Poetic Activity Research Articles

Bryusov's Pushkiniana in the Perspective of Modern Cultural Studies

In the work, in the light of modern cultural studies, the literary and poetic activity of Valery Bryusov, a bright Soviet critic and an outstanding symbolist poet of the Silver Age, is reinterpreted. The material for the analysis was Bryusov’s Pushkiniana and, in particular, the article “The Copper Horseman” (1909) and the poem of the Soviet period “Variations on the theme of the ‘Copper Horseman’“ (1923). It is traced how the critic Bryusov analyzed Pushkin’s “Petersburg story” in detail, how analytically precisely he formed the main trends of the research discourse. The appeal to the system of arrangement of Pushkin’s characters explicated Bryusov’s idea of the antithetical confrontation between the autocrat Peter and the “most insignificant of the most insignificant” poor official Eugene. However, an analysis of the works of modern Pushkinists allowed the authors of the article to show that Bryusov, the researcher, was mistaken in his hypothesis of the “little man”. It is shown that the prototype of poor Eugene in Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” was his closest friend, the lyceum student Wilhelm Kuchelbecker. But the involvement in the analysis of Bryusov’s poem “Variations on the theme of the Bronze Horseman” allowed us to show that the poet Bryusov, unlike the critic Bryusov, turned out to be visionarily more accurate, intuitively introducing into the lyrical text the name of “noble Eugene”, the lyceum student Wilhelm. As a result, the difference between the poet-Bryusov and the critic-Bryusov is clarified, it is shown that the restriction of the poet’s freedoms in the Soviet years activated his intuitive vision of literature and, as a result, history.

Philosophie de l’hétérogénéité : échoïsation des langues dans la création littéraire

Philosophy of Heterogeneity: Echoization of languages in literary creation This article aims to analyse, from a poetic and philosophical perspective, heterolingual practices, or even the intersection of several semiological systems in the same text. In her book entitled Heidegger questions, stimmung, translation, poetry (2010), Éliane Escoubas shows that from 1935, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger began a study on the poetic work of Hölderlin which led him to conceive the act of translation from a broad perspective, not only the internal movement of thought but also that of the development and creation of languages and texts. A new path is then inaugurated in the history of thought as translation. This is highlighted in order to show the originality of the work of “translating” by designing language, shaping speech and forming the body of languages or even writing itself. To better understand this phenomenon, we rely on some reflections and practices that relate to the Maghrebi cultural field. From this perspective, it quickly becomes apparent that the translation paradigm should necessarily figure at the heart of any somewhat coherent critical reflection on the “Text”. In the context of literary creation, the act of translation does not concern questions linked to the comparison between the original and its translation(s). On the other hand, it will be a question of accounting for the writing when it is a translation, not having an original work of reference. This is, obviously, an approach which attempts to radically break with a certain tradition of Algerian criticism which often persists in considering the issues of poetic activity in the Maghrebi literary fields from an essentially (socio)linguistic angle. To reduce a text to its geographical or socio-cultural origin is to refuse to consider the deep complexity of linguistic processes and their historical development, but above all, it is to constantly force the writer into a monolingualism which now seems a conception which denies the interaction of different semiological systems within the same language.

Prozac-propelled Postmodern Poetry, Partly (II)

Conventionally singled out of the class of antidepressants, Prozac is further associated in what follows with poetic activity in terms of postmodern female identity. The two women under consideration, Liza Porter and Martha Silano, are lost and adrift in their stressed-out dysfunctional families, not in the least because of their mood disorders, major depression and respectively postpartum psychosis. Psychotherapy turning out to be inefficient for them in the long run, antidepressants or rather a combination of them come into play, and they restore a sense, even if more or less altered, of some poetic identity. In their interviews, they actually admit they are both cases of a definite progress from non-poetry to poetry. We will take either at her word, intent as we are on relating poet restoration to human recuperation.

