Fusion Of Poetry Research Articles

05BH004 (1915–2019): Generation of Poetic Constraints from River Flow Data

“05BH004 (1915–2019)” is a poem that has scientific data embedded in its form. Historical hydrometric data were used to create visual constraints for this creative work, which is a fusion of poetry and scientific information that functions as an unconventional way to interrogate data, a science communication tool, and a stand-alone piece of literary art. “05BH004 (1915–2019)” is a case study in generating poetic constraints from data while simultaneously performing process through its poetic narrative.

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay Whispers from a Silent Past: Inspiration and Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay Whispers from a Silent PastInspiration and Memory in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard Chandra Owenby Hopkins (bio) The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. WALTER BENJAMIN, ON THE CONCEPT OF HISTORY Some names shall deck the page of history as it is written on stone. Some will not. NATASHA TRETHEWEY, NATIVE GUARD As part of the National Civil War Project, in the fall of 2014 the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, partnered with former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to stage her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection of poetry, Native Guard.1 Inspired by her youth as the child of a then-illegal marriage between her black mother and white father, Trethewey fuses autobiography with historical meditation on a Civil War soldier’s experiences in the first African American Union troop. Native Guard has been called “a play, a poetry reading, an art installation, a film, a diorama and an immersive experience for the audience.”2 “Theatrical installation” may come closest to defining Trethewey’s stage work, which defies traditional categorization. Trethewey was born on the hundredth anniversary of the [End Page 287] Civil War’s end, and her poetry in performance offers a wellspring for reshaping interactions in the contemporary southern United States. Employing Walter Benjamin’s image of the angel of history as an analytical touchstone, I engage the tension at play in the first full staging of Native Guard at the Alliance Theatre between personal and collective history, text and stage.3 Similarly, I draw on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s exploration of postdramatic theatre to parse the transition of poetic voice to fixed historical subjectivity when adapted for the stage despite multivalent staging techniques. Moving from historical event to author, performer, and audience, I ask: How might Trethewey’s poetry-in-production work allow theatre scholars to reconsider the foundational dialectic of text-based theatre and its alchemical move from page to stage? What new categories for praxis and study are mobilized by theatrical installations that blend fact and fiction, hybridizing the individual and communal histories of race in the United States? From these questions, I propose that even as the stage performance uses the exact text from Trethewey’s poems with words spoken, sung, and projected, including the beautifully sparse dedication, “For my mother, in memory,” the performance is fundamentally multivocal and in this aural plurality the power of historical question and discovery is unleashed.4 What start as Trethewey’s painful personal reflections become echoes of a larger history of unwitnessed lives and forgotten deaths. In the fusion of poetry and play Trethewey’s Native Guard offers a new medium for discovering the shared history that relentlessly shapes the present of the American South. To understand this new approach to historical performativity, I first consider the source text of Native Guard, and then I examine Trethewey’s fusion of familial memory with Southern history and the affective power of that collision in the Alliance Theatre’s production. Three conflicts drive Trethewey’s elegiac collection: race and the American South, the death of her mother, and what Trethewey calls the “historical amnesia” that has haunted the unmemorialized yet unforgotten black Union soldiers of the Louisiana Native Guards.5 The collection begins with an opening poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” and follows with parts one and three, which are primarily centered on Trethewey’s life, and a middle section of four poems from a black Union soldier’s imagined journal entries. Like the soldier she channels, Trethewey was born in the Deep South in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. Trethewey’s birth came one year before the US Supreme Court struck down antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia; her birth certificate, which lists her mother’s race as “colored” and her father’s as “Canadian,” echoes the criminalized ontology to which she was born.6 Trethewey weaves the dangerous aftermath of her parent’s...

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925–2006: sculpture as a fusion of poetry and place

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1925–2006: sculpture as a fusion of poetry and place

The Poetry of Theatre: L'Ete of Romain Weingarten

GENERALLY, CRITICS CHARACTERIZE Weingarten's dramaturgy as "poetic" on the basis of the disorienting effect his "ecriture" produces on the reader. Thus, Jacques Guicharnaud speaks of "'new chills'" the theatre of Weingarten has sent "down the spine of French poetic theatre," and Denise Bourdet, of a theatrical space where poetry breathes. From the same point of view, although slightly more thematic, Genevieve Serreau sees its poetic quality in its powerful feast of words, and she adds, "ce que retient Weingarten de la lercon d'Artaud, longuement meditee, c'est 'un effort unique, jamais dementi, contre louie bassesse' et c'est, reduit a l'essentiel, un 'esprit d'aventure' qui est l'autre nom de la poesie. These approaches, however, by-pass an essential question raised by the very nature and originality of Weingarten's ecriture, the dynamic of which resides in its fusion of poetry into drama. 4 By what process can two ontologically different structures-lyric and dramatic-merge into one?' In his essay I propose a reading of L'Ele-the play to which the author owes a great deal of his fame-as a possible method of identifying the ontology of Weingarten's poetry of theatre.'

