Lyric Form Research Articles

Listening to Millay

In the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, presentation is perhaps not all, but it is supremely important. Throughout the 1920's and 30's, when Millay's fame was on the ascendancy, her poetry arrived in beautiful packaging: there was her tantalizing persona, at onee cheeky gamine and brooding roman? tic; there were artfully-crafted editions of her poems, always featuring that most cultivated of lyric forms, the sonnet; and there was her voice, which her would-be lover Edmund Wilson described as the source of her authority with her audience. Traces of that voice remain in recordings that Millay made of her work, and in the notations of many of her listeners who tried to describe her sound and her style of reading. Millay's voice was as familiar to her contemporaries as her extraordinary good forehead and mysterious mouth. What role, therefore, should listen? ing to Millay play in our current understanding of her persona and poetry? I will address this question by beginning to construct an audible Millay from the various remaining traces of her voice. I will consider Millay s references to the qualities of her voice and what she called her throat, and I will analyze public reactions to her readings. This material will provide a rich context for the second part ofthe essay, in which I will analyze her reading style and the arrangement of poems on her recordings in order to demonstrate the critical differences between listening to Millay then versus now.

Listening to Millay

Listening to Millay Derek Furr (bio) "Besides having beautiful hair, an extraordinary good forehead in spite of the freckles, an impudent, aggressive, & critical nose, and a mysterious mouth . . . I have, artistically & even technically, an unusually beautiful throat." —Millay to family, Sept. 17, 1914, quoted in Milford, 117 In the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, presentation is perhaps not all, but it is supremely important. Throughout the 1920's and 30's, when Millay's fame was on the ascendancy, her poetry arrived in beautiful packaging: there was her tantalizing persona, at once cheeky gamine and brooding romantic; there were artfully-crafted editions of her poems, always featuring that most cultivated of lyric forms, the sonnet; and there was her voice, which her would-be lover Edmund Wilson described as the source of her authority with her audience. Traces of that voice remain in recordings that Millay made of her work, and in the notations of many of her listeners who tried to describe her sound and her style of reading. Millay's voice was as familiar to her contemporaries as her "extraordinary good forehead" and "mysterious mouth." What role, therefore, should listening to Millay play in our current understanding of her persona and poetry? I will address this question by beginning to construct an audible Millay from the various remaining traces of her voice. I will consider Millay's references to the qualities of her voice and what she called her "throat," and I will analyze public reactions to her readings. This material will provide a rich context for the second part of the essay, in which I will analyze her reading style and the arrangement of poems on her recordings in order to demonstrate the critical differences between listening to Millay "then" versus "now." [End Page 94] Voice as Artifact As we shall see when we examine their letters, Millay's listeners assumed that the poet's voice embodied her poetry and her true self. This assumption is similar to that underlying the current compilation, Poetry Speaks, which suggests in its very title that poetry is embodied voice. That assumption was the subject of Derrida's deconstruction of voice-as-presence in Speech and Phenomena. The power of the voice, as Derrida describes it, originates in an illusion of unmediated presence. Having no "worldly form," the voice appears to issue from a true self, one that hears its own voice before speaking and is then heard by others. The voice or the spoken word, Derrida argues, appears to be the subject: "My words are 'alive' because they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at a visible distance; not to cease to belong to me, to be at my disposition 'without further props'" (Derrida, 19). However, when words are imagined or spoken, there is movement through time, suggesting to Derrida that voice and "self-presence" are traces, on the same field of play as printed words or perceived objects. The recorded voice is, of course, necessarily situated in time—the time of the recording and of the listening. If we accept Derrida's notion of voice, we might study the recorded voice much as we would a printed text, taking into consideration context and intertexts. When we listen to Millay, we hear her assumptions about what a poet and poem sound like, and we hear her audience, not only as ambient noise on a recording but also as instrumental in the development of her vocal quality and reading style. Such close listening, in which the poet's voice is treated as situated, cultural artifact, has been a focus recently in Victorian period scholarship. Most of this work involves an effort to re-imagine ways of engaging Victorian poetry, especially in providing insight into metrical and generic variety. On the topic of recorded poetry, John Picker's study Victorian Soundscapes is most useful. Picker analyzes the late Victorian reception of recordings created for Edison's phonograph, especially recordings of poets reading from their work. He notes that, on the one hand, Edison's representatives and the poets that they recorded considered the recordings a form of embalming: as they understood it, their voices...

