Poetic Journey Research Articles

Autoethnographic poetic inquiry: therapeutically engaging with violence toward queers

ABSTRACTTherapeutic applications of poetry provide a powerful means of exploring and portraying lived experiences of queer individuals. In this article, autoethnographic poetic inquiry is used to explore the author’s life. Bullying, suicide, moments of strength and weakness, othering, and stifling of voice are some of the issues explored through this poetic journey. The author reflects on each of the poems he has written and roots such explorations in methodological literature of arts-based qualitative research. The overall purpose of the article is to document parts of the author’s life as he demonstrates how poetry has begun to help him heal. Through the act of writing poetry and reflecting on the meanings of said poems, the author takes the reader on a journey through his therapeutic healing process.

Reena NandaFrom Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story

Nota Bene Ivan Vladislavić Flashback Hotel Archipelago Books South African writer Ivan Vladislavić offers this collection of dreamlike stories that highlights his surrealist writing style and imaginative voice. Flashback Hotel blurs the lines between dream world and reality but does so while relentlessly searching for tangible meaning and teachings within the absurd. Josephine Wilson Extinctions Tin House Books Winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions intelligently defies expectations and unabashedly asserts itself as a masterful work of novelistic literature. Set distinctly in Australia, Wilson’s unique and intricately established characters come to life on the page, and their imperfections and traumas are portrayed naturally and honestly through her firmly grounded yet imaginative voice. reports devoted to street demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Luz, the somewhat innocent provincial young man who moved to Paris in search of a job, gets his first taste of tear gas and of charges by the CRS riot police. Overall, Luz’s lengthy graphic novel is a consistently amusing, sometimes moving account of the heyday of an irreverently satirical magazine, before it unwillingly became a worldwide icon. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Huzaifa Pandit Green Is the Colour of Memory Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by without shouts for “Azadi” (freedom) ringing out on the streets of this heaven on earth. Battles break out constantly between Indian security forces and gun-wielding “terrorists” or stone-pelting schoolgirls. Naturally, like any poet living in a contested land, Pandit’s poems also reflect this anguish. Pandit’s poetic journey, therefore, sends him in two directions, one toward a direct confrontation with the security forces like “Death in February,” where he writes, “Obituaries / that seek asylum from winter drought / in lost samovars of salted tea / at funerals to thirsty mourners.” Another way is to write of exiled poets like the Kashmiri English poet Agha Shahid Ali and spell it out: “I know I want to write a poem, but the futility of it / I can’t read, you can’t read.” “What does one do when plastic rainbows / pellet your lamenting lungs? / What does one do when amputated houses / grate against wilted coffins?” The bodies/coffins are really a nation torn asunder. These two distinctions set Pandit apart from the native and extranative Kashmiri poets, but, beneath the veneer of sorrow, he has a disguised sense of humor when he doesn’t talk about Kashmir at all in a poem entitled “Bedside Tales from Kashmir.” This is rare because his main concern is the Indian military and the besieged city of Srinagar where he teaches. In “Testimony in February,” he asks of the poet Ahmed Faraz, “We forgot your name / Won’t you silence our conversations?” For a poet living in a city under suppression by the Indian state, “Green is the colour of memory specked / with shades of yellow grey.” Pandit is emphatic that “The parchment of my heart / is empty, quite empty.” Ravi Shanker N Palakkad, India Reena Nanda From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story New Delhi. Bloomsbury India. 2018. 170 pages. The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the provinces that became Pakistan in 1947 form an important current of twentieth-century history. The events played a key role in shaping modern India. Many novels and stories have been published over the years that depict the atrocities, terror, and violence of Partition, on one hand, and the trauma of the survivors on the other. Reena Nanda’s new novel is a somewhat different slice-of-life memoir. Memory and family history intersect time WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Books in Review and space, and we are treated to a fascinating panorama of lost places and cultures from the vantage point of the author’s own family history. Centered on the character of Shakunt, the author’s mother (Nanda was born in 1945 in Quetta), the family saga traverses the years from before Shakunt’s birth—starting with the arrival of Shakunt’s grandparents as settlers in Balochistan—to the...

The Poetry of Judith Wright:

This paper seeks to explore that the poetry of Judith Wright is an essence of her dynamic and radical ecological thinking. The poet shows an inevitable connection between the human and the natural world in her poetry, and figures out how the natural world is extremely endangered by man. Wright, an ecopoet even before the term was coined, transforms the Australian poetic tradition conveying a new and monumental sense of the land and expressing her deepest concern not only for Australian society but also for the planet. In every phase of her poetic journey, she foregrounds nature as a major part of her subject, and represents the bitter-sweet relationship between nature and man. Therefore, this paper attempts to say that Wright’s poetry is an embodiment of her green writing project. It also focuses that she is a great ecological thinker who not only represents the relationship between the natural world and human one and vice versa but also expresses her deep apprehension for protecting nature from the constant destruction.