The Poetry of Theatre: L'Eté of Romain Weingarten

The Poetry of Theatre: L'Ete of Romain Weingarten FRANCO TONELLI GENERALLY. CRITICS CHARACTERIZE Weingarten's dramaturgy as "poetic" on the basis of the disorienting effect his "ecriture" produces on the reader. Thus, Jacques Guicharnaud speaks of '''new chills'" the theatre of Weingarten has sent "down the "spine of French poetic theatre,'" and Denise Bourdet, of a theatrical space where poetry breathes' From the same point of view, although slightly more thematic , Genevieve Serreau sees its poetic quality in its powerful feast of words, and she adds, "ce que retient Weingarten de la ler;on d'Artaud, longuement meditee, c'est 'un effort unique, jamais dementi, contre louie bassesse' et c'est, reduit a I'essentiel, un 'esprit d'aventure' qui est l'autre nom de la poesie."J These approaches, however, by-pass an essential question raised by the very nature and originality of Weingarten's "';criture," the dynamic of which resides in its fusion of poetry into drama.4 By what process can two ontologically different structures- lyric and dramaticmerge into one?' In this essay I propose a reading of L'Ele- the play to which the author owes a great deal of his fame- as a possible method of identifying the ontology of Weingarten's poetry of theatre' L'Ele, to use the words of its stage director, "c'est ... le poeme d'Amour scenique de notre temps.'" Two children, brother and sister, Lorette and Simon, live in a house with two speaking cats with whom they communicate as though the animals were human. One day two lovers arrive as boarders, and their presence seems to upset the household emotionally. As onc of the lovers secretly leaves the other, 117 118 FRANCO TONELLI Lorette and Simon sense- each in different ways- that love is often coupled with abandon and that perhaps such is the lot of the human condition. As this brief resume shows, little in fact takes place in this play, except for a growing awareness of love as an emotion. The playwright does not really develop love as a theme, nor are love relationships explained in any realistic way. If anything, love is invisible. Its presence is felt in the warm still evenings of summer, in the strange sensuality troubling Lorette and Simon; it is felt through its dramatic absence, but never in a discursive manner. It is this lack of discourse that makes inadequate any thematic reduction of the play, short of concluding that there is nothing to say. Yet the absence of any omniscience is the very texture and richness of the work. This richness can be understood by examining the dynamics of Weingarten's art as it unfolds in the text of L'Ete, by looking at it not as a result but as a process. A poetic notion of destruction and re-creation, articulated in all its dramatic potentiality, will surface as the matrix of a new language of theatre. 1. The World: Space and Time In L'Ete, the objectified world is present in a naturalistic way, apparently rooting the text in daily and banal reality- a house, a garden with trees and benches are the representational symbols of an anonymous bourgeois setting. But no sooner is this concrete reality postulated than a process of rupture with the logical normal order takes place. This garden exists in a kind of limbo whose precarious ties with the rest of the world- such as arrivals or departures of characters, a parade celebrating an unknown "fete du village," the presence of neighbors, roads going from and to it- are never seen, only spoken of and often merely suggested. It is an isolated point, pushed in a far II distance- thus highly deconcretized- where the voices of common .P activities reach only sporadically. Here, space loses its traditional integrative function to become rather separate components of an unusual tension created by the subtle shifting from the familiar to the unfamiliar , from the known to the unknown. Furthermore, the house and the garden are in a kind of enigmatic rapport with each other. The house is never described or seen inside, for the entire action of the play takes place in the garden. When the...

The Music of Lost Dynasties: Browning, Pound and History

Ezra Pound's acknowledgment of his debt to Browning, the only one of the major Victorian poets he admired, is usually understood to mean that he imitated the older poet's vigorous conversational style and used forms adapted from the dramatic monologue. But he was also indebted to Browning's example for the dominant mode of the Cantos, the fusion of poetry and history. Aristotle, in distinguishing between the two, had conceded that historical events might be appropriate poetic subjects if they corresponded with universals, and Browning and Pound both felt that their favorite historical periods, at least, had enduring significance. Both poets responded strongly to the mute eloquence of old books, objects, towns, and works of art. J. P. Sullivan has observed that Pound was so fully occupied with that he seemed to do his work in a musee imaginaire.' After the first of the Cantos had been published, Pound wrote to Margaret Anderson: I desire to go on with my long poem; and like the Duke of Chang, I desire to hear the music of a lost dynasty. (Have managed to hear it, in fact) .' 2 Pound's feeling for was clearly his own. But Browning's historical poems, especially Sordello, and, to a lesser extent, The Ring and the Book, seem to have shown him how historical materials could contribute to the renovation of poetry. Like Browning, he believed that certain aspects of the past reflected his own convictions with special clarity, and offered indispensable chances for demonstrating the cohesion of fact and poetic imagination. This approach to had strong support among the Romantics. In arguing that poetry is superior to story in A Defence of Poetry, Shelley criticized strictly factual accounts as the moths of just history because they omitted the per-

The Fusion of Poetry and Drama in Blood Wedding

The Fusion of Poetry and Drama in Blood Wedding

Poetry and Marxism: Three English Poets Take Their Stand

It is about time that poets spoke up for themselves. And to-day the professional monopoly of critics is being seriously threatened by the invasion of poets into the jealously guarded field of criticism. They seem to be increasingly taking over the function usually assigned to the critic. Poets possess an intimate understanding of the difficulties of the creative process and the special requirements and limitations of their craft. Who has a better right, who is better qualified, to speculate on the arcana of aesthetics? In the past poets waged wordy wars in behalf of their convictions. Indeed, one could tentatively advance the thesis that creative writing is an indispensable preparation for the proper exercise of the critical function. Of the leading English critics—Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Pater, Matthew Arnold—only two were not also poets. But the fusion of poetry and criticism that is taking place to-day is of an original, if not altogether unprecedented, kind. Poets who have turned critics are interested not so much in appreciation, or even technique, as in the problem of values. Their major task is to achieve a valid philosophical outlook, a coherent system of beliefs.