Poetic Craft Research Articles

Reiteration and ambivalence in Maha Al Otoum’s <i>Upper Rooms (2019)</i>: A translation-based stylistic study

This study provides a stylistic analysis of the poetry of Maha Al Otoum, a Jordanian poet and academic. As a translation-based study, it focuses on the phenomena of reiteration and ambivalence in her Upper Rooms, exploring how these techniques contribute to the text's unity, harmony, and coherence. Reiteration emphasizes the rhythm and energy of the text both verbally and nominally, contributing to its cohesion. Artistically employed, ambivalence combines seemingly discordant elements to achieve aesthetic goals and enrich the text’s interpretation. This stylistic focus allows the reader to appreciate the depth and nuance in Al Otoum's poetry and understand how these techniques contribute to her distinctive poetic voice. Delving into this sort of poetry dissecting the distinct style and pulling back the curtain on a particular poetic craft, Al Otoum (2019) provides depth to its meaning(s), pushing readers towards a closer, more in-depth reading of the text. In conclusion, the critical stylistic analysis of Al Otoum's poetry reveals how she employs such two key phenomena as reiteration and ambivalence to enrich her work, shape her poetic voice, and stimulate a deeper reader understanding and appreciation of her text. This comprehensive study provides a fresh perspective on Al Otoum's oeuvre and the stylistic choices she makes as a poet.

Lineage and loss: Practising a traditional art in changing times

Born in a family of mixed linguistic heritage in a industrial village in north-east Wales, Grahame Davies found himself – thanks to a crucial meeting with a charismatic teacher – learning his poetic craft in the Welsh-speaking tradition. While working as a journalist in newspapers and later in broadcasting, he became one of his country’s most prominent poets and authors, later developing an international reputation as a librettist for classical composers. In this piece he reflects on the transmission mechanisms of individual and communal creativity, the varying status of poets in Welsh and English-language culture, the challenges and opportunities of working in joint artistic and professional enterprises, and on the delicate, but often hugely rewarding, process of working with audiences and with those who commission artistic works.

Simon Jackson. George Herbert and Early Modern Musical Culture

In this volume, Simon Jackson presents George Herbert at the intersection of his religious devotion, musical practice, and poetic craft. Jackson’s telling is considerately attuned, vibrantly portraying Herbert within his social, musical, liturgical, and literary contexts. A certain liveliness animates the task, as Jackson draws the interpretative focus away from a static decoding of lyric set on the page, towards ‘the act of reading as a communicative process’ (20), as a sounded event in resonant interaction with the phonic life of social play, literary wit, liturgical style, and musical concord. Such interactions, Jackson insists, must attend not merely to ‘high art’ musical cultures of Tudor and Stuart music, but to popular forms of musical play, and their poetic and literary conceits (8). Chapter one begins in somewhat unobvious territory, grounding early modern musical practice in the theological conception of Augustine’s De musica, a fourth-century philosophical dialogue on poetic metre, which moves from the ‘corporeal to the incorporeal’ to light upon a metaphysics of a harmoniously ordered cosmos. Jackson locates Herbert at the twilight of such classically speculative ideas of music’s significance. In contrast, though, to William H. Pahlka’s study of Augustinian poetics and Herbert, in which the speculative idea of musical transcendence wins out over material and transient musical contingencies (28–29), Jackson is keen to retrieve the interactive dynamism between ‘fixity and flux’ (35) by which, whether in the cosmos’ architecture, the concord of body and soul, or the tempered strain of a musical string, the created gift is realized through attuned measure, that harmony may be struck, resonating fleeting sounds and human experiences with eternal realities. Jackson traces concordances of this musical and ethical charge of Augustine’s to ‘rightly measure’ (‘Man’s Medley’) in a series of Herbert’s poems; the echoes in each are brief, but commanding.