Poetry ‘Bodied Forth’ in Time: The Final Ironies of Cervantes’ Viaje del Parnaso

In 1981 Andrés Amorós welcomed modern criticism’s re-evaluation of Cervantes’ poetry as indicative of a new attitude that recognized Cervantine irony in the writer’s assessment of his own poetic performance. This article will suggest that having belatedly identified the ironic weight of Cervantes’ poetic self-fashioning, we must now attempt to understand it. Cervantes’ final poetic journey, the Viaje del Parnaso (1614), a parodic policing of the borders of the canon, is a significant starting point for further inquiry, and should be understood within a distinctively Cervantine ciclo de senectute. The critical corpus relating to the Viaje del Parnaso is relatively slight and to date the full import of Cervantes’ shift into the lyric mode at this point in his literary trajectory has not been interrogated. This article seeks to facilitate new thinking about the poem and its complex relationship with its moment of origin by analysing it within Edward Said’s paradigm of ‘late style’. Such an approach has several advantages: it accommodates the polyfaceted nature of the text; it allows for a fuller appreciation of the intersection of the individual voice (subjectively embodied) and the epochal (the collectively contingent socio-political body politic); and, in accordance with the characteristics of late works, identifies and investigates the supremacy of irony. As a rhetorical tool that prompts perceptual dissonance, irony demands, and depends upon, a contrast of appearance and reality; as a slippery discursive strategy, it has paradoxical implications for Baroque socio-cultural and political ideologies. For, as this study will demonstrate, what is at stake in the Viaje’s frustration of synthesis, is the construction of a cultural subject and the leveraging of a political ontology. This is most intensely felt in the ‘un-making’ of authorial selfhood that is doubly ‘made up’ in the ‘catastrophic’ commentary of the narrator-persona and in the aging body of the protagonist.

Light Filters In: Poems by Caroline Kaufman

Reviewed by: Light Filters In: Poems by Caroline Kaufman Karen Coats Kaufman, Caroline Light Filters In: Poems; illus. by Yelena Bryksenkova. Harper/HarperCollins, 2018 [224p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-284468-2 $14.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-284469-9 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 7–10 Teenaged author Kaufman is probably better known as Instagram celebrity @poeticpoison, and here she poetically chronicles her path through an adolescence plagued by depression, self-harm, and abusive relationships through to self-aware and sustainable coping strategies. She begins with an author’s note highlighting what may be triggering content, but her warmly conversational tone suggests assurance and solidarity with readers that she sees as allies in brave combat against overwhelming darkness. Her poetic journey is progressive, broken into chapters entitled “the night persists,” “the dawn breaks,” “the twilight grows,” and “the sun rises.” The clearly voiced, readable poems alternate among free verse, haiku, rhymed quatrains, and prose poems, some mimicking scripts, some broken into the components of a lab report, others headed by the names of planets, the totality suggesting a teen attempting to impose order on personal chaos using the tools on offer in her daily life. Simple sketches complement the verbal imagery through literalizing metaphors and contribute to a sense of unfinished adolescence. The hinted-at abuses and relationship traumas are vague enough to map onto various [End Page 433] reader experiences, and while some of the metaphors are past their freshness date, their very familiarity is what offers hope that someone has been there before and that the path out of darkness is not so bewilderingly original as to be untraceable. Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Once Upon a Star: A Poetic Journey through Space by James Carter

Once Upon a Star: A Poetic Journey through Space by James Carter

Ekphrasis and Allusion: Cicero's Path and Virgil's Pathos

A discussion of the notion of a poetic journey for both Virgil and his principal character, Aeneas, that parallels the rhetorical-philosophical trek outlined by Cicero in the Tusculans.

