Poetic Agency Research Articles

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Pragmatism, Humanism, and Form

Pragmatism is a humanist philosophy that tells an antifoundationalist and antirepresentationalist story of progress and emancipation. While most theoretical approaches since the 1960s have radically rejected the humanist legacy, in pragmatism a particular understanding of humanism has persisted. This persistence of humanism is of the utmost importance, since one can only grasp the unique contemporary significance of pragmatism when one appreciates how pragmatism, humanism, anti-authoritarianism, and postmetaphysics are interlinked, and how this link has gained in importance after the exhaustion of antihumanist theories. This essay combines the endeavor to elucidate the idea of a pragmatist humanism with a discussion of the relationship between pragmatism and aesthetic form. The essay is divided into three parts. While the first part explains why pragmatism is a humanist philosophy, the second part discusses why most pragmatists have been unwilling to consider the significance of form. It develops the central idea that Dewey’s naturalist aesthetics does not offer a convincing conception of form. The final part advances the argument that a pragmatist humanism that refuses to historicize the concept of form and is reluctant to regard the act of form-giving as a kind of poetic agency weakens its own position.

(Re)writing Sappho: Navigating Sappho's (Posthuman) Poetic Identity in Ovid, Heroides 15

This article explores Ovid's Heroides 15 (the Epistula Sapphus) through a post-human feminist approach, engaging with the most recent scholarly debate on (Ovid's) Sappho's polysemous poetic language, polyphonic narrative, and gender fluidity. Drawing from recently published works that explore the intersections between posthumanism and antiquity, I show that Her. 15 is resituated within the 'posthuman turn' and accordingly reinterpreted as an expression of Ovid's and Sappho's poetic identity. Sappho's self-identification with her polymorphic poetry, assimilation into the natural world, and transitional sexual identity serve to both downplay and destabilize her role as a poetic subject, while at the same time enhancing her (and Ovid's) poetic creation. The idea of poetry as a self-shaping force is articulated by the agency that certain poetic objects (e.g., the letter, the poem, the verses), as well as other animate or inanimate natural elements (e.g., the branches and birds), hold within the epistle. Ovid has Sappho forego her poetic agency and question her literary skills; however, her poetic identity is also reaffirmed and strengthened precisely by the composition of her epistle. The displacement of the 'human' poet thus serves to enhance the centrality of the artistic, literary work. This dialectic between the limits of Sappho as a poet and the boundlessness of her poetry persists until—and reaches its peak at—the end of Her. 15, where Sappho anticipates her self-murder. Her (foretold) leap in the waters of the Leucadian Sea (217–220) can be interpreted both as a form of self-annihilation and as a means of stressing the permanence and timelessness of her own and Ovid's poetic talents.