Robert Bly in New Brunswick: The Cross-Border Poetics of Allan Cooper

ABSTRACT New Brunswick poets have a history of looking to the United States for literary models. A recent example is Allan Cooper, the Alma, New Brunswick writer, editor, publisher, and translator, who since the late 1970s has spent much of his career emulating both the poetics and literary activities of the Minnesota poet, editor, and translator, Robert Bly. Not only did Cooper adopt Bly’s Deep Image poetics and the concept of the twofold consciousness: he also modeled the editorial policies for his creative-writing journal, Germination, on the editorial approach employed by Bly in his poetry magazine, The Fifties. Cooper also followed Bly’s example by performing translation as a means for improving his own poetic craft. Taken together, Cooper’s embrace of Bly as literary mentor corresponds to the beginnings of a larger shift away from Canada’s entrenched cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s toward more internationalist cultural interventions by the mid-1980s.

‘Meddling with Making’: Speech, Poetic Craft, and the Spectre of Imaginatif in Piers Plowman A

‘Meddling with Making’: Speech, Poetic Craft, and the Spectre of Imaginatif in <i>Piers Plowman</i> A

Poetic Inquiry Coming of Age

Laura Apol’s Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda: Engaging with the Lives of Others (2021) traces the author’s long relationship with survivors of the 1994 Rwanda holocaust in which thousands of Tutsi were murdered by their neighbors, and examines the ways in which her personal uses of poetry for coping with painful subject matter became a longitudinal poetic inquiry. This review responds to themes of relational poetic inquiry and the development of poetic craft and suggests that the author’s development reflects the development of the field of poetic inquiry and marks a stage of accomplishment.

Defining a Tradition

Abstract Allison Busch's seminal work on the classical Hindi literature of Mughal India demonstrated how the composition of works of poetic theory (ritigranths) became a defining literary enterprise of vernacular court poets in the Mughal-Rajput milieu. Though firmly based in a Sanskrit worldview, Hindi intellectuals exhibited newness in their theorization of the art of poetic craft. Engaging with Busch's work on the ritigranth genre, this article demonstrates how the poet-scholars of Rajasthan who were experts in Brajbhasha and Marwari—or Hindi and Rajasthani, respectively, as they are largely understood today—theorized and created new knowledge systems to define their four-hundred-year-old Marwari literary culture. Keeping up with the theoreticians of Brajbhasha who blended Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) with poetic theory, the Rajasthani scholars placed their work in a multilingual literary culture that was increasingly expanding as India came under the knowledge regimes of colonialism.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing

Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Losing

Naming of the Bones by John F. Deane

Reviewed by: Naming of the Bones by John F. Deane Fred Dings John F. Deane Naming of the Bones Manchester, UK. Carcanet Press. 2022. 152 pages. SECULAR ATHEISTS OR adherents to faiths other than Christianity who admire fine poetry should not avoid reading John F. Deane's new book, Naming of the Bones—because its content is overtly concerned with Christian subjects and issues of faith—any more than they would fail to admire the art of Leonardo da Vinci in The Last Supper or The Annunciation. The best passages in this 152-page book rise to the highest levels of poetic craft and persuasion. The title of the book forecasts its architecture and serves also as a multifaceted metaphor for the subjects of the poems. "Bones" are, of course, the most enduring parts of our physical being and the core elements of our supporting structure; they also frequently serve as relics, in this case in early Christianity. Metaphorically, "naming the bones" is the poet's process of identifying and naming the key "old bones" of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition (his tradition), the "old bones" of his Christian poet precursors (Irish and English), the "bones" of his own personal history (experiential and familial), and the "bones" of his Christian belief. Many of the poems in the first portion of this book locate themselves in island monasteries and vicinities, especially those of Iona, Lindisfarne, and Inishmurray, in the times of Aidan, Cuthbert, and Colman, going as far back, of course, as the sixth century. These early figures and places are indeed the old indispensable bones of a tradition that even survived Viking invasions to persist in present times. Deane is not engaged in a history lesson here; there is nothing abstracted or merely "informational" about these poems. They are deeply personal quests to engage—imaginatively, poetically, and spiritually—the roots of his present being, his incarnate being, and "to scavenge here for understanding." In the poem "Old Bones," we read: "the black rocks / slippery with weed and sea-wet. Herring gulls barked / like guarddogs and a kestrel, / fast as a prayer, flew by. I scaled a rock-trail through thistles / where the testy ghosts // wished to be left in peace. To this abandonment, friars came / centuries after the Christ, to forge / salvation, built rock altars, beehive cells, stone churches, / piled up their cursing stones to keep / women and friends at bay." There is something of an enforced solitude and discomfort in such a quest, which the poet recognizes and shares: "thunder-light on the sea stack, a monk / in tears, huddled under the cold and the coming dark." Implicit here is a belief that difficulty must be sought and endured. In a poem entitled "Triple H," Deane identifies three of his Christian poetic "bones": Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, and Seamus Heaney. Of them he writes: "Hopkins in his long unglamorous suffering, / small snappy man in a misery of muscled language; // Herbert, his consciousness of dustworth, / his tentative but eager treaty of love; // and Heaney, witness to the gracefulness of the frames / of dailiness, enamoured of the possible, the worth // of next-door otherness and the allsorts savouring of words: / these, O God, your dead, your un-mortals." Common to all is a valuing of humility and love, but in Heaney also a recognition of the extraordinariness of the ordinary. Deane also spends significant time naming the bones of his spiritual journey, including family members who influenced his spiritual development and stations of experience. One particularly moving poem is part 6 of "Grandfather Ted / John Connors" in the form of a letter from his grandfather. In this poem, the grandfather speaks of a time he came to comfort the poet as a young boy who was experiencing a nightmare and crying out in his sleep, but the grandfather found that he himself was comforted. He had held the boy's "small, sweet-smelling body" against his own "bruised, old-century self" until he slept, but found "I did not want to lay you down, your being blessing mine. And I felt safe, at last, rescued by an access of love, and the world turned, and I let go...

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

Deafing the Sonnet

Deafing the Sonnet Meg Day (bio) Creative writing, as both a field and an industry, is steeped in ableism and audism. That is, it prioritizes non-disabled, neurotypical poets and poems, and pretends we are neither present as your contemporaries nor holding the whole of the canon on our shoulders, rooted as we are—Blind, Deaf, and Mad among us—in the very bedrock of lyric history. And despite our belief in the capacity of literature to teach empathy and drain ignorance, poetics reiterates ableism and audism at rates and in ways that, while creative, rival Hollywood. We have mythologized hearing poet Allen Ginsberg as the father of American Sign Language poetry and honored countless collections—by non-disabled poets borrowing Deaf and disabled experiences—with the field’s most respected awards. We are ground zero for blind love, deaf heaven, phantom limbs, and paralyzing—no, crippling—fear. Contemporary poetics has taught us to anticipate a nondisabled readership or no readership at all. The irony, of course, is that non-disabled writers are the ones to join our disabled lineage of dis-kin such as Homer and Milton, Dostoyevsky and Borges, Woolf, Joyce, O’Connor, Lorde, Butler—I could keep going, but I don’t have to; if one in five Americans is disabled, then I’m already speaking to my kin and comrades today. We’re here, despite the illusion that erases us. In this paper, I wish to be a poet and not a scholar, which is to say I wish to speak more to the making aspect of poetic craft, and less to the made thing of literature. As a Deaf poet who is also queer and trans, I wish to take a break from being analyzed by that which already dictates so much of my creative mind and the ways it is permitted to [End Page 196] move on and off the page. But I resist, in particular, the critical gaze that evaluates one’s capacity for participation in poetics; one might assume—based on popular, phonocentric definitions of poetry, or the Norton Anthology’s table of contents—that Deaf poets writing in English simply don’t exist. I wish to passively refute that idea with the fact of my corporeal form, so that we might engage actively instead in what might be possible when Deaf and disabled poets are not regulated by the limitations of the nondisabled imagination and allowed, without having to reiterate our existence, to freely make. There is not enough space in this paper for me to lead you gently through a Disability 101 primer, so let’s just assume we are in agreement about the following: “disability” is not a bad word; disabled lives are essential, not expendable, and absolutely worth living and protecting; disabled pride includes resisting the cure model that seeks to eliminate us and therefore resists the contemporary eugenics movement, which stretches from the medical industrial complex through to the academic one and right into poetics; disabled people should be the ones to tell our own stories and be participant to legislation that impacts our lived realities; and accommodations, while often treated as a privilege and a burden, are not only a legal obligation, but a human right. This paper is meant to be about Deafing the sonnet. But the problem with Deafing the sonnet is that I would have to then concede that the sonnet is first and foremost a hearing form. And why shouldn’t it be? Aren’t they all? Doesn’t all of poetics rest upon the assumption that lineation and meter sets poetry apart from prose by prioritizing musicality and sound? In Hirsch’s Essential Poet’s Glossary, the entry on sound poetry reads, “Sound is crucial to poetry and thus, in one sense, all poetry is sound poetry, except, perhaps, deaf poetry.” But there is no entry on deaf poetry, which is a digression we don’t have time for. So, the text implies without imagination, sound is crucial to poetry. And don’t hearing people assume that Deaf people have no access to or concept of sound? And even if we did, certainly we were not the ones to invent...