À Chypre, Aphrodite "s’est brisée en mille morceaux" : Fragments d’une écriture poétique redéfinie et mémoire "méthistorique"1

Thus poetry is something more philosophical and higher than history; for poetry speaks rather of generalities and the history of particular details”. These words of Aristotle are fully relevant to the case of Cyprus whose history would have been better illuminated by its poets; Costas Montis, Claire Angelides, Kyriakos Charalambides, Pantelis Michanikos, and others, have become witnesses, those who wipe away the tears of the people. Their creative journey follows the flow of the contemporary history of the country, which is divided into two periods: a) that of the 1955-1959 struggles against the British Empire and b) the one marked by the brutal invasion of the Turks in 1974 which entailed the geopolitical division of the island. The poetic writing of the first period, studied extensively and published in various anthologies, extols the endurance of the people and the heroism of young fighters. In that of the second period, which will be the object of our study here, the poet, in an effort to exorcise evil spirit and injustice, re-experiences the trauma of being uprooted and of mourning all that has been lost; wandering between myth and reality, truth and fiction, he/she distils history so as to redefine poetic art and thus weave his/her own myth. In order to follow the poetic journey of contemporary Cypriot Greeks, we have borrowed extracts from their most representative works: (i) Closed Doors by Costas Montis, which turns out to be a response to Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons, (ii) Methistoria by Kyriakos Charalambides, for whom tragedy alone reveals to us the cosmos of our own existence, (iii) Deposition by Pantelis Michanikos, where the archaic figure of Onesilus prevails, (iv) Breezes of Salamis by Claire Angelides who expresses her nostalgia for the past and her fervent hope to regain Salamis.

Memória, poética e política: o uso e desuso dos objetos

O artigo sistematiza o percurso poético da artista goiana Selma Parreira, a partir da exposição Desuso (2016), desdobramento de seu projeto Machina: memória e poética do espaço e objetos (2015). Por meio de signos picturais, a artista recorre às memórias de infância, contempla o espaço maquínico – um galpão de uma arrozeira em Anápolis, GO –, espólio de sua família, para aprofundar a investigação em poéticas visuais. Neles se entrecruzam memória, história, tempo/espaço/lugar, estética, performance cultural goiana e política. Para tanto, faço um enfoque interdisciplinar apoiado em Jacque Rancière, Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Michael Serres, Charles Baudelaire, Henri Bergson, Jacques Lacan, entre outros, narrativa oral da artista e texto escrito de Nei Clara de Lima.

“CERTAIN ROUTES TO UNCERTAIN LANDS”: SOME REMARKS ON THE DIFFICULTY OF MAPPING DAVID GASCOYNE’S ÉCRITURE

The paper ventures to investigate the possibilities of mapping David Gascoyne’s écriture and outlines the basic problems which anybody attempting such a task will sooner or later face. I seek to find out what is the actual nature of the allegedly critical shift – in the English poet’s outlook as well as in his literary style – that appears to have taken place sometime between 1936 and 1939, exactly when and how it happened (if happen it did, that is) and what its significance for Gascoyne’s poetic development may have been. The paper addresses also what I believe is an all too common misunderstanding that consists in separating the English poet’s early écriture (which is at times most curiously seen as including his “surrealist phase”) from his later writing – the separation all but invariably accompanied by the belief that it is Gascoyne’s later output which is properly mature and thus worth studying, unlike his earlier, supposedly jejune literary oeuvre – and interrogates the possibility of construing Gascoyne’s poetic journey in terms of anything like a development, expansion or growth. Keywords: alchemy, existential, existentialism, modernism, surrealism.

River Water

Chi Zijian explores the confluence of rivers and writing as they merge and comingle in the estuary of her work within the wider contexts of contemporary Chinese fiction. Rivers, like languages, flow across a wide range of geographies, but each is tied to specific local places. Follow Chi through this poetic journey at the intersection of water, language, and land.

The School Bus Symposium: A Poetic Journey of Co-created Conference Space

With the intention of disrupting and re-imagining traditional conference spaces, this article is a poetic compilation developed from a Curriculum Studies conference symposium that took place on a school bus. During the School Bus Symposium, in situ poetry writing and reading, song and storytelling occurred in response to open ended prompts and facilitation of creative activities. After the symposium, a call was issued to invite participants to submit any poetry or stories produced during, or inspired by the session. Consisting of 18 submissions including poetry, story, photography and creative essays, infused by curriculum theory and poetic inquiry, this collection offers an inclusive, reflective, participatory, and experiential rendering where participants are living and journeying poetically. Emphasizing creative engagement with personal memories, the authors collectively aimed to promote art education through imaginative approaches to curriculum studies, poetic inquiry and academic conferences.