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry: A Genealogy

Early South Korean Modernist Poetry:A Genealogy Jae Won Edward Chung (bio) In 1948, four months before the Republic of Korea was established, Sinsiron ("new poetics") published their first anthology volume. In it, co-founder Kim Kyŏng-nin (1918–2006) declared that modern poetry began with "the annulment of all promises about language." What did he mean? In the past, language had been but a tool for the explication of concepts and the circulation of ideology. With modern poetry, language became a scientific mode of thought that could produce its own "fusion" of reality. [I] wish to propose an experimental course for a new trajectory of modern poetry. In order to express a new way of thought (sago), we must adopt reality through a scientific perspective, at the right speed, and this reality must be constituted through a new fusion, with a fresh, pictorial imagination (imijineisyŏn). It is poetic thought that regulates this new fusion, and what adds speed to this new form of thought is art's comprehensive action (aeksyŏn).1 [End Page 245] According to Kim, reality is both recreated and contemplated through poetry, and the "pictorial imagination" combined with "speed" allows the poet the opportunity to engage in "action." The promise of autonomous poetic agency and its reliance primarily on the power of the image would become attributes most consistently enshrined by modernist poetics in the coming decade. Almost forty years later, in his publication of the collection Seoul, Wild Horse-like (1987), Kim states that while modernism should not be constrained to a "dictionary concept," underlying its multiplicity through history were the principles of surrealism or imagism that allowed poets to draw from their contemporary contexts to "unfold new movements."2 It is not enough, however, to say modernism allows for multiplicity. We must look at how historical developments set the terms for what kind of multiplicity modernism may hold—that is, how they shaped the outer limits of modernism's constitution as a field of organizational, creative, and discursive activities.3 This is especially true for the cultural politics of South Korea's turbulent early years. At the end of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), Korea was divided (the northern zone administered by the Soviet Union and the southern by the United States). Across the South, there was widespread ideological mobilization across virtually all organizational units. If 1930s modernism solidified its position in the cultural field in the wake of the dissolution of KAPF (Korean Artists Proletarian Federation) by the Japanese colonial authority, then jockeying for position in the post-liberation era by various factions unfolded more or less concurrently after Liberation, in a shorter span of time, overlapping with migrations, strikes, [End Page 246] demonstrations, acts of terror, political and economic uncertainty, and eventually, the outbreak of the Korean War. The legacy of this civil war and its decades-long solidification into a sustainable postwar system involved the entrenchment of Cold War ideology and continual disavowal by state and citizenry. Modernism was implicated in this process. As we examine the complexity of this implication, a genealogical method allows us to pay attention to moments of diverging possibilities at an early juncture of South Korean literary history.4 It also allows us to engage in ongoing debates about how aesthetic and discursive borders of modernism in Korea have been constituted. Kim Hansung and Choi Junga, for example, have shown how acts of translating or creatively adapting the works of W.B. Yeats yielded varying possibilities for modernism across generations of Korean poetry.5 While Kim and Choi show how Yeats's oeuvre became a fruitful Rorschach test for Korean modernists of their respective eras, Janet Poole's work on "midcentury modernism" seeks to trace the resilience of modernist themes across discursive boundaries shaped by the Cold War.6 By showing how Ch'oe Myŏng-ik's aesthetics of melancholia and negation persist across the 1945 divide, Poole offers a way of understanding modernism less in "specific formal terms" and more as a questioning of unidirectional progress. [End Page 247] If Kim and Choi privilege variation, and Poole repetition, I attempt to track both in early South Korean modernist poetry. I also...

Self-Fashioning and Poetic Voice: Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Authorial Prerogative

Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) spent forty years negotiating and intervening in the gendered frameworks of the cultural poetics of her time. Nevertheless, despite a number of studies that explore Rowe’s engagement with emerging literary trends and her posthumous reputation, little has been said about her self-conscious construction of a literary career trajectory. This essay seeks to address this lacuna by revisiting a number of poems, particularly her famous elegy to her husband, which helped to shape her career and reputation. Rowe’s early poems reveal the care and deliberation with which she positioned herself. As a contrast to these earlier, explicit expressions, the elegy’s implicit and intensely personal struggle with creative expression itself marks a turning point in Rowe’s self-construction. In transforming her private griefs into an expressive form that specifically foregrounds poetic agency and ambition, Rowe co-opts a male elegiac tradition that makes her poem extremely influential for later women writers. Recognizing the various ways in which Rowe constructed her professional role and claimed poetic authority gives us a better sense of her aesthetic contributions to eighteenth-century verse traditions.

Affective frames and intra-relational finites in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

This article brings into conversation a Badiouian ethics and Karen Barad’s post-phenomenological relationality of “intra-actions” among the human and nonhuman so as to situate the environmentally and politically engaged poetry included in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Criticism has avoided exploring the interplay between stylistic choices and political dimensions in her poetry, which includes engagements with pressing environmental issues today (global warming, rising seas, and chaotic weather), preemptive wars, and questions of plausible poetic agency itself. Foregrounding a material dimension while still maintaining a sense of responsibility, this essay highlights Alain Badiou’s use of poetic configurations as “subjects” engaging in ethical world-recognitions that help situate an important underlying posthuman ethos evident in Graham’s poetry. Barad, in a discourse with roots in quantum physics, argues that we must rethink representation from an entirely different phenomenology of intra-actions, beginning with relations, not objects or Cartesian selves. Thus both Badiou and Barad, in radically different but complementary ways, situate ontological finites—poems and sites of intra-action—as means of overcoming Derridean differance, which remains one formal cornerstone of postmodern displacement evident in American mass media’s post-truth equalization of all positions without situating possibilities of coherent analysis or engagement. In conversation with the work of Judith Butler as well as Badiou and Barad, this essay intends to make a small contribution to feminist posthumanism and politics, and expand our sense of ethical and affective engagement in New Materialist criticism.

Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation by Emily Rohrbach

Emily Rohrbach. Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 182. $85. What does it mean to conceive of history as shaped less by the elusiveness of the past than by the elusiveness of the future? And what exactly does the future's elusiveness imply about the and the very presentness of the in which one's own history unfolds? In Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation, Emily Rohrbach argues for a Romantic historiographic imagination profoundly informed by these questions. In the wake of work such as James Chandler's England in 1819, Modernity's Mist revisits Romantic historicism by considering Romantic writers' relation to historiography--to the theoretical and formal problems posed by the writing of history--as it is informed both by their changing understanding of temporal experience and by the events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. The book shows how shifts in historical understanding already underway in the eighteenth century come to the fore in the wake of Waterloo in freshly poetic and inventive modes. Rohrbach's argument articulates both historical/intellectual contexts and existential/temporal horizons in a distinctive series of readings that underline the role of aesthetic form in responding to and reshaping Romanticism's historical along with its attendant ethical and political possibilities. Drawing on the historiographical investigations of Koselleck and, to a lesser extent, Fdabermas, Modernity's Mist situates its argument in relation to what has been considered a sea-change in European writers' relation to futurity during the Romantic period. The French Revolution, along with the rise and defeat of Napoleon, seemed to crystallize an increasing sense of history spinning out of control--with the future revealed as fundamentally unpredictable and the correspondingly inchoate. For the literary figures that Rohrbach considers, the realization that the future was potentially discontinuous with the or, at any rate, continuous in ways that remained obscure to them, meant not only that the past ceased to offer clear models or exempla for ethical and political action, but that the itself had to be thought of as an array of multiple possibilities whose meaning and implications remained subject to revision at every moment. These are writers for whom the meaning and history of the can never be fixed. To give one example: Rohrbach specifically takes issue with readers of Austen's Persuasion who argue that the novel's happy ending is inscribed as a foregone conclusion (122) from its beginning; she shows how, on the contrary, Austen's text repeatedly signals its awareness (and its heroine's awareness) of other stories that might just have easily unfolded from that same beginning. One lives in the shadow of what will have been, but what will have been is, in turn, an endlessly revisable category. Therefore, the stakes are not so much claims concerning the future, which may or may not be realized, as how those claims have the capacity to disturb and transform the lived present. As the example of Austen suggests, when Rohrbach invokes futurity, she is not concerned with the prophetic, eschatological, visionary Romanticism associated with Blake and Shelley, but with the earthly, grounded, quasi-realist Romanticism associated not only with Austen but at times with poets such as Byron and Keats--the point being that even these writers find themselves unmoored from temporal norms that once served as an historical anchor. Literary and poetic agency in the texts Rohrbach considers hinges on a realization of radical incompleteness in one's ordinary, everyday life and, thus, too, on a realization of the multiplicity of alternatives raised by every present experience. A non-linear temporality comes to inform all experience, even the most banal; or, if one prefers, non-linear modes of narrative become necessary to capture the history of the that these writers explore. …

Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. by Kathryn A. Morgan, and: The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire by Nigel Nicholson