How Poems Mean

How Poems Mean Laura C. Stevenson (bio) Vermont Poets and Their Craft Neil Shepard and Tamra Higgins, eds. Green Writers Press www.greenwriterspress.com/book/vermont-poets-and-their-craft/ 274 pages; Print, $24.95 Vermont Poets and Their Craft originated as a ten-part lecture series delivered three years ago at Vermont bookstores and other venues under the auspices of Sundog Poetry Center, an organization founded by co-editor Tamra Higgins to promote poets and poetry throughout the state. The lectures, televised by Vermont Public Television, were subsequently revised for publication, and seven other Vermont poets were invited to submit pieces for an anthology. The result is a substantial collection of essays, all but one of which (Chard DeNiord's mainly analytical "Suspense, Suspension, and the Sublime in the Poetry of Robert Frost") are concerned with the question classically worded sixty years ago in John Ciardi's title How Does a Poem Mean? (1975). A reader searching this excellent anthology for common threads will find them less in the poets' different answers to Ciardi's question than in the similar success of their careers. Many of them teach or have taught at Vermont's colleges and universities; several are associated with the Bread Loaf Conference; two are present or past Vermont Poet Laureates, one a past Poet Laureate of Maine. Their professional reputations extend well beyond Vermont's boundaries: several of them have been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the National Endowment of the Arts, many have received national poetic awards, and they have been published in presses widely distributed throughout the US. They are, for the most part, seasoned professionals: thirteen of the seventeen speak about their craft on the basis of thirty or forty years of practice. Behind their different styles and interests also lie common assumptions. The forbearers they revere—"our great grandparents of American poetry," as Neil Shepard puts it in "The Art of Concealing and Revealing in Poetry"—are Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Baron Wormser's essay "The Irony and the Ecstasy" dwells upon the intensity of Polish poets who take poetry out of "the precincts of amiable sensitivity" and make it a "desperate call for fair play"; David Budbill's witty "Poetry: Special or Ordinary" draws on Taoist poets; but in the main, the poets they choose to quote and their own works reveal their debt to are Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and other modernists of the previous century. Above all, they share Sundog Poetry Center's desire to reach out poetically to Vermont's present general audience. In any state, such a general audience encompasses a variety of auditors, but it may be presumed that among them are experienced or nascent poets seeking fresh perspective or advice on their craft. To those seeking advice, several articles mix technical discussions with sophisticated literary understanding that raises them far above the level of "how-to." David Huddle's "Technique, Tradition, and the Lucky Lot of the Poet," the most Ciardian of the essays, discusses the techniques that makes certain lines in well-known poems by Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Bishop overwhelmingly powerful. Beautifully crafted poems like these, he argues, open the door for new poems: "one poet teaches another, one poem helps another make it into the world." Stephen Cramer's "Making the Road: Tools for the Poet's Journey" starts by describing an exercise that encourages the "curiosity and investigation" that are necessary parts of poetic craft, then moves on with an excellent discussion of poetic diction. Sydney Lea's "Inviting the Reader: Narrative Values, Lyric Poems" argues for clarity in poetry, offering a rule of thumb that he applies to his own poems: "who, why, what, where? If my poem can't answer at least some of these questions, I feel I need to work on it further." At the opposite end of the spectrum, Martha Zweig's "Gnarly" opens by asking "how can readily accessible communication possibly be a goal of poetry?" She prefers "flirtatious" poems that begin by teasing the ear; and she suggests engaging in verbal calisthenics ("Roughhouse, rough trade, roughshod, roughage, ruffian, ruffle, kerfuffle") with the confidence that "meanings will suggest themselves along...

