Kind Of Poetry Research Articles

Experimental Poetic Practices in Spain

In this essay I explore a variety of experimental poetic tendencies produced in Spain during the twentienth century. Some of the most popular experimental poetic practices are visual poetry, sound poetry, phonetic poetry, computer poetry, video poetry, and mail art. Because these tendencies were not born in Spain we have to take into consideration international and historical avant-garde practices such as concretism, phonetic poetry, and others. I also study the different interests between multiple artistic languages employed in historical avant-garde poetry and in more recent experimental poetry. Another aspect studied is the political background especially in the sixties and seventies in Spain and how it conditioned the development and durability of different groups and artistic expressions. Another important factor taken into consideration is the use and development of the different technologies available. Technology is not a medium in this kind of poetry but part of the message and for that purpose it can be used in different ways in the construction of a poem. Because of the complexity of the subject, and the difficulty of getting access to rare books and materials I give a panoramic view - with special attention to selected poems and authors - of the most visible experimental poetic manifestations produced in Spain. But there is a need to do more specialized studies in order to gain a better comprehension of these alternative poetic practices that are becoming more and more popular today.

Momentary Stays, Exploding Forces

When I was in graduate school in Amherst, Massachusetts, over thirty years ago, anentire semester’s seminar was devoted to the poetry of Robert Frost. At the time, he wasconsidered the great man of American poetry. The peak of his reputation came whenJohn F. Kennedy invited him to read a poem at his inauguration in 1961. By contrast,Emily Dickinson was barely a blip on the horizon; she appeared briefly (in half of a onethree-hour session) in a seminar on nineteenth century American poetry. Both poetsclaimed Amherst as their home, Dickinson having been born and lived her entire lifethere, and Frost settling in Amherst as his final dwelling place. Today, there is what isbecoming a well known sculpture in the Amherst triangle next to the Dickinson houses. Itfeatures the figures of Dickinson and Frost in conversation. In the accompanyingphotograph, Dickinson’s rock is bigger than Frost’s, and the perspective from which thephotograph was taken suggests also that she occupies the higher ground.Both poets are, of course, wonderful in their own right. I do not want to suggest that oneis “better” than the other. But I am interested in exploring their differences from acognitive linguistics perspective; how their poetics results in a different kind of poetry;and perhaps to suggest what it is that makes people all over the world revere Dickinson’spoetry the way they do. For Dickinson’s reputation has steadily grown since my graduatedays, and has surpassed Frost’s.Recent work in cognitive linguistics has explored ways in which it might inform literarycriticism (Crane and Richardson 1999), and literary scholars have begun to applycognitive principles to the interpretation of literary texts. Among the several contributionsa cognitive linguistic approach has already made to literary studies are Donald C.

The Shaping of Gary Snyder's Ecological Consciousness

The Shaping of Gary Snyder's Ecological Consciousness Ayako Takahashi Lay down these wordsBefore your mind like rocks. (Riprap 32) Gary Snyder has been a cultural bridge between East and West since the late 1950's.1 Together with Allen Ginsberg—who was widely known as a "Beat" poet, read "Howl" at Six Gallery in 1955, and who was deeply affected by Eastern philosophy and the Buddhist poet Phillip Wheren—Snyder turned to Eastern Philosophy for his poetic inspiration. His poetry and essays examine various critical concerns, and recently many studies have been done, from critical and anthropological angles, as well as from the view of "an ecological consciousness." Consequently, Gary Snyder is being placed in the tradition of Robert Bly and Ezra Pound, and he has attracted the attention of comparatists in China, who are interested in the influences of Zen, Taoism, Hua-yen Buddhism and Cathay's upon his work. Snyder's poetic identification of the mind with things, as we read in the poem "Riprap" and others, may derive from his interest in Hua-yen Buddhism. According to this philosophy, the metaphor for the interconnectedness of nature is "the jeweled net of Indra" and is mirrored in ecological images. Robert Kern has shown Hua-yen Buddhism, especially Avatamsaka and "the jeweled net," has a prominent place in Snyder's ecological consciousness.2 Avatamsaka, as Snyder uses it, means "Flower Wreath"—a flower crown or flower earrings. It is the original name of Hua-yen Buddhism, according to "Hua-yen" a Tibetan translation of Hua-yen Buddhism, and it is symbolized literally by Hua-yen (). Likewise, the "jeweled net of Indra" that Snyder sometimes uses comes from the Hua-yen idea, , and its represents infinitely crossing relationships and the interconnectedness of all things. There is also a similarity between Snyder's principle and the Hua-yen Buddhist view, "." In [End Page 314] the Hua-yen Buddhist view, the realm of truth is called "." "" means things and truth; "" teaches us the relationships between things and truth. Among "," in "" is the world of affairs, in "" is the world of reason, in "" is the relationship between things and mind, in "" is the relationships between things and things. This interrelatedness is the essence of Snyder's ecological consciousness. In Snyder's worldview, this ecological consciousness leads to a new definition of humanism and of democracy. Wai-lim Yip argues that, for Snyder, the underlying principle is the complete awareness of all beings in nature as "self-so-complete" or tzu-jan (), as the Taoists and the Ch'an Buddhists would say.3 According to Snyder's philosophy, the identification of things with the mind does not amount to humanism, rather it is the result of "human-centeredness," a radical form of "de-humanism." This view represents the complete transition from a human-centered to an all-creature-centered—including non-human—nature. I: Capturing Things and the Mind In 1912, Ezra Pound listed as the principles of the aesthetic, direct treatment of the "things," whether subjective or objective, the use of absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and composition in the sequence of musical phrases.4 John Gould Fletcher tells in the preface to Goblins and Pagodas (1916) of the "doctrine of the interdependence of man and inanimate nature" which he hoped to make use of in his poetry. He felt that if he could "link up" his personality with the essence of the objective world, he might "evoke a soul" out of inanimate nature and thereby produce a rich and new kind of poetry.5 Needless to say, the haiku form had influences upon the Imagists, and Fletcher emphasizes that this influence explains the short, concise form of Imagist poetry, which nonetheless demonstrates an intense experience of nature. This is significantly different from Romanticism, which searched for the ideal of God in nature, because it could find different relationships between nature and humanity. In his first volume of poems, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Snyder wrote some Imagistic poems. However, Snyder is clearly different from his predecessors; he doesn't use nature as a means of expression, but instead as a personal experience. For example, Snyder...