Reviewed by: Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. by Kathryn A. Morgan, and: The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire by Nigel Nicholson David G. Smith Kathryn A. Morgan. Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. xix + 460 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Nigel Nicholson. The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xix + 353 pp. Cloth, $74.00. The Greek west in general and Deinomenid Syracuse in particular provide an alternative to Athenocentric assumptions that Greek culture coalesces primarily in an Aegean milieu. Nevertheless, with the exception of Freeman (1891–94), Dunbabin (1948), and Finley (1968), there has been a relative dearth of English-language monographs on these regional contexts. With new books from Kathryn Morgan and Nigel Nicholson (and Franco De Angelis’ 2016 Archaic and Classical Sicily: A Social and Economic History in the same series), this limitation is now decisively lifted. For those drawn to the period, teachers have something to assign that was written in the current millennium, and students looking for a guide to the period’s sources will find them thoroughly documented. There is not much new literary or archaeological evidence for the historical narrative. Morgan briefly adduces the Aeschylean “Dikē” fragment (but not the corresponding “Eirēnē” fragment). The Himera battleground cemetery unearthed in 2008 is discussed in neither account of how Deinomenid monarchs constructed victory. On the other hand, both books foreground their use of the largest surviving corpus of literary texts dealing with the period and region—Pindar and the traditions surrounding epinician poetry, which are seductive evidence for Greeks outside Athens. Morgan’s treatment of this material results in a thick description of the relationship between Hieron and Pindar that remains idiosyncratic to them, whereas Nicholson’s provides a historicized structuralist account of the relationship between epinician traditions with potential applicability to other contexts. Their most salient difference is that Nicholson’s Pindar responds more directly to performance conditions whereas Morgan’s seems freer in expressing his personal support and poetic agency. As the titles suggest, this makes Poetics a book about history and genre and Construction a book about a poet. Despite their differences, both books have adopted a similar structure. Morgan’s opens with a summary of her approach to Pindaric epinician as a poetry “refining and concentrating a vision of monarchy for a world where kings were becoming unfashionable” (22). Nicholson’s first introduces the genre of hero-athlete oral narrative and then describes its ideological interrelationship with the competing commemorative genres of sculpture and epinician. The middle [End Page 729] of each book reviews standard evidence for the Deinomenids (Morgan 23–86, Nicholson 79–85)—i.e., manipulation of groups and individuals, monumental architecture, athletic participation, dedication, coinage—and their patronage of epinician traditions (Morgan 87–132, Nicholson 85–98). The remainder of each book is structured by five case study chapters. Nicholson’s juxtapose epinician and hero-athlete material from a particular polis: Hagesidamus and Euthymus from Epizephyrian Locri, Astylus and Philippus from Croton, Glaucus and Glaucus from Gelon’s Syracuse, Ergoteles and Tisander from Hieron’s Syracuse and the period thereafter, and finally, Alexidamus of Metapontum. Morgan’s case studies, prefaced by Greek texts and English translations, focus on individual poems: Olympian 1; Pythians 1, 2, and 3; and Nemean 1 and 9 and Olympian 6 together for “henchmen.” While Morgan is limited to epinician and therefore, despite her title, largely to Hieron, Nicholson is able to devote an entire chapter to Gelon (the first since Dunbabin), treating Hieron with the following period as a separate unit. Morgan’s book announces itself as “an effort to read Pindar’s poetry for Hieron of Syracuse through the lens of its Sicilian, and specifically Syracusan, context” (1), and further specifies that the Syracusan context in question is defined by Pindar’s concerns with how to situate Hieron in the renewed Greek debate about good (Croesus) and bad (Phalaris) leadership after the Persian Wars have problematized autocracy (3). How did...

Linguistic Transformation as Counter-Hegemonic Operation in Kora in Hell and Spring and All

| This article seeks to expand our understanding of the counterhegemonic aspects of Williams’s 1920s work by focusing on commonly overlooked and seemingly minor linguistic transformations. These transformations, the article argues, form a parallel to the overtly polemical statements that are more readily acknowledged as counter-hegemonic and demonstrate the scope of Williams’s engagement with the question of American writing in relation to what I view as the European hegemony at the time. Using the figure of the imagined puma interrupting an opera performance in The Great American Novel as the starting point for discussing the implications of the European hegemony in the realm of literature and the arts in the 1920s, this article subjects specific linguistic operations in Williams’s work to extensive analysis. The article argues that these linguistic transformations, offer important insights into Williams’s conception of poetry as resistance, i.e. into what might be called poetic agency.

Linguistic Transformation as Counter-Hegemonic Operation in <em>Kora in Hell</em> and <em>Spring and All</em>

| This article seeks to expand our understanding of the counterhegemonic aspects of Williams’s 1920s work by focusing on commonly overlooked and seemingly minor linguistic transformations. These transformations, the article argues, form a parallel to the overtly polemical statements that are more readily acknowledged as counter-hegemonic and demonstrate the scope of Williams’s engagement with the question of American writing in relation to what I view as the European hegemony at the time. Using the figure of the imagined puma interrupting an opera performance in The Great American Novel as the starting point for discussing the implications of the European hegemony in the realm of literature and the arts in the 1920s, this article subjects specific linguistic operations in Williams’s work to extensive analysis. The article argues that these linguistic transformations, offer important insights into Williams’s conception of poetry as resistance, i.e. into what might be called poetic agency.