How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty

Reviewed by: How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet by Olga Peters Hasty Hilde Hoogenboom HOW WOMEN MUST WRITE: INVENTING THE RUSSIAN WOMAN POET, by Olga Peters Hasty. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. 248 pp. $120.00 hardback; $39.95 paperback; $39.95 ebook. In her prize-winning book, How Women Must Write: Inventing the Russian Woman Poet, Olga Peters Hasty establishes new connections among four major women poets. She pairs Evdokiia Rostopchina (1811-1858) with Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893) in the nineteenth century and Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) with Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) in the twentieth century. The pairing of these poets is a cultural habit that Hasty finds useful if problematic because critics pushed women poets to compete with each other. In a major reconfiguration of this dynamic, Hasty shows that Tsvetaeva broke the competitive cycle, as she aligned herself with Pavlova's ideal of the poetic craft and wrote poems and letters to Akhmatova. Poets in Russia occupy a prestigious place in literature and among feminist scholars. In her groundbreaking study Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (1987), Barbara Heldt argued that Russian women writers found their voice most convincingly in poetry and autobiography rather than fiction. Heldt singled out Rostopchina, Pavlova, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova among her pantheon, as does Hasty. In her new work, Hasty applies the lens of gender to these well-known writers and their anthologized poems. For her opening chapters on Rostopchina and Pavlova, Hasty builds on Diana Greene's Reinventing Romantic Poetry: Russian Women Poets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004), which asks how class and gender affected the education, publication, and reception of fourteen women poets, especially Rostopchina, Pavlova, and Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia. Hasty calls her critical method "deep reading"—a Russian twist on close reading (p. xi). In a culture used to reading between the lines for hidden political messages, readers have failed to imagine that women wrote [End Page 403] political poetry. They have also failed to detect women poets' subversive messages about gender. Hasty argues that readers at the time missed those messages because they imposed their own gendered censorship. They did not recognize how women poets subverted gender norms and engaged in "skillful negotiation" over the "multifaceted indeterminacy" of the term "woman" (p. 3). Women poets found their voice and agency through coded dialogue with each other. They protested against men's stereotypes of women's poetry, which "inhibited their unmediated self-realization" (p. 10). Hasty draws on an eclectic mixture of methodologies: the close reading of New Criticism; Wolfgang Iser's reader response theory from the 1970s; masquerade theories from the 1980s; and notions of women's agency that arose from feminist and Marxist rebuttals to structuralism. Rostopchina, like Akhmatova two generations later, embraced writing as a woman. It is Rostopchina's poem "How Should Women Write" (1841) that provides the book's title and its conundrum: women poets reveal "the feminine world" that must remain "modestly veil[ed]" (p. 62). Hasty deduces that in this poem, Rostopchina is asserting that men cannot decode women's poems because they have declared that women should only write about their hidden inner world. But the dictates of male culture did not always succeed in shaping how women wrote. Rostopchina's next poem eluded the censors, was soon confiscated, and cost her access to the royal courts of Nicholas I and Alexander II. She published her incendiary poem "A Forced Marriage" (1845), which alluded to Poland's political submission to Russia, in a conservative journal that likely had misunderstood the political subtext—not because she was a woman but because she chose to submit it to a conservative journal. Hasty shows that Pavlova and later Tsvetaeva presented themselves as poets first and women second. Pavlova famously dubbed Rostopchina an acolyte of George Sand in "We Are Contemporaries, Countess" (1847), after her political scandal. Hasty interprets this as an attack on Rostopchina as a feminist when it was most likely aimed at her liberal politics. Sand's politics and relationship with the Polish pianist and composer Frédéric Chopin galvanized Russians. Presenting herself as a dutiful wife, Pavlova declared she was a purely intellectual poet in the...