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature by Emily Steiner

REVIEWS Heresies and Errors of the Friars’’ are the result of ‘‘dissident Franciscan presence in England’’ and have been hitherto ‘‘misascribed to the Lollards ’’ (p. 196). Helen Barr seeks to investigate the ‘‘Wycliffite Representation of the Third Estate’’ in an attempt to explain how the Wycliffites came to be associated with civil rebellion in the view of numerous , contemporary commentators, such as Adam Usk, despite the ‘‘declaredly orthodox, and even quietist’’ lollard views on social organization and obedience to secular authority (p. 197). She concludes that while lollard representations of the pious, simple peasant might be read as seditious, it is when Wycliffite texts ‘‘argue for the superfluity of the second [estate], or indeed its eradication’’ that they are closest to the insurgents’ polemic that would refigure the political community by consigning clerics to ‘‘the family of Cain’’ (pp. 215–16, passim). Mishtooni Bose’s essay sheds fresh light on the vernacular attempts of Bishop Reginald Pecock’s to construct an orthodox reforming theology in response to Lollardy. Her readings recover Pecock’s work as a worthy object of study and she draws attention to the multigeneric and experimental nature of engaging in vernacular theology, where ‘‘the literate practices . . . were not defined or controlled exclusively by the clergy’’ (p. 236). Somerset, Havens, and Pitard have done us a remarkable service in bringing together this volume, which demonstrates the range of exciting interests currently occupying scholars of Wycliffism. The volume should very quickly come to be seen as bookending securely the nearly two decades of research since the publication of The Premature Reformation (1988), and Derrick Pitard deserves unstinting thanks from all those interested in the study of Wycliffism for his herculean efforts in compiling the copious bibliography. Kalpen Trivedi University of Georgia Emily Steiner. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 266. $60.00. Emily Steiner argues that the identity of medieval English literary writing was shaped by a ‘‘documentary poetics.’’ There is brief discussion of PAGE 361 361 ................. 11491$ CH13 11-01-10 14:02:56 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Bracton, Deguileville, Margery Kempe, and William Thorpe, but the book focuses chiefly on the Charters of Christ and Piers Plowman and its aftermath. Discussion of Bracton’s legal theory underpins an examination of how the intriguing Charter of Christ lyrics exploit documentary relations of absence and presence to dramatize the continual availability of the Word made flesh. Writers and illustrators were fascinated with the material form of these charters, as evidenced by the manuscript illustrations reproduced in chapter 2, but Emily Steiner’s claim that this materiality enabled medieval writers to come to a self-reflexive understanding of the intricacies of subjectivity, lyric form, and genre seemed to me to be an overreading of the function of legal metaphor. In a later chapter, Steiner shows how orthodox writers policed these lyrics by inserting an intervening clerical voice in order to make sure that the salvific claims of the Charter were mediated through ecclesiastical authority. More heterodox appropriations of these charters used them both to show the inutility of ecclesiastical documents and to bypass ecclesiastical apparatus. Given this argument, I thought that the later analysis of William Thorpe’s trial could be pushed further. To my mind, Thorpe does not simply wrest documentary culture away from the archbishop to preach a sermon, but cunningly demonstrates that material ink, parchment, and rolls stored in cupboards are vain (in both senses of the word) ‘‘mannys ordinances’’ compared to the true sentence that is inscribed in the true believer’s heart. With Piers Plowman, Steiner offers an intriguingly bold and original reading of the Pardon scene, arguing that the Pardon should be seen as a ‘‘chirographum dei,’’ a charter that promises a new contract for the individual soul. Piers’s tearing of the pardon—in two—stresses Steiner, is not a crisis point, but an affirmation of the document through the process of indenture. Piers tears the document in order to witness and confirm its terms. This argument is heavily influenced by Augustine’s treatment of the ‘‘chirographum dei’’ in his commentary on Psalm 144. There are serious problems with this...