African Musical Rhythm and Poetic Imagination: A Phono Stylistic Interpretation of Clark-Bekederemo's "Return of the Fishermen"

African Musical Rhythm and Poetic Imagination:A Phono Stylistic Interpretation of Clark-Bekederemo's "Return of the Fishermen" Luke Eyoh John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo (formerly John Pepper Clark) is a well-known Nigerian poet and playwright. Born of Ijọ/Urhobo parentage in 1935, Clark-Bekederemo hails from Delta State of Nigeria. Most of his poems and plays reflect this riverain background. Apart from his many plays, Clark-Bekederemo has had one hundred sixty-one (161) published poems to his credit. These are contained in five volumes, namely, Poems (1962), A Reed in the Tide (1965), Casualties (1970), State of the Union (1985), and Mandela and Other Poems (1988). This study focuses on his first volume, Poems, specifically, on "Return of the Fishermen." It applies the notion of African musical rhythm (within the framework of phono stylistics) to the interpretation of the poem, which some critics have either dismissed as meaningless or have interpreted amiss. Clark-Bekederemo has enjoyed reasonable critical attention as a poet. Critical works on his poetry exist mainly in the forms of books, book sections/chapters, and journal articles. Few of these works, however, issue from a stylistic/phono stylistic perspective. In his book, J. P. Clark, Robert M. Wren, for example, relies mainly on historical and political incidents as well as social and physical setting for his analysis and interpretation of Clark-Bekederemo's poems. The result is an analysis/interpretation based solely on historical, social, political, and ecological dynamics but devoid of poetic/aesthetic devices deployed by the poet. Similarly, I. I. Elimimian in his full-length book on Clark-Bekederemo's poetry does not leave the reader in doubt about the fact that he does not approach the book's subject from a stylistic standpoint (vii). This point is clearly demonstrated by him in his treatment of "Return of the Fishermen," an issue to which we shall return shortly. In his Three Nigerian Poets, a major section of which focuses on J. P. Clark-Bekederemo's poetry, N. J. Udoeyop recommends the use of "form [. . . .] language and diction to evaluate our literature" (15); he does not, however, apply these stylistic devices in his treatment of Clark Bekederemo's poems but relies mainly on politicohistorical details. Udoeyop, however, gives insight into the deployment of phono stylistic features in Clark-Bekederemo's poetry and explains the source of such features. He does this by citing Clark's article "Another Kind of Poetry" in which the poet compares English poetry, especially that of the Romantic and Victorian eras, to the udje poetry of the Urhobo people of Nigeria. In English poetry, according to Clark in this article, a system of punctuation, a convention of typographical arrangement, and a convention of stress form the main mechanics of poetry. By contrast, the udje poetry of the Urhobo [End Page 105] has the effect of words issuing from the mouth to delight the ear and stir the human frame in interplay with others in a close audience. Its rhythm is one of common speech [. . .] which drawing from special vocabulary tends towards the twin dialects [. . .] that many Urhobo regard as the most musical and ornate version of their tongue. That common speech impregnates the poetry all the way by the melody line of the song that is [. . .] the poem, so that a piece comes to be loved as much for its melody as for the content of its words. (qtd. in Udoeyop 86) Udje poetry, Clark says, is rich in "teeming tonal clusters and vowel harmonies, flights of phraseology and semantic glides that simply take breath away [. . .] assonance and alliteration occur in plenty" (Udoeyop 86). As Udoeyop rightly observes, "Clark [. . .] writes in alliterative style" not only because he wants to achieve the musical effect that he cherishes in Udje poetry, but also because he wants "to preserve a native style" (86-87). There is no doubt that the alliterative device as well as the musical rhythm of udje poetry as described by Clark has significantly characterized much of Clark's poetry in English, as a study of many of his poems, including "Return of the Fishermen," reveals. Reliance on politicohistorical details also informs R. N. Egudu's two critical works in...

Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets by Leonard M. Scigaj

B o o k R e v i e w s Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. By Leonard M. Scigaj. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. 336 pages, $34.95. Reviewed by John P. O’Grady Allegheny College Here is an unusual book of literary criticism. It urges readers to distinguish between two kinds of poetry in order to set the stage for an epic intellectual and aesthetic battle. On the one side, we have “ecopoetry,” a form that Leonard Scigaj believes sustains the environment. Such poetry, according to the dust jacket, is characterized by its insistence that “the interests of humans be balanced with the needs of nature.” Scigaj’s ecopoets are A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder. These are the good guys. On the other side is “unsustainable poetry,” or, as Scigaj likes to call it, “establish' ment poetry.” This form ofverse “systematically naturalizes nature into reliably benign, National Park landscapes and regularly sanitizes the text by systemat­ ically editing out specific social and economic concerns, while restricting interest to aesthetics and language theory” (79). Representative figures in this camp are Jorie Graham and Robert Hass. Call them the bad guys. Sustainable Poetry then reads like an ecocritical psychomachia. Sort of. As much as a brawling Roberta Lavadour. THE ART OF ANGLING. 1999. Photograph of “Artist’s Book.” 5" x 6". Courtesy of the artist. The cover is composed of hand­ made paper and the book contains an extended passage from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1678). B o o k R e v ie w s 3 0 5 knock-down, drag-out between the forces of good and evil can drive the plot in medieval allegories and Hollywood movies, it is a risky strategy for literary criticism, especially when Robert Hass (or his writing) is cast as a villain. Don’t get me wrong; there is much to admire about Sustainable Poetry, not the least of which are its author’s erudition and passion for his subject. This book makes a valiant attempt to press further into the philosophical territory opened up by David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996). Scigaj has ren­ dered ecocriticism a noble service by immersing himself in the philosophy of phenomenology to see what it might offer environmental literary studies. After all, the dirty little secret is that ecocriticism, since its inception, has been want­ ing a sound philosophical base from which it might offer a genuine critique rather than merely pan through literary texts for ideological gold. The first two chapters of Sustainable Poetry are a well-researched, albeit densely written, endeavor to establish a philosophically informed ecocriticism. Unfortunately, when Scigaj resorts to dubious coinages such as “référance”— a cognitive process he says “turns the reader’s gaze toward an apprehension of the cyclic processes of wild nature after a self-reflexive recognition of the limits (the sous rature) of language”— to explain how ecopoetry works, I for one am at a loss to gauge the success of his project (38). I need a field guide so I can identify this “référance” when I encounter it in a poem, if not out there in nature itself; this book does not provide it. And when I read a sentence like “For ecopoets language is an instrument that the poet continually refurbishes to articulate his originary experience in nature,” I begin to wonder if anything is being said at all (29). The analyses that follow— contained in long chapters devoted to the work of each of the four ecopoets— add little to the theorizing that precedes them. Scigaj’s prose, despite his effort to read these authors through the freshground lens of “sustainability,” only darkens and obscures what others agree is some of the clearest and most accessible poetry written by Americans in the last fifty years. Ezra Pound once quipped that poetry ought to be at least as well written as prose; the same could be said of literary criticism. If, however, the reader already has a fondness for any of these ecopoets, some delight is to be had in revisiting their words through Scigaj’s book, as when...

Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature

Barbara Guest. Rocks on a Platter: on Literature. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Rocks on a Platter contains some of Barbara Guest's most obscure and compelling lines since Defensive Rapture (1993). It has been interpreted by other reviewers as one long poem that examines the implacable poet as subject and vector in the process of creative production. While that may be the case, these poems are also literally notes on literature, as its subtitle suggests. The book can be seen as Guest's own jottings in response to her inspiring and eclectic research, with texts dissected and arranged to become poetic objects resonating as in a still-life painting. Guest was one of the central members of the New York School, though David Lehman (in The Last Avant-Garde) omits her in favor of an unnecessarily reductive, masculine view of the group. It could be argued that Guest's work, and perhaps Guest herself, is more radically individual, and less easily summarized. Canonical practices have typically excluded such writers in favor of more homogenous categorization. While this tendency has long been under critical scrutiny, the practice of dropping particularly influential, but often more clairvoyant poets from critical schema persists (see, for instance Alan Kaufman's omission of Edward Dorn and his connections to Black Mountain and the Beats from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry). But what critics fail to recognize or like to forget is how different kinds of poets still speak to each other, still have friendships and discussions that are crucial to artistic germination whether or not they share the same aesthetics. The best poetry demonstrates this kind of complex engagement with different kinds of poetry and with a greater, interdisciplinary community. Most recently, Guest's work has been noted as one of the foundational influences for what could be considered a feminist wing of postL=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets such as Kathleen Fraser, Brenda Hillman, Meimei Berssenbrugge, Lisa Jarnot, Juliana Spahr, and Jena Osman. Intrinsic to the New York School's poetics was a fundamental crossfertilization with the visual arts. Painters such as Motherwell, Freilicher, and Rivers were just a few of those whose work and ideas coalesced with those of the poets. Frank O'Hara worked at MOMA and Ashbery worked as an art critic, as did Guest. Her own work often achieves a kind of poetic equivalent to Abstract Expressionism, forcing the literary critic to work with the vocabulary of the art critic: abstraction replaces representation, patina replaces simple imagery, chiaroscuro, diction. Her poetry reveals a primacy of page as canvas that draws from modernist sources, yet achieves a texture which is distinctly postmodern in its absence of a central, controlling ego. That Guest is the artist of the collage on the cover of Rocks on a Platter confirms that her close relationship to the visual arts and to artists is one of the fertile resources of her work. The collage is composed of several subtle, textured surfaces in nearly indistinguishable tones of gray, black, white, and beige. The collage, like the poetry, appears to be composed of shadows, of water and sand as much as of paper. Placement here is as imbued with meaning as the weighty rocks. This cover evokes sculpture: nature placed on a created surface. Rocks on a Platter is concerned with nature and the natural world, from the flotsam of the world of appearances to its wet earth. One vision which emerges from these Notes is that of the natural world as element and object, as force and life, animate and inanimate. Land is both ship's destiny or conquest and the very limits of language, ground is earth and page: The book begins with the aqueous beginnings of earth, with Dreams set by / typography like a ship in an immense sea. …