Troubadour Song as Performance: A Context for Guiraut Riquier’s “Pus sabers no’m val ni sens”

The songs of the troubadours present the fundamental challenge of understanding poetry as music. Although the Old Occitan lyric corpus was a sung tradition from its origins in the twelfth century, we do not know exactly how it sounded; the poetry and musical notation of troubadour song are only skeletal vestiges awaiting completion by the imagination. Miniature biographies of the troubadours known as vidas, which combine elements of fact and fiction, describe some poets as performers who sang and played instruments, while others apparently did not. (1) Most manuscript sources of troubadour song lack musical notation; the few chansonniers that do include it provide the pitches and text underlay for one strophe of melody, with the remaining strophes of text laid out in prose format. The absence of music from so much of the written transmission of the corpus can be attributed to factors such as predominantly oral transmission of the melodies (resulting in their loss as the tradition waned) and the circumstances of compilation, which favored the presentation of the songs as poems. (2) The repertory travelled in the thirteenth century to northern France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and beyond through the movement of poets, singers, patrons, and not least, the formation of the manuscript tradition. As Marisa Galvez notes, the very concept of a troubadour corpus as an authorial tradition emerged from the chansonniers. The constitution of poetic personae in these manuscripts stands in for the construction of poetic agency and voice that would have occurred in performance (2012: 59-64). Many nonmusical, nonverbal components of performance that are now irrecoverable were as much part of the song as the melody and text, and were probably embedded in its early reception: the performers' appearance and gestures, their relationship to the audience, their present or absent patrons. (3) The framework of performance and reception takes on particular significance in the analysis of Guiraut Riquier's "Pus sabers no'm val ni sens," a song whose unique structure invites close attention to its novel combination of music and text. Studies of Riquier (c. 1230-c. 1300) note his innovative assemblage of his songs into a self-referential "book" in chronological sequence (Bossy 1991; Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1978, 1994). As the only coherently ordered autobiographical collection created by a troubadour, Riquier's book emblematizes the performance of the self that is central to the troubadour tradition. (4) In the context of Riquier's book, "Pus sabers" performs the construction of a persona through lyric conventions and the deployment of the troubadour's agency as a historical subject; it also exploits the possibilities of musical and poetic form to the fullest, drawing attention to the roles of singers, listeners, and readers in the performance of the song. Although oral performance is often imputed an unquestioned primacy, literate modes of reception (as attested by the chansonniers) also had a formative role in the tradition that Riquier inherited (Gaunt 2005; Haines 2004). Audition, reading, and singing are overlapping actions: singer and audience may both know the song aurally, and a reader must reconstruct a song while viewing its written record on the manuscript page or in modern transcription. (5) As most sources of troubadour poetry do not contain melodies, their musical dimension must be conjured from memory or the imagination. Even songs with preserved melodies are typically notated only for the first strophe of the text; thereafter, the relationship between melody and text must be reconstructed for each successive strophe. Joining melody to text using the manuscript page is itself an act of performance that establishes a verbal and sonic profile. A modern singer using the manuscript record of a troubadour song must determine the pronunciation of words, the duration of syllables, the notes to sing to each syllable (when the manuscript leaves doubts about this juncture) and the length of each note. …

Writing Pain: Sensibility and Suffering in the Late Letters of Anna Seward and Mary Robinson

‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward‘s Letters (1811) and Mary Robinson‘s letters (1800) create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of Charlotte Smith‘s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith‘s sonnets made feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it. However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body of sensibility on which Seward‘s and Robinsons early poetic reputations had depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith‘s model made it an important model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with disabled bodies, Smiths example needed to be reimagined to account for the reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain.

‘Volto di Medusa’: Monumentalizing the self in Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta

Scholarship on Petrarch has generally intepreted the figure of Laura-as-Medusa as a projection of the poet's internal conflict between sacred and profane love. Such a reading takes Medusa as a threat to Petrarch's agency. Yet Petrarch's Laura-Medusa is suggestively figured as only her disembodied head, a weapon ultimately manipulated by Perseus. This reversal of agency has an impact on Petrarch's complicated theory of poetic inspiration, and reaches beyond the relationship between poet and beloved to encompass another fraught paradigm of power: the relationship between poet and patron. By recalling the disembodied head of Medusa in the figure of Laura, and recovering the political symbolism of the appropriation of her petrifying gaze, Petrarch creates a model of poetic agency that he uses to stage his relationship to patronage in the Latin Africa and a poem addressed to his Colonna patrons.

Poetry, Network, Nation: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Expatriate Women's Poetry

This article examines the concept of “network” in relation to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florentine circle of pro-Risorgimento women poets. Concentrating on Aurora Leigh ’s relation to Theodosia Garrow Trollope’s Tuscan newspaper poetry, the essay argues that expatriate women poets represent an alternative history of Victorian poetry based on networks of print and sociability, and that their poetry forges a new model of public poetic agency as that network’s cultural effect.

