homoerotic desire that may have arisen between a schoolmaster and his pupils. In his playful poetry, Hilary also pokes fun at the questionable sexual habits of his fellow clerics. Afterward, Moser goes on to discuss the changing verse forms that are exemplified in such erotic poetry as “Iam dulcis amica” from the Cambridge manuscript mentioned earlier. These new forms represent the concordant changes that were inspired by new liturgical and extraliturgical church songs. The latter parts of chapter 6 are dedicated to three poems from Bodleian MS Additional A.44 and one poem from Cambridge University Library MS Ff.1.17(I). Moser demonstrates that in these poems, poets who wrote Latin erotic lyric and who also experimented with verse form were among a group of clerics who sought to combine their interests in classical exegesis with the scientific humanism of the Neoplatonists. In chapter 7, Moser turns his attention to British Library MS Arundel 384, the largest single collection of Latin erotic poetry in England. In his close study, Moser argues for a single author for the Arundel manuscript, citing the fact that “the thematic, structural, and verbal parallels” evident in the poems imply that a “single mind” is at work (242). Whether this “single mind” is the Peter of Blois who wrote many letters or the Peter of Blois who was a canon at Chartres is somewhat irrelevant. In either case, the poetry of the Arundel manuscript continues the theme of the anxious poet philosopher who is at odds with the role of sexuality in his orderly life. Finally, Moser concludes with a chapter on the importance of myth to the erotic poet. He argues that “the reflex to think mythologically was much more than just an effort to imitate Ovid, it was part of how twelfth-century humanists learned to think about the world.” The importance of myth, moreover, needed to be present because such elements could be understood on multiple allegorical and literal levels; levels in which the level of the audience’s education did not affect the comprehensibility of the text. Moser examines three myths in particular: Hercules, Orpheus, and Leda. In his readings of these myths and in his conclusion to his book, Moser points out the uniqueness and complexity of the Latin verse in their ability to both recreate their authors’ anxieties and interact with a past and present that embraced the sexuality of classics yet still held onto a Neoplatonist world view. Although A Cosmos of Desire is ostensibly about Latin lyric in English manuscripts, it is equally enlightening as an introduction to Latin lyric in France. This synthetic work is friendly to the novice, complete with full translations of the Latin text and helpful bits of information that aid in situating erotic lyric in a larger context. It is in his close readings of the poetry, however, that Moser’s ability to deconstruct the poems’ meanings shines through. The analyses are dense with insightful commentary and fast-paced in their approach, covering a substantial amount of material in a relatively short amount of time. Both advanced and beginning scholars will find A Cosmos of Desire a valuable read. JENNIFER A. TRAN, English, UCLA Leonora Neville, Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004) xi + 210 pp., map. REVIEWS 269 The author’s main premise in this book is that the imperial administration of tenth- and the eleventh-century Byzantium only lightly touched on provincial society, concerning itself exclusively with the maintenance of imperial sovereignty , the suppression of revolt, and the collection of revenue. At the same time, social regulations were undertaken by individual provincial households. Thus personal freedom in the provinces was constrained more by neighbors and rival households than by the imperial government. The novelty and originality of Neville’s approach to the Byzantine tenth and eleventh centuries is in focusing on the provinces instead of the capital in both her choice of sources and in the questions she asks...

Bessie Parkes's Summer Sketches : George Eliot as Poetic Persona

IN 1853 AN HISTORIC GROUP OF LITERARY VICTORIANS GATHERED AT THE KING'S Arms Inn at the foot of Leith Hill for a part of their summer holiday. A vanguard group of three women, Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), her aunt Julia Smith, and Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Belloc), arrived in the Surrey village of Ockley near the end of June and installed themselves in the snug little inn. After several days, during which they established an active yet restful rural routine, a party arrived from London to expand the group by three women and a man: Marian Evans (eventually George Eliot), Sara Hennell, Susanna Chapman, and her publisher husband John. (1) Most of the group who met at the King's Arms were writers. Leigh Smith completed and published her Brief Summary of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women the following year. Sara Hennell plugged away at her metaphysics and brought out Christianity and Infidelity in 1856 and Thoughts in Aid of Faith in 1859. John Chapman continued writing occasional articles, including, in 1855, an essay on women's rights, and, in 1858, his single independent publication, a seven-page pamphlet on Chloroform and Other Anesthetics. Evans also wrote noteworthy articles, the most important of them for the Westminster Review. (2) By the end of the decade she had become one of England's most respected novelists. And Parkes, although she later found her place in literary London editing feminist periodicals, at the time was writing both prose and poetry, including Summer Sketches, an epistolary narrative poem set largely in the Surrey village she and her friends visited in the summer of 1853. Despite writing four books of poetry containing more than a hundred poems, Parkes's verses, whether about Ockley or her many other subjects, never achieved for her much fame as a poet. (3) Instead, she figures in Victorian history as a women's rights activist, periodical editor, convert to Catholicism, mother of twentieth-century poet Hilaire Belloc, and early friend of Marian Evans/George Eliot. Her MP father Joseph Parkes commissioned Evans' first publication in book form, the translation of D. F. Strauss's Das Leben Jesu, which appeared in 1846. Nine years later, she and Barbara Leigh Smith took the unusual course of failing to ostracize their friend after her scandalous elopement to Germany with George Henry Lewes. Continually, Parkes prodded Evans/Eliot to show more of her feminist side in her writing and her life. The singular poetic achievement of Summer Sketches also proceeds from Parkes's friendship with George Eliot, for in the poem she follows her two sections of narration of events at Ockley with a third part in which she takes the audacious step of creating the future novelist (at the time an important London editor) as her poetic persona. (4) In the early parts of the epistolary poem, the letter writer, (Parkes) describes the creative activities, political discussions, and immediate surroundings of herself, Mistress Clare (Julia Smith), and Ella (Leigh Smith) to her friend Helen (Evans), still hard at work in London. In the third section, supposedly posted from London, the prosaic, moderate voice of Helen most often conforms to usual interpretations of George Eliot's positions, practices, and beliefs as described by her many biographers. (5) To the ongoing George Eliot biographical project in general, this voice contributes a rare and credible portrait of an almost-young Marian Evans/George Eliot as interpreted by a close friend. (6) Moreover, Parkes's plan for her three-part poem creates Evans as a presence well before she hands the narrative over to her, indeed from the opening salutation to Dear Helen. Before Helen/Evans becomes the voice of the third letter, she figures as the addressee of its first two sections. This arrangement implies that Lilian selects her topics to appeal to the interests of Helen, and these choices in turn imply that in 1853 Evans was, like her friends, concerned with theories about social reform, especially women's rights and improved education. …