To Hear Ourselves as Others Hear Us: Towards an Anthology of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry in German

By the time he came to write 'A Word to the Wise', his afterword to the fourth issue of Poetry Scotland which he guest-edited in 1949, the focus and dynamism of Hugh MacDiarmid's radical aesthetics had more or less completed their transition towards an open-ended exploration of what he called the 'potentialities of poetry in relation to science and to politics and economics' (p. 44), a field of engagement which promised to fuel his continuing demand for a totalizing, yet synthetic, 'world language' from which no aspect of life or knowledge would be excluded. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, MacDiarmid's customary epistemological gigantism is accompanied in his short essay by a number of reservations regarding the course of the Lallans project, a movement that owed much to MacDiarmid's energy as a poet and propagandist, and which had provided much of the drive and symbolic depth for the Scottish Renaissance as a whole. 'Great though the achievements of the new Lallans poets may be', he wrote, 'their ambitions have remained far too modest, and they have scarcely shown an indication yet of recognising the tremendous potentialities of their medium' (p. 44). Statements of this kind, in which MacDiarmid seemed to suggest that the production of his fellow poets did not meet the high standards set by his own verse, might easily suggest that his Modernist activism barely concealed his inclination towards self-aggrandisement. What I think MacDiarmid's criticisms appropriate or not reveal more than anything else, however, is the compulsion felt by the author of the first part of 'The Kind of Poetry I Want' (published in 1943) and of 'In Memoriam James Joyce' (written in the 1930s and early 1940s) to reassert as forcefully as possible what he saw as the international and Modern scope of the Renaissance project underpinning the continued exploration, extension, and invention of Scots. Citing David Daiches, and prefacing his remarks with the caveat that what he had to say was

Decadent Trends in Hebrew Literature: Bialik, Berdychevski, Brener [Brenner] (review)

Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 350 Reviews For his part, Lewis can reciprocally rely on Zangwill. Thus there is a complicated echo among these translations, each of which bequeaths its imprint to its successor. That imprint is also the record of the translator's personal meeting with the Hebrew poet and his work. So do we need another translation of the Keter Malkhut? Well, why not? It would be easy to quibble with Slavitt for his wording here and there. More seriously, he has sent a difficult text into the world with few references to the world from which she came, let alone her indebtedness to previous sponsors. Nonetheless, Slavitt's rendition is overall a pleasant "read." The Keter Malkhut has moments of strange and wonderful kind of poetry. All three translations testify in some way to its marvels, even as they grope along the path to the royal palace of their source. To paraphrase Ibn Gabirol, some translations will be like blind men on this journey, while some stride unwaveringly to their goal. Still, for those who respect the miracle of translation, "it is all the same mystery, and if they each have different names, they all go to one place." (Keter Malkhut, section III.) By 2040, we will be ready for a new companion on the road. Susan Einbinder Hebrew Union College Cincinnati, OH 48220 seinbinder@huc.edu DECADENT TRENDS IN HEBREW LITERATURE: BIALIK, BERDYCHEVSKI, BRENER [BRENNER]. By Hamutal Bar-Yosef. pp. 416. Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1997. The subject of Decadence is timely for both Israeli and American culture. The acclaimed feature film "Eyes Wide Shut" has reminded Americans of Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna and of the role Jews played in the depiction of the darkness in the lives of twentieth century urban dwellers-living in apparent light but seeking secret places in which to avoid the glare. The re-emergence of Sigmund Freud in current discourse further enlivens our interest in decadence, and three prominent museum exhibits of Freud's life have enriched that discourse. Additional attention to decadent theme and personality-and the moral contrast with the hypocrisies of mainstream social values-became prominent subjects in two movies and a wildly successful play about the life and trial of Oscar Wilde. Hebrew Studies 41 (2000) 351 Reviews Israelis, for their part, are experiencing a renewed soul searching about their own cultural environment and about the role of "classic" scribes in adding unconventional themes to the canon of Hebrew fiction and poetry. Thus, Hamutal Bar-Yosef's book on Bialik, Berdyczewski, and Brenner and their relationship to decadence brings together two ostensibly disparate worlds which she links with both dexterity and first rate scholarship. Her book could be the ideal study for Israeli-American discourse-a discourse which too rarely engages intellectuals with shared concerns. (The problem of readership even for the Hebrew literate is another issue.) Historically, of course, Wilde and the trend known as Decadence had considerable importance for Hebrew literature, and Wilde's work was translated surprisingly early within the Yishuv's translation industry. For some readers, attention to the indulgent denizens of urban environments and the fascination with bourgeois arrangements remains a surprising little comer of the early Zionist movement which based itself on optimistic social programs and which attached itself to values which-though not "transcendant" theologically--certainly were understood to transcend (in the sense of over-ride) the pressure of quotidien life. Wilde's appearance on the Zionist scene is, on the other-hand, no more surprising than his appearance among the Colorado miners or Iowa farmers he addressed on his legendary visit to America in the early 1880s. But Wilde-inspired "decadence" is only one perspective on this wide ranging trend of the eady twentieth century. Bar Yosef describes an array of elements that found their way in one degree or another into the works of modem Hebrew's remarkable literary triad. Her four hundred plus page book peers into almost every aspect of decadence in the three writers and she traces sources of influence-its methods and its themes--challenging earlier critics to re-examine the significance of the works these three writers must have read. Because Bialik has not...