Troubadour Song as Performance: A Context for Guiraut Riquier’s “Pus sabers no’m val ni sens”

The songs of the troubadours present the fundamental challenge of understanding poetry as music. Although the Old Occitan lyric corpus was a sung tradition from its origins in the twelfth century, we do not know exactly how it sounded; the poetry and musical notation of troubadour song are only skeletal vestiges awaiting completion by the imagination. Miniature biographies of the troubadours known as vidas, which combine elements of fact and fiction, describe some poets as performers who sang and played instruments, while others apparently did not. (1) Most manuscript sources of troubadour song lack musical notation; the few chansonniers that do include it provide the pitches and text underlay for one strophe of melody, with the remaining strophes of text laid out in prose format. The absence of music from so much of the written transmission of the corpus can be attributed to factors such as predominantly oral transmission of the melodies (resulting in their loss as the tradition waned) and the circumstances of compilation, which favored the presentation of the songs as poems. (2) The repertory travelled in the thirteenth century to northern France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula and beyond through the movement of poets, singers, patrons, and not least, the formation of the manuscript tradition. As Marisa Galvez notes, the very concept of a troubadour corpus as an authorial tradition emerged from the chansonniers. The constitution of poetic personae in these manuscripts stands in for the construction of poetic agency and voice that would have occurred in performance (2012: 59-64). Many nonmusical, nonverbal components of performance that are now irrecoverable were as much part of the song as the melody and text, and were probably embedded in its early reception: the performers' appearance and gestures, their relationship to the audience, their present or absent patrons. (3) The framework of performance and reception takes on particular significance in the analysis of Guiraut Riquier's Pus no'm val ni sens, a song whose unique structure invites close attention to its novel combination of music and text. Studies of Riquier (c. 1230-c. 1300) note his innovative assemblage of his songs into a self-referential in chronological sequence (Bossy 1991; Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1978, 1994). As the only coherently ordered autobiographical collection created by a troubadour, Riquier's book emblematizes the performance of the self that is central to the troubadour tradition. (4) In the context of Riquier's book, Pus sabers performs the construction of a persona through lyric conventions and the deployment of the troubadour's agency as a historical subject; it also exploits the possibilities of musical and poetic form to the fullest, drawing attention to the roles of singers, listeners, and readers in the performance of the song. Although oral performance is often imputed an unquestioned primacy, literate modes of reception (as attested by the chansonniers) also had a formative role in the tradition that Riquier inherited (Gaunt 2005; Haines 2004). Audition, reading, and singing are overlapping actions: singer and audience may both know the song aurally, and a reader must reconstruct a song while viewing its written record on the manuscript page or in modern transcription. (5) As most sources of troubadour poetry do not contain melodies, their musical dimension must be conjured from memory or the imagination. Even songs with preserved melodies are typically notated only for the first strophe of the text; thereafter, the relationship between melody and text must be reconstructed for each successive strophe. Joining melody to text using the manuscript page is itself an act of performance that establishes a verbal and sonic profile. A modern singer using the manuscript record of a troubadour song must determine the pronunciation of words, the duration of syllables, the notes to sing to each syllable (when the manuscript leaves doubts about this juncture) and the length of each note. …

Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky

Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky

Anchors, mermaids, shower-curtain seaweeds and fish-shaped fish: The texture of poetic agency

This article defines and theoretically positions the alternative conceptualization of poetic agency. In its aesthetic singularity it aims to humbly resonate with Arcadian explorations of commodities as poetic objects (Benjamin, 1999). It proposes a reconnaissance of poetics that challenges and complements the prevalent mapping of consumer agency in narrative structures. In order to holistically express practical encounters in situ (Allen, 2002) the inquiry explores the liminal texture of meaning-making. The positioning of poetic agency in a culturally particularist model of consumer experience (Sherry Jr, 2000) is suspended between the four notions of narrativity, performativity, liminality and materiality, and evoked in four separate poems. The article finishes its ethno-poetic journey with a purposefully written poem that illuminates theory and method of poetic agency in a fresh context.