"Little Troilus ": Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

"Little Troilus":Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde Jamie C. Fumo When considering Chaucer's debt to Ovid's Heroides, it is common for our minds to fix upon that work promised by a sheepish Chaucer in the first lines of the narrative implosion that is the epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde: "And gladlier I wol write, yif yow leste, / Penolope&eumls trouthe and good Alceste" (5.1777-78).1 Chaucer appears to have relished the tension availed by the Heroides as intertext within his work—its capacity to subvert, as it does the Virgilian veneer of the Dido story in the House of Fame, or be subverted, as it is by Chaucer's flattened and de-individualized reworking of the collection of complaints in the Legend of Good Women. It is doubtful, had Chaucer agreed with the many modern readers who find the Heroides to be thin, repetitive, even boring exercises, that he would have rechannelled them into his own poetic world as strikingly as he did, and in such writerly environs as Venus's temple and Alcestis's garden. Rather, I am inclined to think that Chaucer found many of his own interests reflected in what one of the most important modern defenders of the Heroides has called "a mirror of the relative nature of reality," wherein "[t]he world of myth is no longer reality or a symbolic reflection of reality, but to a large degree projections or extensions of individual minds" and each event "becomes a multi-faceted thing depending on who sees, experiences, and recounts it."2 Since Edgar Finley Shannon brought to light more than seventy years ago Chaucer's infusion of Criseyde's psychological process of falling in [End Page 278] love with motifs from Helen's Ovidian heroid to Paris,3 much of Chaucer's intertextual treatment of individual heroides within Troilus and Criseyde —a notably epistolary poem itself—has gone unexplored. However, in the intervening decades, our appreciation of the special affinity between Chaucer and Ovid has been greatly advanced by Richard L. Hoffman, John M. Fyler, and Michael A. Calabrese, among others, and our recognition of the "deep classicism" and complex intertextuality that permeates the Troilus preeminently among Chaucer's writings has been enhanced by the important studies of Winthrop Wetherbee and John V. Fleming.4 The present essay re-approaches the question of Chaucer's relationship to Ovid, as well as that of Chaucer's allusive style, by investigating the function of Heroides 5, Oenone's letter to Paris, in the design and structure of the Troilus. Though numerous critics have made passing note of Chaucer's curious use of Heroides 5 in two isolated moments in books 1 and 4 of the Troilus, and several have commented upon the irony embedded in these outof-context allusions to an Ovidian text that describes sexual betrayal and forecasts the fall of Troy,5 no one has recognized Chaucer's sustained and allusive use of Heroides 5 and its function as a metanarrative structural device in the design of the poem. The intratextual energy of Heroides 5 within Ovid's own body of writings has likewise been overlooked, and regrettably so, for it is largely this aspect of the Oenone story that attracts Chaucer's creative interest and structures his own rewriting of it. In the hope of better illuminating the often shadowy contours of the Ovidian contexts of the Troilus, my approach is twopronged: (1) to assess the details of Chaucer's reworking of Oenone's letter where it is explicitly cited and (2) to gauge the rich multivalence of the Ovidian text, its more implicit and deeply situated relevance to the design of Chaucer's poem, as an intertextual backdrop to many of the special formal and narrative qualities of the Troilus. Heroides 5 as intertext, I would like to suggest, is a microcosm, an epitome, of the action of Chaucer's poem. The Ovidian text acts in Chaucer's poem as does the symbol of "Troilus" in early tradition as Piero Boitani describes it: like Troilus—"little Troy," in his youth the image of Troy's vitality and in his death the...

Epistolary Poems of Love by Sakanoue no Iratsume(Reading)

Epistolary Poems of Love by Sakanoue no Iratsume(Reading)

The Vision of Love Universalized in Two Epistolary Poems of Miguel Hernández

The Vision of Love Universalized in Two Epistolary Poems of Miguel Hernández