"My Hart Is Full, My Soul Dos Ouer Flow": Women's Devotional Poetry in Seventeenth-Century England

oremothers or slip-shod sybils, pioneers or scribbling poetesseshowever one regards early modern women writers, they have undoubtedly become a dramatic feature in the literary landscape in recent years.' Our reading and teaching, and our debating of such issues as authorship, texts, cultural and historical contexts, literary canons and critical judgments, have all been affected by the (re)discovery and (re)evaluation of the work of women writers. We are beginning to have adequate answers to a number of fundamental questions: In what contexts could and did women write poetry, and what kinds of verse did they produce? What did it mean to be a poet in this particular historical period, particularly as a woman, and what specific circumstances could lead women to put pen to paper? There are several related issues that also require further attention. For example, what were the significant influences upon the work of early modern women poets; in what communities did they function as writers, and by whom were they read-if at all? Such questions hover behind all the essays in this volume, but my particular concern is to attempt some brief answers in relation to the earliest part of the period-the seventeenth century-and with one particular genre, devotional poetry, as my focus.

Walk-Out: Rereading George Oppen

To be read posthumously It will as a matter of fact happen it is a big fact It is a big fact which will happen for very small reasons. - George Oppen But what kind of poetry do you understand with one reading that you go on using and remembering all your life? I mean poetry that's most important to me is poetry that's been important to me for most of my life. I want to go back to it, and I find new things in it. - Mary Oppen On March 13, 1983 George Oppen walked out of a reading by Edmond Jabes at Fort Mason, San Francisco. question I wish to investigate is why he should have done so. An immediately plausible possibility is health. time of reading Oppen was seventy-three and would die, one year later, of Alzheimer's disease. Rosmarie Waldrop, Jabes' primary English translator and one of presenters at reading, recalls that poet's wife, Mary Oppen, requested they be introduced to Jabes prior to reading for fear he would not be up to entirety of event. I do not deny plausibility of this possibility. Oppen may have been easily tired, may in fact have been dying, but health speculation is no more certain or encompassing than any other speculation. If not health, then what? If not health, then one would have to assume that Jabes' work somehow prompted leave-taking of other poet. Further: that something about work proved to be so disquieting as to be unendurable. My investigation concerns that something. selections for reading were determined by Jabes' presenters, Rosmarie Waldrop and Jerome Rothenberg. They begin with very first pages of Book of Questions, including all of At Threshold of Book, jump to part five of And You Shall Be in Book, continue through parts of The Book of Living to sections from Book of Yukel and Return to Book. reading concludes with Drawn Curtains from first part of latter title. penultimate lines are: ('Death will get better of me. God can only help me in void.' - Reb Zeilin). I was not present at reading. above account is based on a videotape from American Poetry Archives of San Francisco State University. George Oppen's departure is not recorded on videotape. camera remains fixed throughout on Jabes and his presenters. In addition to Waldrop and Rothenberg, there was a third presenter, Michael Palmer, who provided an introduction. Palmer was aware of Oppen's departure but could not give an exact time. Rothenberg was not aware that Oppen had left. Waldrop remembers that Oppens were gone by intermission. question of why walk-out took place is displaced by question of when. When conditions why. My assumption is that Jabes' work somehow prompted other poet's leave-taking, that something about work proved to be so disquieting as to be unendurable. answer to why is conditioned by answer to when. I was not present at reading, and there is no consensus among those facing audience. Whichever moment might be chosen as decisive has to remain speculative. moment I would nonetheless designate as moment occurs almost exactly halfway through reading. moment I would mark with red is at beginning of section three/part two of The Book of Living, which makes up final pages of first volume of Book of Questions. moment of this moment is one line: The light of Israel is a scream to infinite (164). There is possibility that this was beginning of moment which culminates one page later with a statement attributed to Reb Rouel: The Jewish soul is fragile casket of a scream. George Oppen didn't scream, he walked out. He did so at sound of word Israel, at characterization of what that word stands for as an ambivalent spirituality. He did so at sound of phrase the Jewish soul, at characterization of what that phrase stands for as an ambivalent spirituality. …

Poetic Form in the Early Madrigal Reconsidered

The composers of the early madrigal used a wide variety of textual forms for their compositions, and treated them in a comparably wide variety of ways. While a lot has been written and said about what kind of poetry was chosen, especially as compared with other genres such as the indigenous frottola and the French chanson, not much as been done to coherently classify the form of this poetry. In the present essay each fixed form is studied in turn (ballata, canzone, sonnet, and so forth), as is the free 16th-century madrigale. I then propose a system to categorize the texts that fall in-between ballata and canzone and the free madrigale, placing these hybrid texts on a continuum, their relative position being based on how many and which characteristics of the fixed form they have and lack.

Value and Validity in Contemporary Poetry

Anthologies of contemporary poetry may not tell you everything you need to know about the state of the art, but they are bound to tell you something. That is their purpose. I bought my first such anthology in 1956. It was called New Lines and its editor, Robert Conquest, argued in his brief introduction that the work of the nine poets he had chosen for inclusion could be seen to restore 'a sound and fruitful attitude to poetry, of the principle that poetry is written by and for the whole man, intellect, emotions, senses and all.' And all what, we might wonder? We might also cavil at the phrase 'the whole man', especially as one of the contributors to the anthology was Elizabeth Jennings. Still, I do not want to score easy points against New Lines. I remain immensely grateful to Conquest for introducing me to work by poets I was ready to admire; and I was also excited by Conquest's determination to press the case for a particular kind of poetry, which entailed arguing that some poets were better than others. Conquest championed his poets on the grounds that their work exhibited a 'refusal to abandon a rational structure and comprehensible language, even when the verse is most highly charged with sensuous or emotional intent.' Even the nineteen year-old Lucas knew that Conquest was here alluding to the bad practice of those 1940s poets who took their cue from the bardic vapourings of Dylan Thomas. For that was how in the 1950s Thomas was commonly presented. Looking back, it is astonishing to realise how very nearly obsessed poets of the decade were with Thomas' supposedly malign influence. Nor was this confined to the contributors to New Lines. Charles Tomlinson, who savaged Conquest's anthology in a famous review in Essays in Criticism, soon afterwards published a long poem called 'Antecedents', a kind of Pound-out-of-Laforgue meditation on the plight of post-war English poetry, in which Thomas makes a key appearance as 'Rimbaud the incendiary/. . . the gentleman/. . . was dressed/In the skin of a Welsh lion ... //Last music/For the sable throne. (She comes, she comes!)'