Nightmares and Dreams on Progesterone: Trans* Embodiment and Intermedia

This essay theorizes the connection between trans* embodiment and intermedia, using historical intermedia practice and score-based creative practices by artists such as Yoko Ono, CA Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, and Allan Kaprow, as precedent. This paper describes foundational thought to my work as a trans* intermedia artist and serves as an introduction to Nightmare and Dreams on Progesterone: Action Art Scores for Trans Becoming; a text work of 150 poetic action art scores designed for, and birthed from, trans* becoming. Each score is generated from dream journal entries translated into instructions that complicate the art/life divide. As I began taking progesterone as part of my hormone replacement therapy, I started experiencing vivid dreaming as a side effect. As my body changed, so did my dreams. These dreams, from my own trans* subconscious and altered by transsexual action, often directly engage with my identity or arts practice as subject matter. When translated, the scores are written poetically and have a diverse range of abstraction, for example:
 Score #77: Fellowship
 Three queer people talk about visibility The most beautiful woman in costume makeup Takes several ladders to climb towards
 
 Score #58: Insane Clown Posse
 Come out to your family
 
 Score #69: Huge
 A trans woman Surrounded by other trans women All bathing
 I believe avant-garde art practices can be liberatory for trans* bodies and that this methodology and these performances have the potential to be instructional for other trans* people for coming into their identity. This introduction provides an intimate portrait of myself as an artist, including biographical information on my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) journey and how it has affected my creative practice.

La Beauté CONVULSIVE et les convulsions du roman surréaliste. Nadja (1928, A. Breton) et Zenobia (1985, G. Naum)

The CONVULSIVE Beauty and the Convulsions of the Surrealist Novel. Nadja (1928, A. Breton) and Zenobia (1985, G. Naum) The article examines some of the communicating vessels (« vases communicants ») between André Breton’s theoretical surrealism and Gellu Naum’s neo-surrealism praxis. The focus of the analysis is also on the intersection points among the two novels, Nadja (1928) and Zenobia (1985), defining moments of beginning and of the last surrealism. The aim is to determine the synthetic (theoretical and practical) manifesto of Breton’s novel, Nadja, and the pure poetic act of the last European surrealist novel, Zenobia. Although the correspondences seemed clarified by Romanian literary criticism, the present article offers a new, in-depth and contrastive perspective on the « convulsive beauty », from theory to practice.

Poetry and urban space: The Phalène as a poetic collective practice of placemaking and commonality

The article examines the Phalène or Poetic Act, a mode of poetry as collective action formulated by the poet Godofredo Iommi. The authors analyse how the Phalène opened a creative heritage from the early experiences carried out by Iommi in Europe during the 1960s to the current poetic endeavours of the School of Architecture and Design PUCV in Valparaíso, Chile. Through analysing the Phalène, the article provides new perspectives on the relationship between poetry and urban space. About this relationship, the authors propose the Phalène as a poetic act of placemaking in which the ephemeral presence of the uttered word unleashes ludic interactions in the participants provoking the construction of commonality and the resignification of the place.

ATANAS DALCHEV’S SILENCE AS A LITERARY-HISTORICAL TOPOS

The paper argues that the period of limited poetic activity of the prominent Bulgarian author Atanas Dalchev in the years 1945–1965, should be regarded not only as a biographical, but rather a significant literary-historical topos. This period, most often described as “Dalchev’s silence” by literary historians and critics, is often discussed in relation to the author’s works, and inspires comparisons to other Bulgarian writers, such as Nikolay Liliev. The paper outlines the origin of the concept, its development and interpretations in the years 1966–1990, as well as its transformation into a metaphor for civil dignity. It refers to comments made by, among others, Panteley Zarev, Atanas Lazovski, Boris Delchev, Milena Tsaneva, Svetlozar Igov, Georgi Markov, Edvin Sugarev, Bozhidar Kunchev, Roman Hadzhikosev, Angel Igov, Noemi Stoichkova, Yordan Efftimov and Toni Nikolov. It is revealed that the notion of “silence” in regard to Dalchev’s post-war works can only be used conditionally. The analysis allows to conclude that while in the years of totalitarianism the breaking of Dalchev’s silence was willingly interpreted as a manifestation of a public (and politically correct) position, or even a kind of enlightenment of the poet about the radically changed political reality, after 1990, conversely, the concept became a sign of non-conformism expressed by creative and civil bravery.

Literary and Publishing Activities of Poetic Groups of the Russian Far Eastern First-Wave Émigré

The material laid down in the basis of the article is drawn on various bibliographic sources and library collections (Russian State Library, Russian National Library, Research Library of Tomsk State University). The object of the article is for the first time to present and systematize the main body of literary and fiction texts of the 1920s–1940s in the context of publishing activity of literary groups and associations of the Russian Far Eastern First-Wave émigré. The poetic activity of this period initially realized itself through groups, following the Silver Age traditions, and creative persons brought together, as fate willed it, in the situation of “Russian scattering.” In this aspect, the literary group is considered as a sociocultural form due to the methodology of Yu. N. Tynyanov, B. M. Eikhenbaum and A. I. Reitblat. Such tendencies were most apparent in the second period of the literary process formation among the Russian Far Eastern émigré in Harbin, where “Young Churaevka” literary association (1926–1935) had a very well-thoughtout program and concept. In addition to regular general gatherings and discussions among like-minded people, the typology of the literary group includes public speaking and promotion of joint undertakings in the press. As a rule, the activity of any literary group or association is directly connected with some publishing body, so the defining genre of such creativity is a literary collection – the most flexible type of literary publication with all kinds and genres of fiction. All this outlines the perspective for systematization of collections of that type and revealing their common typology with the determining role of socio-cultural environment.