Language and a Poetics of Collage: Catalina Cariaga's "Cultural Evidence"

Catalina Cariaga is often referred to as a poet because of her language-centered poetics and experimentation with poetic form. Rather than a retreat into what might seem to be a self-indulgent language game, Cariaga's is resolutely situated in social, historical, and political. Her interrogation of language and form shares with many Filipino American poets an investigation of colonized subjectivity in relation to cultural imperialism, particularly imposition of Spanish and English on Filipinos. Part of this investigation entails poets' exploration of possibilities of using colonizers' language to tell another tale (Abad 3). While Catalina Cariaga's first book of poetry, Cultural Evidence, engages similar issues, experimental poetics reveals a new phase in development of Filipino American in both thematic concerns and technical strategies, especially in use of language to subvert ways in which of racialized and gendered Other are produced through a binary scheme of representation. Like many Filipino American poets such as Gemino Abad, Michael Melo, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Jessica Hagedorn, and Virginia Cerenio, Cariaga undermines English as institutionalized instrument of colonization and as model of official language of culture to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans must conform in their process of assimilation. (1) But Cariaga also seeks to master English in a way that explores alternative strategies for using language to disrupt what Susan Howe refers to as total systemic circular knowledge (28). Employing a poetics of what has been called Language-centered or poetry (Perloff 173), Cariaga subverts naturalized representations of race, gender, class, and culture in seemingly natural, authoritative language. Rather than relying on a conventional mode of narrative or contemplation by lyric speaker to tell another tale from perspective of colonized, Cariaga explores possibilities of collage juxtaposition while developing a language-centered poetics which enables her to accomplish more than what is possible in form of conventional lyric. By insisting on confronting ways in which language is used to colonize, racialize, and commodify Other, her poetics of collage opens up poetic space to multiple voices and languages and to disjunctive histories, allowing different perspectives, utterances, and words to resonate, generate, or undermine one another. Cariaga's poems thus enact a politics of writing by foregrounding structure, materiality, and signifying process of language in a way similar to deployment of language by Language poets, who seek to make the structures of meaning in language more tangible and in that way allowing for maximum resonance for medium as Charles Bernstein asserts (114). Cariaga's experiments with language and poetic form are a salient aspect of postmodern poetry, which Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue note, distinguishes itself from modernist by its refusal to naturalize language of text. Hinton and Hogue further note in their introduction to We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women's Writing and Performance Poetics, that Postmodern poetics foregrounds text's ability to explore material and signifying possibilities of language medium. Interrogating politics of postmodern poetics, Hinton and Hogue call critical attention to relationship between avant-garde writing and dominant structures of power, of white, class, and or gender privilege (2). It is precisely these possibilities of postmodern poetics that Cariaga explores in her poetry. She participates in and contributes to contemporary postmodern feminist poetics through her search for a new poetic language and form to articulate Filipino American and Asian women's multifaceted experience in contexts of intertwining histories, cultures, and raced, gendered power relations. …

Fluttering on the Grate: Revision in "Frost at Midnight"