II. TheEclogues

Pastoral as a kind of poetry is a paradoxical combination of apparent naïveté and sophistication; William Empson refers to ‘the pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple’. The pastoral landscape in its more ideal moments is the stage for simple country folk who lead an easy and uncomplicated life. But landscape and shepherds appear in poems written by sophisticated poets, whose self-consciousness weighs heavily on the figures who speak in their poems. The picture of an idyllic world often conjured up by the words ‘pastoral’ or ‘bucolic’ is a trivializing and selective simplification of the full reading experience offered by theEclogues. That simple image is presented to the reader in the first five lines ofEclogue1 in Meliboeus’ description of his friend Tityrus’ happy situation: Tityrus reclines at ease in the shadow of a tree, composing ‘woodland music’ on his rustic pipe and teaching the sympathetic woods to echo the name of his girlfriend Amaryllis. But this description frames Meliboeus’ statement of his own plight: in contrast to his settled friend he is in motion, away from the boundaries of the idyllic Never Never Land, which in line 3 is already redefined with the very Roman wordpatria. Eclogue1 quickly bursts the limits of a simple and timeless bucolicism to encompass the historical and social realities of the city of Rome, in the course of a brief exchange of experiences past and anticipated in which the humble herdsman Tityrus meets a man-god, and the smallholder Meliboeus foresees an exile as far distant as Britain (1.66), the limit of Julius Caesar’s imperialist adventuring a decade and a half before the time of composition. The firstEclogueis typical of the collection as a whole in this testing of limits and in the recurrent thwarting of the desire for fulfilment in an enclosedlocus amoenusor ‘green cabinet’. Much of the energy and interest of theEcloguesderives from the constant tension between the limiting case of a static pastoral ‘idyll’ and the forces that threaten to destabilize the idyll.

Dafydd ap Gwilym: Influences and Analogues by Huw M. Edwards

Dafydd ap Gwilym: Influences and Analogues by Huw M. Edwards

Homer with a Camera, Our Iliad Without the Aftermath: Ken Burns's Dialogue with Historians

writers of formal history has almost been replaced by the high stakes tension between sound, verifiable history, and history that can be rendered filmic, between the emotive medium of film and the analytical medium of history. The tension between the history we write and the visual mediums through which it can reach unprecedented mass audiences represents one of the greatest professional challenges of our time. At stake, simply, is the nature and quality of the national or social memory, the vast public's knowledge of its past. Good history has always relied on a kind of poetry among its best storytellers; good poetry has always instructed us about the past. As poethistorian Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1953, historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.' Ken Burns, the maker of The Civil War and several other distinguished documentary films, understands this mutual dependence of poetry and history. Burns has a deep and infectious sense of history, although he took only one

Toni Morrison's Sula: A Satire on Binary Thinking

Attempts to define Toni Morrison's novel Sula are as numerous as they are diverse. The text has been read as black woman's epic, study of female friendship, an antiwar novel, fable, an exploration of the feminine psyche, and a prime postmodernist text.! If one were to single out one particular interpretation and argue that were somehow superior, somehow right while the others were wrong, that person would fall into the trap of binary thinking is also what Morrison's text is about. Deborah E. McDowell explains further: The narrative [Sula] insistently blurs and confuses . . . binary oppositions. It glories in paradox and ambiguity beginning with the prologue that describes the setting, the Bottom, situated spatially in the top. We enter new world here, world where we never get to the bottom of things, world that demands shift from an either/or orientation to one that is both/and, full of shifts and contradictions. (80) In my own attempt to describe Sula, will expand upon McDowell's thesis and argue that the novel may also be read as an extended satire on binary (reductive, cliched) thinking. Because satire is notoriously imprecise term, clarification of its usage in this is appropriate. The traditional definition of satire as didactic art form was articulated by Horace in the first century B.C., restated and amplified by Dryden at the close of the seventeenth century, and upheld by several prominent theorists in the first half of the twentieth century.(2) In fact, as recently as 1985 Linda Hutcheon argued that parody should not be confused with satire, which is extra-mural (social, moral) in its ameliorative aim to hold up to ridicule the vices and follies of mankind, with an eye to their (43). Dryden's Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of (1693) has largely been responsible for this view of satire. As Dustin Griffin explains, Our reigning notion of satire as moral art and as carefully constructed and unified contrast between and virtue finds its fullest and most influential presentation in Dryden's essay (15). According to Dryden, Satire is kind of Poetry . . . invented for the purging of our Minds; in Humane Vices, Ignorance, and Errors, and all things besides . . . are severely Reprehended (77). This definition highlights two related points deserve attention. First, Dryden's theory of satire as correction and reformation clearly fails to describe his own satiric practice; and, second, is intended to describe only formal verse (or Roman) satire and not Menippean (or Varronian) satire. Regarding the first point, Edgar Johnson aptly notes that it is hard to detect any reformatory zeal in Mac Flecknoe and the booby-trap denouement of its coronation scene (4). The same may be said about the satires of Horace, who argues that his goal is to laugh men out of their follies - thus drawing attention to the moral aspect of his satire - but, as Griffin notes, Satire, as Horace practices it, is considerably more diverse than laughter at (8). In fact, contrary to what the satirist may claim in defense of his or her work, the satirist's primary aim has generally been to upset our conventional literary and moral expectations - not to validate them. Moreover, as John R. Clark argues, rather than attacking folly and vice, Satiric plots regularly dramatize the triumph of folly or vice (51). We need only recall the end of Gulliver's Travels - where Gulliver converses with his horses - or the conclusion of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue I - where Vice triumphs with great pageantry - to recognize the validity of this statement.(3) Furthermore, is significant that Dryden's theory is intended to describe only formal verse satire (as practiced by Horace, Juvenal, and Persius), and not Menippean satire. Like Quintillian before him and many theorists after him, Dryden draws clear distinction between the two satiric traditions - privileging the Roman tradition of verse satire established by Lucilius (second century B. …