Negation in Poetics and Theology

AbstractThere is a certain parallel between ‘negative capability’ in poetics and negation in theology. However, the former should be understood after Coleridge, not Keats, as blending empathetic self‐estrangement with expressive subjective involvement. Yet this only makes sense in terms of a participation in the transcendent. Similarly, negation in mystical theology is one moment in oscillation with the cataphatic. Negative theology, so understood, only makes sense at all within a broadly Neoplatonic metaphysical framework, as can be shown both historically and conceptually. Neither phenomenological nor grammatical approaches to negation are by comparison sufficient, though they have their supplementary illuminating place. Today, however, we need to supplement the Neoplatonic metaphysical framework with a stronger sense that the mystical approach to God involves in itself our poetic activity which inversely has to be understood as participative.

Мағжан Жұмабаев шығармашылығының философиялық аспектілері

This article was written as part of the 130th anniversary of M. Zhumabaev. The article examined the issues of philosophical reflection of the work of M. Zhumabaev. M. Bekenuly is a poet lyricist and he is truly perceived as a single, public figure of the Turkic peoples. The poet's work is characterized not only by historicism, reflections on spirituality, but also by an irrational experience, abstract imagination. The article contains a study of the spiritual activity of M. Zhumabaev and a comparison of his works with the philosophical views of the German philosopher F. Nietzsche on art. A comparative study by F. Nietzsche on the role, specifics of categories of religion, art and philosophy in determining the cognitive actions of a person was used. The poetic heritage of M. Zhumabaev passed the test of time and proved its artistic value and synthesized the categories of humanism, nobility, happiness and pan-Turkism, pessimism and lyrical experience of the aspirations of Kazakh society. The article uses the hermeneutic method of contents of the verse “Prophet” and “Flood” to determine the philosophical meaning of artistic images. The revival of national identity in modern Kazakh society, the strengthening of independence aroused interest in the poetic activities of Magzhan as an object of philosophical research. The field of study of the works of Magzhan strengthened the spiritual, historical self-awareness of generations. She laid the groundwork for shaping it as ideological content of public policy. He painfully assessed radical changes in society, trying to comprehend the future of the Kazakh people and the tragedy of the rash action of contemporaries. The value of M. Zhumabaev's creative contribution for the culture and historical memory of Kazakhstan was analyzed.

YESLYAM ZIKIBAYEV'S LITERARY HERITAGE

This article will focus on the poetic activity and work of the famous journalist, poet Yeslam Zikibaev. In modern Kazakh poetry, the poetic specificity of the poet's poetry, manifested in its originality, is fully revealed, thematic and ideological features are revealed. The works of the poet Yeslam are dedicated to the native land, the Motherland. A thematic analysis of poems written on patriotic themes was carried out, artistic specificity was revealed. Beauty definitely shakes the soul of poets. After all, there are many writers who clearly reflect them in their poems. Yeslam Zikibaev sang of pure love, beauty, chastity. In the course of the study, the artistic specificity of the poet's poems was also analyzed.An analysis of journalistic research articles and essays in the literary heritage of the poet was also carried out. In the work of the well-known journalist, poet, publicist Yeslam Zikibaev, the criticisms expressed were summarized and assessments were given.

Margaret Larkin: Mütenebbî ve Abbasî Şiir İdealinin Sesi

This book review presents Margaret Larkin’s work, Al-Mutanabbī: Voice of the Abbasid Poetic Ideal. The work is a belles-lettres critique of a literary genre, the poetry of Al-Mutanabbī, which discusses the function of poetry in the Abbasid ideal. Larkin's interpretation of history, particularly medieval Islamic history, reveals the significance of contextualizing poetic activity in the 10th century Islamic court authority, as it is a disseminated media power and has an iconoclastic impact in the community, centralizing institutionalized power and supremacy. The author discusses several aspects of the poetic material in relation to the poet's life story, plight, and identity crisis, but also indicates its derivation from the political substructure, i.e., the Abbasid ideal. The political ideal is not a monolithic project; it requires an aesthetic vision and an attractive public image. According to Larkin's discernment, in achieving an Islamic empire discourse, the mobility of state power is grounded on the factor of charisma, the realm of which is poetry in the medieval Arab world. Larkin fills a scholarly gap in current literary studies.