Jorge de Lima poeta em movimento (Do "menino impossível" ao Livro de sonetos)

O ensaio visa percorrer o itinerário poético de Jorge de Lima desde a publicação do poema "O mundo do menino impossível" até o Livro de sonetos. Após a passagem do estilo acadêmico-parnasiano para a linguagem modernista Jorge de Lima voltou-se para a evocação da paisagem social de sua província natal, Alagoas. Nos anos 1930 escreveu poemas afro-nordestinos reunidos, mais tarde, nos Poemas negros. A partir da sua conversão ao catolicismo, sob a influência do pintor Ismael Nery, a sua poesia é abertamente bíblica e cristã começando com Tempo e eternidade composto em parceria com Murilo Mendes. Túnica inconsútil e Anunciação e encontro com Mira-Celi aprofundam a sua tendência mística. O Livro de sonetos exprime, em formas clássicas, uma imaginação surrealista. A compreensão do dinamismo das imagens é um dos motivos condutores do ensaio.

The Poet’s House Was a Trip

The Poet’s House Was a Trip Allison Thorpe (bio) The poet’s house was a tripI could not refuse. I knew you only through words,anxious to hear your lyrical wisdomabout meter and musethe heart of a simple line,but something more humblesurfaced the poetic journey. The spreading peach tree in your front yardalmost hid you from our viewas our car pulled to a stopuntil you reached upand offered us the bright fuzzy globes. We ate until our chins stickiedand our hands dripped sweetlaughter sealing a friendshiplike summer to a jar,memories ripe and readyfor the joyous pickingagainst the cruel snatch of winter,fuzzy dreams fillingour eager palmswith nuggets of gold. [End Page 75] Allison Thorpe Allison Thorpe recently retired from teaching literature, creative writing, and women’s studies. She is the author of Thoughts While Swinging a Wild Child in a Green Mesh Hammock, Swooning and Other Art Forms (a NFSPS chapbook winner), What She Sees: Poems for Georgia O’Keefe (forthcoming from White Knuckle Press), and To This Sad and Lovely Land. A Pushcart nominee, she is currently working on her first novel. Copyright © 2015 Berea College

Re- Reading Nissim Ezekiel through the Mirror of Post-colonialism

In the genre of Indian English Poetry, Nissim Ezekiel stands as a flagship, founder and father of post-independence period. And any discussion regarding the poetic journey and development of Indian English poetry will definitely start with Nissim Ezekiel. He did the same thing what Walt Whitman did for American poetry. He is classifies both as a modernist and post modernist poet. And this can be found in the first half of his poetry. But a close looks to some of his poetry shows that his poetry manifests or reflect the gesture of post colonialism. Now-a-days cultural studies and theory of post colonialism become a fashion and also Nissim Ezekiel can be re-read by applying these cultural studies and post colonial theory to some extent. He wants to confirm his identity and also wants to hark back the colonial past of India. Not only this, he also uses myth in his poetry. This paper attempts to highlight those issues and aspects in the poetry of Nissim Ezekiel where he tends towards post colonialism.

Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems by Shiv K. Kumar

Hirshfield’s declaration of being “a human poet”—and certainly one with a distinctive voice and an honest vision—suffices . Her humanity includes self-criticism, genuine humility, and a penetrating interest in the sciences. Her discreet questions, immersed in moments of inspired creation, are suspended on grace notes of memory. Jane Hirshfield stands with the finest contemporary American poets. The Beauty reveals a poetics of being that inhabits mysteries , essences, and beautiful lyrics. In her books of prizewinning poetry, translations, and essays, one realizes that her works are apertures into wisdom. [Editorial note: Turn to page 126 to read a review of Ten Windows , her latest essay collection.] Robert Bonazzi San Antonio, Texas Shiv K. Kumar. Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems. New Delhi. Authorspress. 2014. isbn 9788172737597 Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems contains sixty-seven thought-provoking poems by the seasoned poet Shiv K. Kumar. This poetic journey begins with a quest—“Where have they gone?”—and ends “in the woods,” with the determination to “learn to speak the language of trees, bushes, snakes, and beasts” via memory lanes, recalling the dream world of youth. What is striking in this poetry collection is Kumar’s imaginative skill, which has not blurred over his career. In the evening of his life, he never forgets the other world where he has to go—and so the dead, funeral processions, shadows, ghosts, tears, fire, hospital, sleepwalkers, time, pain, space, trains, sand, and all things associated with death remain flashing on the screen of his mind. He also often takes the reader to memory lanes from his childhood days—stars, hills, clouds, woods, river, the gardens of Chashme Shahi, flowers , along with the streets of Delhi. The poet knows well how to use memory as a technique for exploring his “Self” as well as voicing his feelings. He worships love and firmly believes in the religion of art for art’s sake, though he never becomes blind to the happenings around him and the world. What he recommends is naturalness and innocence. Intuitions mark his life, but intellect seeks expression through writing. “The best way to choose is not to choose / but just press on.” He loves animals, birds, insects—be they dogs, eagles, pigeons, or ants. He attempts to trace the genesis of the birth of pain, which he does not find in the eviction of the first ancestors but in the first labor through which Eve passed. This labor pain in childbirth becomes responsible for every “facet of trauma”—be it “separation, sickness, and deception.” Kumar’s poetry is rich enough to evoke the fusion of idea and feeling. What makes it particularly appealing is his confessional mode, which he uses to go into the hearts of his readers. Where Have the Dead Gone? And Other Poems remains a mystery. The poet attempts to decipher the unwritten script and listen to the unheard melodies of this other world. He lives intuitively and finds that “The way to equipoise / is to sleepwalk through life.” He does not wish to impart any absolute message through his poetry, although the reader may become aware and show interest in understanding life through Kumar’s poems—the poems that speak of the experiences in life. Sudhir K. Arora M.J.P. Rohilkhand University, Bareilly Lan Lan. Canyon in the Body. Fiona Sze-Lorrain, tr. Brookline, Massachusetts / Hong Kong. Zephyr Press & The Chinese University Press. 2014. isbn 9781938890017 Lan Lan’s poetry in Chinese is as distinct and immediately recognizable as your The Memory of Stone: Meditations on the Canyons of the West Erv Schroeder, photographer University of New Mexico Press Erv Schroeder’s captivating images of undomesticated lands, coupled with poetry by native authors, lead you on an expedition through history and humanity. By viewing these mesmeric rock formations, the reader gains a more transcendent idea of time and nature. These intimate black-and-white photographs resonate on a profound philosophical level. Karel Schoeman This Life Else Silke, tr. Archipelago Books Translated from Afrikaans, this post– Apartheid novel carries the reader through four generations of Afrikaners and the value of memory. The tale of one woman and her deathbed reflections, it is...