Constructions of Venus in Ovid's Metamorphoses V

The fifth book, and with it the first third, of Ovid's Metamorphoses ends with a friendly visit of the goddess Minerva to Mt. Helicon, in the course of which one of the Muses recounts the events of a poetic contest which had recently taken place between her learned sisters and a group of nine mortal challengers called the Emathides. The Muse narrator briefly summarizes the song of these women, an idiosyncratic and highly irreverent version of the revolt of the monster Typhoeus against the Olympians, 1 then repeats verbatim the responding entry of Calliope (Meta. V 341-661), which documents the famous rape of Proserpina by Pluto and the wanderings of her mother Ceres in search of her. Most interpretations of this episode have quite understandably focused upon Calliope's song as art, asking what kind of poetry, or more particularly what genre of poetry, it might represent, and why. 2 Despite their close comparison of the episode with its two most famous predecessors, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Ovid's own account in Fasti IV, critics fail to consider the possible social and narrative purposes of a highly significant digression from not only the Hymn and Fasti versions, but all versions of the rape: Calliope's attribution of the rape to the sole agency of Venus and Cupid (V 359-84). Further, the representation of Venus and Cupid in Metamorphoses V, not so much as the inspirers [End Page 125] of love but as the Empress and Commander in Chief of an empire, diverges in significant ways from their more traditional depiction in Ovid's and other elegiac poetry. Why they should attain such prominence in Calliope's version of the rape of Proserpina, and why their characterizations depart so radically from Ovid's elegiac divinities, will be the focus of this discussion. I will argue that Ovid's elegiac and epic treatments of Venus and Cupid are two sides of the same Ovidian strategy, in the first case making a mockery of Augustan moral legislation, in the second launching a broader assault upon Roman imperial ideology. Two further digressions from the traditional accounts of the rape, Cyane's attempt to stop it and her consequent transformation early in the song (V 409-37), and the lengthy account of the rape of Arethusa toward the end of the episode (V 572-641), are linked thematically to this unusual appearance of Venus and Cupid in order to reinforce a correlation between imperial, divine, and sexual power that Ovid has developed in the first third of the Metamorphoses. Venus and Cupid, who do not appear to have been available motivators of the rape before this episode, 3 are here made entirely responsible for Proserpina's demise. Jupiter, the motivator in the Hymn, 4 is invisible until Ceres' traditional appeal on behalf of her daughter (V 512ff.). Pluto, blamed in the Fasti, 5 is merely an unfortunate victim of [End Page 126] Venus' ambition. Pluto has emerged from Tartarus to check for damages caused by the struggling of Typhoeus, with whose burial under Aetna (the traditional end of his battle with Jupiter, omitted by the Emathides), Calliope has opened her narrative. As Venus spots the unwitting Pluto she addresses Cupid (V 365-79): "arma manusque meae, mea, nate, potentia," dixit, "illa, quibus superas omnes, cape tela, Cupido, inque dei pectus celeres molire sagittas, cui triplicis cessit fortuna novissima regni. tu superos ipsumque Iovem, tu numina ponti victa domas ipsumque, regit qui numina ponti. Tartara quid cessant? cur non matrisque tuumque imperium profers? agitur pars tertia mundi . . . at tu pro socio, si qua est ea gratia, regno iunge deam patruo." "My arms, my hands, my power, my son!" she said, "Take up the missiles that overwhelm everyone, Cupid, and sink your swift arrows into the heart of the god to whom the last lot for the division of the three-fold universe fell. You domesticate the gods, and Jupiter himself, and the divinities of the sea and their ruler; why...