Finding Bede in the “Lindisfarne” Gospels: Aldred the Scribe and “beda ðe broema boecere”

Finding Bede in the “Lindisfarne” Gospels: Aldred the Scribe and “beda ðe broema boecere”

The Superhuman Characters in the Prologues of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, Agamemnon, and Thyestes

This paper presents a new hypothesis concerning the prologues of Seneca’s Hercules Furens, Agamemnon, and Thyestes. It provides an interpretive alternative to the controversies associated with the current reading tradition, which places superhuman and protatic characters speaking in the opening acts of these plays on the same level of fictional reality as other heroes, or subordinates them to figurative construction. According to the proposed hypothesis, the specific nature of these three scenes may be the result of applying the convention known, with little variation, from several other dramas in which the ghosts disturb the sleeping. The argumentation emphasises the paradigmatic nature of these opening scenes, which end with a formula setting them at the close of the night. It also points to the fact that in the light of the new assumptions, these prologues — redundant in their expository and anticipatory function — play an important role in structuring the dramatic action. Moreover, in the context of the events that follow them, their content can be explained in terms of the dream theory known from the rationalising philosophical discourses of antiquity. Finally, proposed reading of these scenes is based on the assumption of continuity between the discursive and poetic activity of the author.

Obrazy zesłania – "Poezje" Tadeusza Łady-Zabłockiego

The author takes a closer look at the poetic activity of Tadeusz Łada-Zabłocki, who, while in exile, passionately and courageously cultivated literary activity. Presenting an impressive portrait of the exiled poet, she focuses not only on his literary life, but also on his translation work, as a translator of, among other things, communal songs of Transcaucasian Tatars. Łada-Zabłocki is also seen as a protector, promoting young Polish poets and facilitating the publication of their poems.

The ethics of poetic expression in Emmanuel Lévinas and Maurice Blanchot

Lévinas believed that Blanchot identified artistic inspiration with his understanding of the il y a, that is, an inauthentic attitude toward life and the Other. Lévinas, who tried to overcome the neutrality of the il y a, criticised Blanchot’s desire to establish ethics as a prima philosophia. Lévinas asked himself in what way the artwork could give access to the ethical, which is why he explored the relationship between expression and responsibility. He concluded that poetic speaking was excluded from his understanding of ethical language. Therefore, Lévinas was against poetic activity, in ethical terms, because poetic activity (dis)possessed the subject/artist in such a way that the creator was not able to control his writing, which converted art into the worst kind of irresponsibility. This paper will focus on Lévinas’ first aesthetic period, and on the ideas collected in the essay La Réalité et son ombre, published in 1948.

(Write it!) Like Disaster: Precarious Futures in North American Poetry

My paper describes disaster poetry as a particular mode of engagement with a perceived, negative rupture between present and future. Understanding “disaster” in such abstract and open terms, I argue that this poetry stages a tension of continuity and discontinuity in which the poetic act itself works against the very sundering it still posits. In making this larger point, I contrast two exemplary poems, Walt Whitman’s Civil-War poem “The Dresser” (1865) and Stephen Collis’s “Future Imperfect” (2021). Addressing war and environmental destruction in their social and personal ramifications, both these poems confront a present in which the future itself is precarious or even unimaginable, and they all act in their present to bridge that conceptual gap again in various ways without denying its existence or profound relevance. As such, they provide aesthetic models for a more wide-ranging assessment of how we imagine, speak about, and respond to disaster as a temporal crisis in which the relation between present and future is in question, as they engage with corresponding tropes of fatalism, determinism, uncertainty, agency, knowledge, hope, finality, and beginnings.

The Matter of Poetry

Focusing on contemporary long poems that use documentary sources, Michael Leong's Contested Records theorizes a genre he names "documental poetry." Taking a "cultural formalist" approach to these works, Leong brings rigorous attention to the forms, sources, and poetic activities of some of the most controversial recent poems including Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" and Kenneth Goldsmith's "The Body of Michael Brown." Ultimately, Leong uses documental poetry to argue persuasively about the nature, use, and relevance of poetry to social, political, and cultural life.