Three Poems by Zeng Dekuang

Zeng Dekuang was born in 1969 in Hunan Province, and while he is college educated, he resigned from his job in 1992 to take up the bohemian lifestyle of a drifting singer and a poet, making money busking under overpasses and on street corners. While Zeng's self-imposed vagabond lifestyle has enriched his poetry and folksongs with intimate details about China's urban underbelly, he remains set apart from the migrants, factory workers, and sex workers who populate many of his poems and songs. The uneasy position of this poet as both a collegeeducated author and a vagabond drifter reveals a contentious social space where his readers can witness firsthand the porous walls between poetic responsibility and agency. The problematic nature of prostitutes in his work speaks to this tension: Is Zeng merely a consumer or an ally, a voyeur or a witness, and does his work further exploit or evince the gaping vulnerability of China's urban poor?

“Poetic” publics: Agency and rhetorics of “netroots” activism in post-earthquake L’Aquila

In this essay, I analyze the rise of post-earthquake activism in L’Aquila as an exemplification of counterpublics’ transformation into social movements endowed with “poetic” agency. Engendering “poetic agency,” for a counterpublic and for a social movement alike, denotes being able to bring forth change in the world and being able to generate change in a creative, “poetic” way. In this sense, poetic assumes a connotation that opposes the Habermasian perspective of a public sphere in which only a rational-critical discourse can be engendered as check on the State. In the case of L’Aquila, I contend that the post-earthquake social movements’ capability of effecting change in public life through poiesis has been enhanced by the possibilities of the Web 2.0 and by the activists’ acknowledgement of new ways of political participation in a world of spectacularized politics. In this instance, strategies such as the exploitation of alternative “public screens” on the web and the use of “minor rhetorics” to contrast the mainstream media portrayal of the post-disaster situation worked together in a creative and spontaneous effort to improve the condition of the people living in the area affected by the quake.

Unoriginal Genius/Conceptual Writing

Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened up by the text.--W. Benjamin (1) poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad--T. S. Eliot (2) In her recent book Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff questions the establishment tradition in which authenticity is given the highest value and inauthenticity is given the lowest. The mainstream (Anglo-American) tradition rarely asks what can be being original of unoriginal. tries to keep on pretending to be original in the age of mechanical reproduction of everything. Perloff argues that it is still possible to be genius in the age of simulacra, but one cannot be original in the way romantics wanted to be--to tell something ever unthought and unsaid in their lyric--but rather by way of (re) making different assemblages of inter-texts. By avoiding dependence on earlier poetic models (3) what we can do is give semantic density and verbal to the poem to be original. In the eighteen century enlightenment humanist tradition (4), genius was defined as the most immediate individual that underlies beneath the language and culture. conceives an individual's mind as an origin of genius. Genius is understood as original, authentic, rare and extraordinary. The history of ideas barely asks about genius. In other words, it has rarely been asked if there can be genius? What can be the nature of genius, and can genius contribute to the history of idea? The question of authenticity/original genius was started to be an issue beginning with the first generation of modernists writing, for example T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's The Cantos (an extended translation from Homer, Picasso), Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades (the urinal turned upside down and titled Fountain) and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (unfinished collections of quotations). These modernists are important precursors to the contemporary unoriginal like of language poets whose writing further radicalizes the question of the originality theory of genius. For example, Charles Bernstein's libretto to the opera Shadowtime recasts Benjamin's own texts into strict forms posing tension with the originality theory. In this scenario, Perloff's book Unoriginal Genius is an attempt to fuse avant-garde sensibilities of the past and the present with the new technologies and media of recent days. In other words, she is trying to recover the avant-garde practice of writing in new emerging context of information revolution. The explosion of new medias and digital technologies has not only taken a new lease on [our] life but also has influenced the way we think, feel and communicate: It is common place that in the world of digital discourse, of the internet, email, cell phone, and Facebook, communication has been radically transformed both temporally and spatially. (5) Everything we thought today is already thought and is passed to us through different copied mediums in several ways. This transformation also has significant impact on poetic agency, nature and function of poetry and poetics subverting the romantic's claim for personal voices in lyric poetry. Christian Bok aptly describes the contemporary situation: Recent trends in technologies of communication (such as digitized sampling and networked exchange) have already begun to subvert the romantic bastions of creativity and authorship, calling into question the propriety of copyright through strategies of plagiaristic appropriation, computerized reduplication, and programmatic collaboration. Such developments have caused poets to theorize an innovative aesthetics of conceptual literature that has begun to question, if not to abandon, the lyrical mandate of originality in order to explore the potentials of the uncreative be it automatic, mannerist, aleatoric, or readymade, in its literary practice. …