WHILE EXAMINING THE PROOFS OF SIBYLLINE LEAVES IN 1817, SAMUEL Taylor Coleridge found at in an unexpected place, the section of Occasioned by Political Events or Feelings Connected with Them. In addition to providing his publisher with a substantially revised version of the text itself, Coleridge also insisted on relocating the poem within the volume: How comes this Poem here? ... It must, however, be deferred till it[s] proper place among my domestic & meditative Poems. (1) The new position accorded to Frost at Midnight in Sibylline Leaves, as the final piece in the section of Meditative Poems in Blank anticipates the poem's subsequent reputation. Critics have often taken it to be the culmination of Coleridge's achievement in his most influential lyric form, the conversation poem. Coleridge's preference aside, an incisive critical revaluation, begun in the early 1990's, has sought to re-emphasize the poem's political contexts. As Paul Magnuson has reminded us, Frost at Midnight was first published in 1798, concluding a quarto that also features Fears in Solitude and France: An Ode. Like the other poems in this volume, Magnuson argues, Frost at Midnight responds to the repressive political climate that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. (2) Much of the recent commentary on the poem follows Magnuson's lead in renewing attention to the circumstances surrounding the poem's inception. Judith Thompson has elucidated the significant exchanges between Frost at Midnight and John Thelwall's poems of the 1790's; Jerrold E. Hogle has explored the poem in terms of Coleridge's vexed attitude to the Gothic vogue of the late eighteenth century. (3) These studies have proven valuable by reinvigorating our sense of Frost at Midnight as a conversation poem, as a text intricately engaged with the broad social and cultural questions of its day. As salutary as this revaluation has been, however, it has had some unfortunate consequences, not the least of which is the occlusion of Coleridge's own conversation with his earlier self in the process of revising one of his signature texts. Recent anthologies of Romantic era writing--McGann's New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse, Mellor and Matlak's British Literature 1780-1830, and Jonathan and Jessica Wordsworth's New Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry--all provide the poem's earliest published version. The gradual disappearance of the final text Coleridge authorized should give us pause. Indeed, the editors of the Penguin anthology, while defending the inclusion of the 1798 text, express some telling reservations: Frost at is presented in the text of 1798, not because the early version is better than that of 1828 (it isn't), but because in its original form it is the climax of Coleridge's Conversation Poems, and a vital influence on the Wordsworth of Tintern Abbey. (4) Even given our current qualified suspicion of any aesthetic standards distinct from ideological ones, how can the presentation of a probably inferior version of a poem be justified? This essay will explore this question by considering the provenance of Coleridge's revisions of Frost at Midnight. It will begin by interrogating some of the more auspicious claims recent critics have made for the earlier version of the poem by contrasting them with more circumspect readings, advanced by Anya Taylor and Judith Plotz, of Coleridge's relationship to his son Hartley. It has become fashionable to assume that the fuller treatment Hartley receives in the poem's initial version necessarily indicates a more generous paternal attitude. The contention here will be that descriptions of Hartley specific to the 1798 text participate in a troubling practice of foretelling that Taylor has identified in Coleridge's other poems on his first child. Coleridge's revisions of Frost at Midnight read as an attempt to counteract this practice, an attempt motivated in part by a previously unacknowledged presence in the poem. …

Speed and Memory: An Interview with Jane Miller

I first encountered Jane Miller through her 1993 book August Zero. With a vertiginous lyricism, at turns sacred and profane, intimate and cultural, she managed to render an apocalyptic vision without losing an essential tenderness. It was a model to me of the possibili ties of lyric form, and specifically how I, also a western poet, might turn my gaze outward to the physical landscape while maintaining the imperatives of song. So too, her range?between love and dev astation, gay and straight, postmodern and tradition?offered a way to write poetry that evoked the strange trespasses technology bears upon the self. I found her inspirational.

Spanish Shorter-than-Short Fiction: Subverting Tradition

This article examines issues of length and proportion in very short Spanish narratives, focusing on a number of minimalist and antirealist practices that set the microstory apart from the canonical nineteenth-century short story, and make it defy categorization under traditional genres. In the late nineteenth century, the short story emerges as a fixed literary genre that reflects Spanish culture and ideas of the time. In contrast, modernist and the avant-garde short stories undergo generic hybridization and experimentation, oscillating between the norms of prose and poetry. The forms generated include the lyric tale, allegory, prose-poem, and other distinctive forms, such as 'greguerías', 'caprichos', and 'glosas'. In the hands of postmodern writers, for whom all genres are regarded as equally valid and may exist in the same work, the mimetic and progressive story is further subverted by non-literary media discourses and folkloric and subliterary material (anecdotes, sketches, parables, tales, allegories, animal fables, epigrams, jocular tales, jokes, riddles, etc.). This confers on them a new significance within a global culture that embraces post-humanist attitudes and virtual forms of communication. The microstory or fragment is an ideal medium for subverting norms of tone and style, spatio-temporal contiguities, and conventional perspectives and perceptions. Writers are able to manipulate these features of their work for structural as well as epistemic purposes, filling their creations with ambiguities, puns, contradictions, and discontinuities. These qualities of the microstory convey eloquently the unease, dissonance, and sense of infinite possibility that characterize modern life.