“We Two Boys Together Clinging”: The Earl of Surrey and the Duke of Richmond

“WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER CLINGING” : THE EARL OF SURREY AND THE DUKE OF RICHMOND S T E P H E N G U Y -B R A Y Trent University S o crewell prison” is a useful poem for historians of English poetry: Sur­ rey, always (and now perhaps primarily) associated with technical innova­ tion, is said in this poem and in some others to be beginning the tradition of the English elegy. But this is not the only possible generic description. The classification of “So crewell prison” as an elegy has, practically speaking, ruled out the possibility that the poem could fit into other kinds of poetry, and criticism has tended to concentrate on the poem’s connections to the elegy to the exclusion of other poetic and generic considerations. I want to look at these other considerations, to suggest alternative generic contexts for the poem in order to suggest alternative ways to read the poem. Although “So crewell prison” is undeniably an elegy, it is, equally undeniably, not just an elegy; and my emphasis here is on the poem as a love poem and on its relation to other love poems. The best way into the subject is to examine the different classifications of “So crewell prison” made by Surrey’s two most important editors, Frederick Morgan Padelford and Emrys Jones. Critics have tended to follow Jones’s lead in discussing the poem; I want to suggest that Padelford’s classifica­ tion is ultimately more helpful. Padelford’s edition of the poems of Surrey was originally published in 1920. “So crewell prison,” which Padelford calls “The Poets Lament for His Lost Boyhood,” is classified as an autobiograph­ ical poem and, as such, is grouped with the satire on London, the sonnet to Geraldine, “When Windesor walles,” “Good ladies, you that have your pleasure in exyle,” and others. It is not with the “Elegiac Poems,” a group that has the three tributes to Sir Thomas Wyatt and the sonnet to Thomas Clere. In Jones’s edition, published in 1964, “So crewell prison” is grouped with the sonnet to Clere, “When Windesor walles,” and several other poems under the heading of “Ethical and Elegiac Poems,” while “Good ladies” and the sonnet to Geraldine are classified as “Amatory Poems.” This examination of the classification of “So crewell prison” is, of course, more than a bibliographic exercise. The editorial decisions that I have men­ tioned are prompted by ideological considerations. While Jones wants to draw a distinction between elegy and love poem and to emphasize the ele­ giac nature of “So crewell prison,” Padelford sees the important distinction 138 among those poems of Surrey’s that are not translations as being between poems that tell us about the poet and poems that tell us about other peo­ ple ( “Elegiac Poems” ), about (presumably imagined) romantic situations (“Love Poems” ), or about how we should live (“Moral and Didactic Po­ ems” ). In Padelford’s time, literary criticism was, after all, still an enterprise largely based on biography. The autobiographical element in “So crewell prison” has usually been taken to be a reference to Surrey’s actual impris­ onment in Windsor Castle. This is the political context for the poem; the poetic context has always been assumed to be Surrey’s elegies and his son­ net “When Windesor walles.” While acknowledging the importance to “So crewell prison” of these contexts, I want to suggest a larger poetic context, one which includes both Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Surrey’s own “0 lothsome place.” The advantage to this project of Padelford’s grouping is that it suggests a way of looking at “So crewell prison” in which the poem can be read simultaneously as an elegy, a political statement, and as a love poem. The third classification— “So crewell prison” as a love poem — is the one that has been discussed least often in studies of Surrey. The usual critical assumption is that what Surrey felt for Richmond was friendship rather than romantic love, but it seems to me that this is not a distinction that can be supported from the poem. What Surrey does in “So crewell prison” is to depict his relationship with Richmond...

Benjamin Fondane and Romania

Fondane confesses that he sometimes feels distaste when making counterfeit coins for the ostriches out of millet and corn. The counterfeit coins are his pastoral Romanian poems and by ostriches he means his compatriots, who bury their heads in the sand, preferring not to know what happening around them. Already, here, we can detect an ambiguity in Fondane's feelings about his birthplace. On the one hand, of course, he feels tenderness, as he carefully validates this particular world. It the subject of Priveliti (Sites),' a rough-hewn native landscape, evoked unquestionable fondness. On the other hand, there are signs of a festering wound, the keenly felt scar of the incomprehension he has run up against. These ambiguous feelings color the writing of the anthology itself. The image I refer to suffuses the poem Parade, placed first in the book and casting doubt on everything that follows. For this poem a farewell to the poetry written by Fondane while he lived in Romania and used the name Fundoianu (meaning from Fundoaia, an imaginary village which the poet, actually born in Jassy, creates as his birthplace). His soul he proclaims wants to be filled with other words, with other fecundities, with other people, and with other idols. This volume, states the preface to the anthology, is by a poet who died around 1923 at age 24. Adieu to a certain kind of poetry, yes, but also to Romania, since B. Wechsler left the country for good that year. And yet, the bonds were not entirely broken. For proof there this anthology, which Fondane published in 1930 when he had already been in Paris for seven years, using the name Benjamin Fondane, contributing to important French journals, including the 'lite Commerce,2 participating in the group Discontinuit,3 and boasting of having come to blows none other than Andre Breton. From Paris he continues to provide articles and poetry to the avant-garde Romanian reviews, Contimporanul,4 Integral,5 and Unu.6 For a while he even hopes to become a correspondent for a large Bucharest newspaper (see the letter to Rebreanu,7 at that time the president of the Society of Romanian Writers). In 1922, a year before Fundoianu's departure, there was active anti-Semitic unrest. Future leaders of Romanian nationalism considered it the defining period in their intellectual development. The young man also

Zadkine'sPoet: ‘Ut poesis sculptura’

Abstract Modern art theorists have postulated the aesthetic sufficiency of sculpture as an art of ‘pure’ forms, but contemporary artists sometimes combine sculpture not only with painting but also with verbal expressions. The parity of the media is the theme ofa reputable tradition going back to Horace's famous analogy of poetry to pictures (Ut pictura poesis) which was later interpreted as meaning that painting was a kind of poetry.1 Painters were said to be poets who express themselves in visible images, but this definition was seldom applied to sculptors. Statues could be described as mute theatre or perhaps petrified dance, and non-figurative works have been likened to architecture which in turn is sometimes compared to music, but the notion of concrete poetry had to await the liberation of sculpture from the demands of lifelike imitation. The ideology of sculptural poetry had especial relevance for Ossip Zadkine, a friend of poets who himself wrote verses. In his poems he often conveyed his messages ...