The Vernacular Pulse of Sanskrit: Metre and More in Songs of the Gītagovinda and Bhāgavata Purāṇa

Abstract This article explores the metrical patterns of Gītagovinda’s songs, to investigate what they reveal about their origin and inspiration, building on previous scholarly research into the vernacular nature of the songs. Seemingly abstruse, metre lies at the heart of the performative nature of the text, but is often overlooked in a quest for meaning. The article starts with the approach of Sanskrit commentators, focusing on Mahārāṇā Kumbhakarṇa of Mewar’s fifteenth-century Rasikapriyā, interrelating with his theoretical work on music, the Saṃgītarāja. This reveals the problem of the discrepancy between metrical theory, or śāstra, and praxis, or prayoga, problematising the metrical pundits’ focus on classification and static definitions at the expense of rhythmical processes of actual performance. The article proposes an alternative by analysing Gītagovinda’s songs instead through the lens of New Indo-Aryan (NIA) poetry, which significantly enhances appreciation of the poetic craft of the author. Finally, comparison with selected Gopīgītas, or ‘Songs of the Gopīs’, from the ninth-century classic scripture of Krishna devotion, Bhāgavata Purāṇa, reveals parallels in both metre and oral formulae. Reading Gopīgītas in conjunction with Gītagovinda’s songs opens up a new perspective, revealing a vernacular pulse underlying some of the best-known and best-loved Sanskrit literature.

The Lyrical Art of Ana Cristina Cesar

Ana Cristina Cesar is one of the great poets of the 1970s and 80s in Brazil. In this paper, some of her poems are analyzed in the perspective of how her lyrical narrative presents an interactive dialogue with the reader and criticizes modernity. Ana Cristina Cesar's poetic work privileges critical-reflexive language, the theme of identity, alterity, lyrical memory, poetic synthesis, and questioning, as marks of modernity. The word-memory is the essential factor that moves the aspirations and feelings of poetic self, because at the moment of reminiscing, the self recollects, in depth, the events and experiences previously experienced. The word is a force that drives the Word Artist to realize dreams, goals, and achievements. Through the poetic word, the poem develops the continuous transmutation of language, generating new possibilities of being and effecting poetic procedures through the lyrical genres, centered in the articulations of the poetic creation. The poetic craft is essentially of creating oneself, thus poetry being also self-creation, knowledge, and transmutation.

Accommodating Humankind: Theatrical Space, Poetic Form, and “Dwelling” in The Castle of Perseverance

Abstract This article argues that The Castle of Perserverance both explores the problem of worldly dwelling and constructs the play itself as a place to dwell, demonstrating that the idea of “dwelling” is vitally connected to the idea of poetic form. Through the technologies of stagecraft and poetic craft, the play creates a space set apart from the world, much like the castle at its center. Mankind's failure to remain in the Castle reflects the play's emphasis on bodily vulnerability. So too do many poetic parallels that demonstrate both the fragility and the resilience of form. The play's handling of poetic forms—the stanza and the linking devices of rhyme and repetition—reflects an idea of perseverance constituted by pauses, ruptures, and fresh starts. Reading the play as both a poem and a play reveals a self-conscious artifice that uses poetic form to embody theological claims.