American women poets in the 21st century: where lyric meets language

Poetry in America is flourishing in this new millennium and asking serious questions of itself: Is writing marked by gender and if so, how? What does it mean to be experimental? How can lyric forms be authentic? This volume builds on the energetic tensions inherent in these questions, focusing on ten major American women poets whose collective work shows an incredible range of poetic practice. Each section of the book is devoted to a single poet and contains new poems; a briefstatement of poetics by the poet herself in which she explores the forces - personal, aesthetic, political - informing her creative work; a critical essay on the poet's work; a biographical statement; and a bibliography listing works by and about the poet. Underscoring the dynamic give and take between poets and the culture at large, this anthology is indispensable for anyone interested in poetry, gender and the creative process. CONTRIBUTORS: Rae Armantrout, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lucie Brock Broido, Jorie Graham, Barbara Guest, Lyn Hejinian, Brenda Hillman, Susan Howe, Ann Lauterbach, Harryette Mullen.

Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas by Roland Green (review)

MLRy 98.1, 2003 267 today, 'others' as well equipped as the current editors to handle the difficultvocabulary of multilingual texts in this specialist area of knowledge will be very hard to find. One or two small points: crabot(p. 109. 220) given as 'beetle' looks more like 'toad', cf. crapaude (p. 33. 290). Both are to be reduced to powder and burnt?a burnt beetle would hardly be worth the trouble. 'A mile-wey denotes a period of twenty minutes, approx. the time to run a mile' (p. 154. 80)?for 'run' read 'walk'; in 'casten out the wicke wirm' (p. 174. 113), the 'wicke' may well be the northern dialect 'wick=living, lively, wriggly', rather than 'wicked'. Manchester W. Rothwell Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. By Roland Green. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2000. xiii + 289 pp. $47; ?33 (pbk $18; ?13). ISBN 0-226-30669-0 (pbk 0-226-30670-4). Building upon his previous work, Roland Greene explores how the century following the clash of European and American worlds continually refigured that relationship through the Petrarchan love lyric. While epic, in decline in the early modern period, might be defined as exclusive and representative, the lyric was participatory and flexible, providing a space in which the dichotomies of conquest might be explored. Conceding that 'nothing about imperialism ever changed because of a poem' (p. 5), Greene demonstrates how in the sixteenth century a dialectical momentum was estab? lished through which the lyric defied conventional bounds to present internationalist and multifarious perspectives, representing both sides of an unstable imperial divide. The 'unrequitedness' characteristic of Petrarchan form proves the central element to the lyric's malleability, creating a discourse of differences in which iove' becomes an intersection of social, cultural, and religious forces. Thus the Americas become the autoreflexive, irreducible object of European desire that, while materially conquerable , are never entirely known. It is this association in its numerous forms that Greene demonstrates to be continually reproduced throughout the sixteenth century. Situated in the wake of the recent quincentennial explosion in studies focusing upon 1492, the opening chapter explores the assertion that Columbus was actively Petrarchan, resorting to a lyric model of experience when his received models failed adequately to quantify reality. Greene's illuminating discussion highlights the way in which modern versions of Columbus are the heavily invested consequence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideals that have created a 'Romance' identity which exerts profound authority over ideas of empire. Countering this influence in the second chapter, he identifies Brazil as the 'quintessential object' of early modern imperialist discourse and its commodities?in particular Brazilwood (or pau-brasil)?as objects onto which European power and desire were projected. In the third, the work of the 'first-generation' mid-century European poets is explored?in particular the work of those who belonged to the courtly diplomatic class exemplified by men like Thomas Wyatt (1503-42), Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1504-75), Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1511-64), and the younger Labe (1520-66) and de Cetina (?i520~57). Weaving them together into an increasingly complex Western European Petrarchan formulation, Greene builds upon foundations laid by Greenblatt to provide some remarkable insights into the work of Wyatt which demonstrate how interconnected this lyric form had become. It is a theme he carries into his fourth chapter, devoted almost entirely to a consideration of Philip Sidney (1554-86). Despite establishing a rather laboured connection between Sidney and Philip II of Spain and oversimplifying the profoundly important conflict between their two countries throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, Greene provides an intriguing reading of Astrophil and 268 Reviews Stella that explores the anxieties attendant upon expressions of imperial power. In his final revelatory chapter, the chronologically oriented thrust of the argument focuses upon the writer known as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (i539-1616), the mestizo child of both Inca and Spanish parents, whose work represents perhaps 'the last moment in which the lyric discourse that shaped empire could still be manipulated to work critically against its own erstwhile purposes' (p. 24). Unrequited Conquests offers a remarkable array of radical new avenues of enquiry...