Les Muses incognues, 1604. Édition critique par Guillaume Peureux et Hugh Roberts

Over the last decades, scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry have shown a keen interest in the different forms, shapes, and moods of the French Muses: from Hubert Carrier’s Les Muses guerrières (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996) and Delphine Denis’s La Muse galante (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997) to Pascal Debailly’s La Muse indignée (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012) and La Muse du consistoire, presented by Julien Goeury (Geneva: Droz, 2016). To this non-exhaustive list should also be added Guillaume Peureux’s LaMuse satyrique, 1600–1622 (Geneva: Droz, 2014). With Hugh Roberts, Peureux has now produced a critical edition of one of the first collective volumes of satyrical poetry, Les Muses incognues ou la seille aux bourriers plaine de desirs et imaginations d’amour, published in 1604 by the Rouen printer and bookseller Jean Petit. Their edition, based on the only surviving copy, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 8-BL-12035, comes with an Introduction, notes on the establishment and transcription of the text, a glossary, a directory of expressions, a bibliography, an index nominum, and tables listing first lines and poem and section titles. The opening paragraph of the Introduction characterizes the editorial vogue of satyrical poetry, of which the Muses incognues is an early example, as the flourishing, between 1600 and 1622, of collective volumes of poems that are both satirical and inspired by a satyr’s posture. While this presentation suffices perhaps for an audience familiar with the genre, for non-specialist readers the lack of a more elaborate definition, which would explain the vulgar and obscene nature of satyrical poetry and its links with the satyrs from Greek mythology, risks hampering their understanding of the pages that follow. In these pages, the editors explore the semantic richness of the word ‘incognues’: unknown, unrevealed, ignoble. This last meaning resonates with the ‘seille aux bourriers’ [trash can] in the subtitle, which cleverly advertises both the devalued and the private nature of the poems. This analysis precedes a discussion of the context of the composition and publication of the recueil, in which the editors replace the long-accepted hypothesis that its principal author is Guy de Tours with one that considers this volume as the result of a complex process of compiling and copying poems for Jean Petit. They stress the fact that some parts of the volume suggest a collective rather than individual poetic activity. The last part of the Introduction briefly examines the relationship between the ‘poésie incognue’ picked up from the trash can and humanistic literary culture. Book historians might be dissatisfied with the information on Petit and his edition of the Muses incognues, but with the editors’ careful annotations, including lists of reprints and variants in no fewer than thirteen other recueils published between 1600 and 1622, as well as their elaborate glossary, readers from different backgrounds are provided with the necessary tools to study a text that would otherwise probably remain ‘incognu’. It has been argued that lingering in oblivion would, in fact, be a suitable destiny for this collection of poems filled with obscenities and misogynistic and homophobic verses. This new edition, however, allows us to apprehend the nature of these texts as well as their relation to humanistic literary culture, thus enriching and complexifying our understanding of early modern French poetry.

Yemapoetics: Towards a Theory of Healing in Indigenous Poetry from Sikkim

Literature that is being composed from or about the politico-geographical category of Northeast India focuses on violence and ethnic movements in major ways (Hazarika, 1996; Barpujari, 1998; Baruah, 2005; Paula, 2008). While Weberian understanding of indigenous cosmology has led to archiving, documenting and research on ethnic epistemologies from Northeast India, in the absence of indigenous literary theories, literature from this region faces the challenges of homogenisation or becoming case studies for ethnographic documentation and anthropological inquiry (Karlsson & Subba, 2006; Subba, 2009; Lepcha et al, 2020 in the context of Sikkim). This paper intends to propose a theory of reading that upholds the role and participation of the poet(ess) as a shaman- a transforming agent and a transformed individual herself. This theory is being named Yemapoetics, deriving its epistemic framework from the figure of shamaness or Yema in the Limboo healing tradition in Sikkim. Yemapoetics is an attempt to propose a new indigenous paradigm for indigenous literary expression around the world. This theory identifies stages of poetic composition as well as reception, ranging from purification, possession, communication to catharsis. An indigenous literary theory like this will provide contexts for locating the poet(ess), examining her/his role as community healer who connects the modern, urban psyche of individuals with communal, archetypal symbols. This enables a process of retracing and re-membering through the poetic act that is essential to healing and recovery. Just as Limboo cosmology recognises women as first humans to be created, this paper argues that women’s psychospiritual agency should be at the centre for poetic theories to accord validity and applicability of feminist spirituality to indigenous literary theorisation. For the purpose, an illustration of the proposed theory will be made with reference to select indigenous poets from Sikkim.