Poetry: a healing voice for the frail and elderly

ABSTRACT The focus of this article is about a poetry healing group the author founded at a post-acute rehabilitation facility for senior citizens. The program was established a year and a half ago based on the need for mentally stimulating calendar activities. The group varies between high and low functioning frail and elderly participants with the notion of producing content to heal and stimulate, not for poetic craft. The program involves sharing poems with a specific a theme, so participants conjure lively discussions. The result is therapeutic healing through the art of storytelling. This article covers a description of the program along with the author’s observations. The therapeutic value of medical narrative to the elderly is also discussed.

Unlocking the Secret of ‘Locksley Hall’

Despite its originality, Tennyson's poem ‘Locksley Hall’ (1842) shares considerable characteristics with the pre-Islamic Arabic poems the Mu‘allaqāt, namely those composed by Imru’ al-Qays and ‘Antara. The similarities include length, rhyme, metre, genre, themes and appeal, which this article compares in order to show that Tennyson adapts these source text resources to the concerns and subject matter of his own poem, and not for the purpose of translating the Mu‘allaqāt. It follows that ‘Locksley Hall’ needs to be studied in modern scholarship not only as a poem that reflects some aspects of Tennyson's biography and poetic craft, but also as an imitation of other poetry. This article analyses the details that unveil the imitative strategy Tennyson adopts in ‘Locksley Hall’. In so doing, it posits that ‘imitation’ is better suited than ‘intertextuality’ as a conceptual tool for articulating the links between ‘Locksley Hall’ and the Mu‘allaqāt. Furthermore, in contrast to previous critical studies that refer to the influence on Tennyson of the Mu‘allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays, this article argues that Tennyson combines two Mu‘allaqāt as source materials for his own poem.

Revisiting conquest in classical Swahili war epics

This article reads two 18th Century classical Swahili epics of war as coded critiques of empire. Here, Empire refers not only to Europe but also the Arab world's conquest histories on the Indian Ocean seaboard. The epics: Mwengo bin Athumani's Chuo cha Tambuka (1728), ‘The Epic of Tabuk’, and Mgeni bin Faqihi's Utenzi wa Rasi’lGhuli (1855), ‘The Epic of Rasi’lGhuli’, are typically read in terms of their religious content and have been deemed apolitical; that they are merely concerned with translating Arabic tales for Islamic spiritual purposes. Through a critical approach, the article asserts that the epics deeply reflect on East African conquests as they are written in the era of Swahili coast conquests by the Portuguese and the Omani Arabs. They portray the oppressed, whose imagined piety is emphasized, appropriating religious authority to launch revolutions against their conquerors. The article demonstrates that the epics are political strategies of liberation from militarily powerful empires bent on consolidation of territory and exploitation. The poetic craft of winding tales of war not only nurtured and sustained the revolutionary spirit, but also reveals the warring atmosphere that defined the Swahili in their efforts to imagine a community in the years of imperial incursions.

Crafting Authenticity: Reality, Storytelling, and Female Self-Representation through Instapoetry

This article focuses on the phenomenon of instapoetry, considering the ways that this literary genre exists as a subset of other digital poetic fields. In examining this genre, I use the work of a number of instapoets, considering how this cohort create an aesthetic that is specifically built for this medium of dissemination. In a digital age, questions of identity and the ways in which we disseminate become more and more complex. In this article, I examine how instapoetry tackles issues of authenticity, particularly in light of the highly contentious nature of influencer culture and Instagram as a site that has a tendency to distort our vision of the world. In this exploration, I interrogate the tensions between these perceptions and an era of poetic expression that has been charged with favoring authenticity above poetic craft (Watts). This article examines the stories told by instapoets as well as the depiction of the self that is curated via the site. Finally, in light of all of this, I explore the potential of Instagram and instapoetry as a location for women's self-expression and self-representation in the digital age, and examine how this genre has allowed for a greater range of identities and self-expressions to be reflected.