Von Falken, Trappen, Eulen und Hirschen. Ein liederlicher Liebeszoo

Starting with some songs of the late middle ages that use the falcon-motif (among other birds), as well as a song about a hunt for a white hart this article leads to a description of a poetics of evocation as central to late medieval love songs. This is a recurrence of evocative and non-discursive modes of speech from early Minnesang, of which the falcon is an 'indicator animal'. Two basically different kinds of songs can be found: ballads, examples of an almost classical genre objectif, and, instead of the absent classical genre subjectif, a lyrical form which tries to achieve general appeal not only by leaving the identity of the speaker completely open, but also by using 'emotional cohesion'. This openness not only makes for a high level of appeal, but also guarantees a wide usage: the songs can be sung by male or female performers or groups before a socially exclusive or inclusive audience.

Wordsworth in his major lyrics: the art and psychology of self-representation

This text explores identity, role and subjectivity of speaker in Wordsworth's finest and best-known longer lyrics - Tintern Abbey, Resolution and Independence, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and Elegaic Stanzas. Because Wordsworth is most autobiographical poet of romantic period, and perhaps in English language, readers naturally take speaker to be poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, the poet in his own person. Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in characterization of speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical or cultural terms. Leon Waldoff examines critical issues posed by these different understandings of speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical I that deals with dramatic and psychological complexities of speaker's act of self-representation. Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldoff suggests that lyrical I in each poem is a transitional self of poet. The poem offers, in suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which speaker attempts to act out, in sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of self. In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, book shows that major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act of self-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and self-dramaticizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of subjectivity he represents. Waldoff concludes that Wordsworth's lyrical I requires a conception of subjectivity that gives greater recognition to its individual, psychological dimensions and to art of self-representation in each poem than recent Wordsworth criticism has provided. This book should be appreciated by anyone interested in Wordsworth or in Romantic poetry.

Seven Faces; Brazilian Poetry since Modernism

Brazil, perhaps more than any other nation of the Americas, has placed poetry at the forefront of dialogue and debate about the limits and uses of art, the social duties of artists, and the nature of nationalism and national identity. In Seven Faces, Charles A. Perrone charts the course of Brazilian poetry in the contemporary period through the principal currents, multiple tendencies, and aesthetic tensions that have made the Brazilian lyric so creatively diverse. Perrone introduces the most important poetic themes of the second half of this century with a look back at Brazilian modernism and the avant-garde legacy of poets of the 1920s and 30s. Brazilian poets, the author reveals, have long drawn inspiration from the other arts, experimenting with the inclusion of music, graphic arts, and other non-traditional elements within lyric forms. Relating aesthetic concerns to cultural issues, Perrone elucidates the major poetic movements in Brazil since modernismo: concretism and vanguard poetry, politically committed verse of the 60s, youth poetry of the 70s, the lyricism of Brazil's renowned popular music, and the rethinking of poetry through postmodernism in the final decades of this century. Providing a window on the ways in which poetry reflects a national spirit and offers a measure of the status of culture in a consumer society, Seven Faces is the only book-length study in English of contemporary Brazilian poetry. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of Latin American literature, as well as by general readers interested in poetry and its influence on culture and society.

Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet. The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony

The motet began as a form of sacred vocal music in several parts; a cantus firmus or tenor, drawn from sacred Latin chant, served as a foundation for one or more upper voices. The French motet was a well-established form by the middle of the thirteenth century, as were bilingual motets that combined at least one French and one Latin text among the upper voices. Though some attention is paid to melodic structure and the relationship between text and music, this book focuses on the literary artistry of the texts of French and bilingual motets, notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality. The author analyzes both the interaction of the texts within a motet (when there is more than one texted voice) and the relationship between the texted voice(s) and the tenor. Although some French motets employ vernacular refrains as tenors, the vast majority use Latin tenors, thus maintaining an explicit tie to the liturgical origins of the genre. This presence of sacred and profane elements within a single motet presents an interpretive dilemma that the author suggests can be resolved through an allegorical or parodic reading; indeed, she argues that the tension between allegory and parody is an essential feature of the French motet. The book examines the creative juxtaposition of sacred tenors and vernacular lyric motifs, and the resulting interplay of allegorical and parodic meanings, focusing in particular on the female persona as object of desire and as desiring subject, and on the motives of the separation and reunion of lovers. The author's analysis also discusses the links between the French motet and the secular lyric, the allegorization of love poetry in sermons and mystical texts, sacred parody, and the playful use of liturgical and biblical citations in erotic poetry.

Beyond Spring: Tz'u Poems of the Sung Dynasty.

This anthology of poetry from the Sung Dynasty, translated into English, represents the golden age of the Tz'u period in the 10th-12th centuries AD. These translations of an important lyric form in Chinese literature strive to capture the phrasing and rhythms crucial to Tz'u. Organized by individual poets, the collection includes an introduction to symbols and allusions which enables the reader to discover references in specific poems. The text also contains biographies of the Chinese poets, a glossary of terms, and an historical chart of Chinese poetic genres.

Generations "I": The Future of Autobiographical Poetry

GENERATIONS "I": The Future of Autobiographical Foetry/David Wojahn "When I speak of keeping the human image, I am speaking of keeping, not selves, but the value of selves." —AUen Grossman from The Sighted Singer ROBERT LOWELL, CIRCA 1962 or '63, is looking at the camera with the sort of fixed intensity that's displayed in so many of his photos. He's wearing the black owlish hornrims which were the uniform of the myopic early sixties, a time when the rose-colored granny glasses of the Byrds' Roger McGuinn and John Lennon's oval wirerims, shading acid-dUated pupils, were still unknown. In this particular photo Lowell looks uncharacteristically calm, his hair neatly brushed; there's none of the eerUy dishevelled gawkiness of his more famous photos, no Einstein-wild hair, no sense that he possesses a body always shambling and awkward, too large to fit the rooms that contain it. When the photo was taken he had recently released Life Studies, possibly the most influential book of American poetry published Ui the last half-century. I don't know the name of the photographer , for the photo was rescued by a friend of mine one day whUe she worked as a secretary at Harvard, and was asked to clean out and throw away some files. On the back, Ui faded pencfl, are the words Mr. Robert Lowell. The photo came m the mail a few months ago, a gift from my friend, and now occupies a space on the wall above my desk, along with various other icons—Akhmatova, Louise Brooks, Bob Dylan, Stanley Spencer, Frank O'Hara, MUes Davis. And of course the family photos: my father Ui his corporal's stripes circa 1944, my mother waving from the Perisphere at the '39 World's Fair, and the photo which would eventually find its way to thejacket of my wife's posthumously pubUshed book of poetry. In profile, drop earrings and a scarf puUed halfway back and turban-tike, she looks uncannily Uke Akhmatova; profile to profile, they face each other as I look from them to the leafless March trees beyond and back to Robert LoweU. The tiving have no place here, it seems. The mothers and beloveds dead. And the fathers. When my father posed for the photo before me—somewhere halfway 96 . The Missouri Review up the boot of Italy—it was nine years before my birth. And when Lowell looked up from his podium at the Woodbury Poetry Room, facing some now unknown photographer's flash while reading, perhaps , his new poem "For the Union Dead," I was nine years old. It would be another decade before I would hear of Lowell or read his work. Clearly LoweU is the other dead father, as he is for so many of the poets of the last two or three generations; he has bestowed upon us a complex and troubling legacy. He is both model and pariah, and his tics and mannerisms have been incorporated into our psyches so fully that we scarcely are aware of their presence. Without Life Studies, the careers of as diverse a list of poets as Plath, Sexton, Merill, Levine, Heaney, Bidart, Pinsky, Glück, Hass, CK. Williams, Sharon Olds, Frederick Seidel and Charles Wright would be impossible to imagine. One could also make a case for Lowell's considerable but less obvious influence upon writers such as Jorie Graham, Paul Muldoon, Carolyn Forche and Allen Grossman. Lowell's impact on these writers manifests itself Ui many ways—in a prosody which mixes various elements of traditional and free verse, in a sense of pubUc history's intricate connections to personal history, and even in the use of imagery. The most crucial aspect of Lowell's influence has been his creation of a particularly influential form of autobiographical lyric. The self in the world, and the self in relationship to its past are Lowell's principal concerns after Life Studies, and most of the significant movements m contemporary poetry can be seen as deriving from Lowell's approach to such concerns. The intensely introspective lyrics of neo-surreaUsts such as Merwin and Wright owe something to Lowell's attentiveness to...