Poetic Journey of Bhawānī Prasād Miśra

Poetic Journey of Bhawānī Prasād Miśra

BAJO EL CIELO DEL ANTIPURGATORIO

During the Dante’s poetic journey on the afterworld, the astronomic references set his chronological route. When he is under the boreal sky, everything is adjusted on the Ptolemaic vision. But in the austral hemisphere, where there is the mountain of Purgatory, the poet must work �耀rst of all with allegories and, because of that, is not acceptable a possible identi�耀cation of the Southern Cross in this imaginary vault of heaven.

The Road Less Trodden – Firaq Gorakhpuri’s Poetic Journey

Raghupati Sahay was a renowned poet in Urdu literary canon who received critical acclamation in his lifetime. Loneliness and constant search for beauty are repeating themes in his verses that made him a popular poet of Urdu literature in India and abroad. He profoundly felt that he was separated from beauty in reality and this could be a reason for him to take the word, ‘Firaq’ which means ‘separation/quest’ as his takhallus or penname. Firaq is a rare poetic personality who could direct his disappointment in life into creative channels. Despite his short temper, a major flaw in his personality, Firaq carved a permanent place for himself in Urdu Literary Canon with his literary efforts. His poetic journey becomes significant in the light of the setbacks in his personal life and his short temper which was his biggest weakness. Firaq Gorakhpuri like his predecessors Mir Taki Mir, Ghalib, Miraji, and contemporary poets Jigar Moradabadi and Majaz Lucknowi achieved significant critical esteem in his quest for beauty. This article briefly studies the path taken by this eminent poetic personality in achieving lifetime recognition in Urdu literary canon.

How the Poet Soars into Devotional Ecstasy in Crossing the BarA Rhetorical Study

Lord Alfred Tennyson silhouetting the “intellectual throne” of Victorian England with his entire blaze is often called a “poetic stylist”. Starting his poetic journey from 1829 with Timbuctoo he wrote different kinds of poetry some of which were gay, some serious, some flippant, a lot many passionate, some with a note of lamentation and a large number sensuous. But as his life and poetic career gradually rolls on like the rising sun across the sky with time he gains the inevitable maturity and deeper insight into the cosmic evolutionary process. His poems from mere sensuousness attain a devotional note of complete spiritual surrender at the feet of his “Pilot” and his yearning to unite with Him intensifies. He wins over the fear of death and dissolution; his poems from the elegiac note of Break, Break, Break transcend into an ecstatic mood in Crossing the Bar which he wanted to be inscribed as an epitaph on his sepulchre. But it is through the coalescence of form and function this total transcendence in thought, feeling and attitude to life succeeds in finding expression. Hence in this paper through the stylistic analysis of Crossing the Bar an attempt is made to study the poetic diction and versification, the rhetoric profile that enables the poet to create a milieu perfect for his heightened realization.