P. A. Miller, Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. x + 236. ISBN 0-415-10518-8. £35.00.

Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness presents a model for studying the history of lyric as a genre. Prof Miller draws a distinction between the work of the Greek lyrists and the more condensed, personal poetry that we associate with lyric. He then confronts the theoretical issues and presents a sophisticated, Bakhtinian reading of the development of the lyric form from its origins in archaic Greece to the more individualist style of Augustan Rome. This book will appeal to classicists and, since English translations of passages from the ancient authors are provided, to those who specialise in comparative literature.

Die antieke Griekse ‘religieuse’ liriek

All occasions during which ancient Greek lyric was performed, were originally and intrinsically embedded in religious ceremony, but certain lyric forms were addressed more directly to some divine being in whose honour the ceremony was being performed. The spatial context of this kind of lyric performance was mostly a public gathering of officials and populace, and the content (references to ritual and myth), form and manner of performance (generally choral odes performed by a chorus of singer-dancers, accompanied by an ensemble of flutes and/or lyres, and percussion instruments) reflect this more ‘religious' and public nature. This broad characterisation cannot, however, be applied rigidly and consistently to the surviving poetic texts. In this article, which surveys the various forms of this kind of lyric, 'religious' is interpreted as ‘in honour o f a divine being' as opposed to a mortal being.

Entre o instante e o tempo: um poema de Cassiano Ricardo

The poem "Serenata sintética" by Cassiano Ricardo is analysed in its phonological aspects and in its imagery. The possibilities of narrative development in the scope of brief lyric forms as well as through the ideogramic method are investigated as mechanisms through which sense is introduced in the structure of the texto

Entre o instante e o tempo: um poema de Cassiano Ricardo

The poem "Serenata sintética" by Cassiano Ricardo is analysed in its phonological aspects and in its imagery. The possibilities of narrative development in the scope of brief lyric forms as well as through the ideogramic method are investigated as mechanisms through which sense is introduced in the structure of the texto

Die klassiflkasie van die antieke Griekse liriekvorms

Early Greek lyric poetry was composed for and performed on specific occasions. Instead o f a general term such as our 'lyric particular forms of 'lyric’ were composed for particular occasions and for particular ways of performance. In this article such distinctions as are encountered among the poets themselves, as well as the theoretical classifications of the 'lyric' forms in the Classical period (5th to late 4th century) as exemplified by Plato and Aristotle, and in the Hellenistic or Alexandrian period (late 4th to 1st century B.C.) - as reflected, inter alia, in the Chrestomatheia of Proclus (410-485 C.E.) are examined.