Poetic Line Research Articles

Alice Notley's Descent: Modernist Genealogies and Gendered Literary Inheritance

This article examines modernist genealogy in Alice Notley's 1992 poem The Descent of Alette . Notley's central speaker finds herself riding on a nightmarish subway ruled by a male tyrant who controls all artistic form. This article argues that the subway can be understood as an ongoing public to which poets since Pound have returned to experiment with impersonal poetic form. In Notley's poem, the subway signals vexed poetic lineage as well as the passageway to a new collective formal space. However, this article suggests, we must ask whether the poem's emphasis on private poetic speech qualifies the poem's feminist poetic imagination, or whether Notley's formal experimentation, particularly her use of citational quotation marks, leads to a workable notion of collective voice as the object of quest. Reading Alette against "Doctor Williams' Heiresses," Notley's early experimental historiography, the article situates the question of private speech within the larger question of modernism's "after-affects" in postwar women's poetry.

نظرات الشیخ محمد محیی الدین عبد الحمید فی تحلیل الشعر ونقده شرح ابن عقیل على ألفیة ابن مالک أنموذجا

Abstract Sheikh Mohammad Mohi Addin Abdulhamid’s Perspectives in Analyzing and Criticizing Poetry: Ibn Aqils Commentary on Alfiyah Ibn Malik as a Model By: Dr. Abu Al Fotoh Mustafa Juma Rashwan Sheikh Mohammad Mohi Addin Abdulhamid’s vision in editing “Sharah Ibn Aqeel” was characterized as comprehensive. He not only did editing tasks, but he also applied other literary critic tasks. His work, as a result, was interesting and convincing. This pairing between the two tasks opened the texts wide for him. His analysis and criticism of the poetic lines were varied. He cared for relating the text to its author. He also introduced the poet, stated the poem’s occasion, clarified the poetic purpose, determined the context, and criticized the language. He further explained the meaning and criticized it, and he also criticized the rhythm and the literary image. His criticism, in all, was at some times objective and at others it was subjective. He also justified and balanced most of his criticism. نظرات الشيخ محمد محيي الدين عبد الحميد في تحليل الشعر ونقده شرح ابن عقيل على ألفية ابن مالک أنموذجا د/ أبو الفتوح مصطفى

Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in the German Lied (review)

Songs in Motion: Rhythm and Meter in German Lied. By Yonatan Malin. (Oxford Studies in Music Theory.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [xx, 236 p. ISBN 9780195340051. $49.95.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, index. In 1817 article in Allgemeine Musika lische Zeitung, composer, critic, and publisher Hans Georg Nageli predicted new era of lied composition that would be characterized by an as of yet unrecognized polyrhythm, so that rhythm of speech, singing, and playing will be subsumed into higher artistic whole (Hans Georg Nageli, Die Liederkunst, Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 45 [1817]: 765-66). often overlooked relations between these rhythms of poetry and music lie at heart of Yonatan Malin's valuable contribution to study of German art song. In Songs in Motion Malin draws on wealth of past and present approaches to song analysis and metric theory (including his dissertation, Metric Dissonance and Music- Text Relations in German Lied [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2003]) to critically examine songs by Fanny Hensel nee Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Hugo Wolf. Whereas recent studies of rhythm and meter have largely focused on specific songs or collections, Songs in Motion presents broad picture of genre and changing approaches to lied composition in nineteenth century. Malin's stated aim of book is a deepened awareness of temporal flow in song and union of musical and poetic rhythms (p. vii), and his readily comprehensible analytical methods and straightforward prose help realize goal. Perhaps counterintuitively, in order to understand how song is set in motion, it must first be suspended in time; each layer of song-text, vocal line, and accompaniment-is studied independently, then joined together to observe resultant polyrhythm that propels song forward. opening two chapters (Part One: Rhythm and Meter in German Lied) provide number of tools to do so by introducing methodologies and providing background on analysis of poetic and musical rhythms of lieder. In first chapter, The Rhythms of Poetry and Song, Malin offers concise overview of poetic rhythms and meters before turning to discussion of musical rhythm, in which he identifies number of declamatory schemas commonly used by nineteenthcentury composers to translate trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter poetic lines into given musical meter. These declamatory schemas, which outline declamatory rhythms and indicate patterns of text setting, provide simple yet effective method for comparing different composers' approaches to combining poetic and musical rhythms, and Malin utilizes this particular approach repeatedly throughout Songs in Motion. Chapter 2, Theories of Musical Rhythm and Meter, introduces number of recent developments in metric theory, using distinction between meter and rhythm as point of both departure and conclusion. Meter is defined not as static temporal frame, but as an infinitely variable structuring of periodic motion formed by recurring accents and parallel structures, while rhythm is understood as the changing pattern of durations (pp. 64-65). This more flexible conception of meter underlies many of recent development in metric theory. Malin offers succinct explanations of these theories (including those of periodicity, hypermeter, metric perception and entrainment, phrase rhythm, shadow meter, and metric conflict), taking care to apply these concepts to short examples within lied genre in preparation for more extended analyses of part 2. Chapters 3 through 6 (Part Two: Songs in Motion) turn to closer readings of specific songs that represent in some way aforementioned composers' approaches to rhythm and meter. Although these two musical elements provide entry points into various songs, Malin neglects neither cultural contexts in which songs were written (he provides brief background information pertinent to understanding each song) nor other musical and poetic aspects of songs, including poetic meaning, harmony, form, musical texture, and dynamics. …

The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps by J. Winter

Winter, Jeanette. The Watcher: Jane Goodall's Life with the Chimps. New York: Schwartz & Wade Books, 2011. Print. Jeanette Winter is a prolific and award winning American children’s author and illustrator. She tells us in her author’s note at the end of this book that, as a child, she wished that she “could have read about someone like Jane Goodall – a brave woman who wasn’t afraid to do something that had never been done before”. So she wrote this book. The picture book format and the Grade 3 reading level make this work appropriate for the lower elementary school target audience, children who are beginning to think about what they want to be when they grow up. While written mostly in poetic line form, the work is not particularly poetic. However the form does seem to give Winter the licence to begin sentences with conjunctions and end them with prepositions. The text reads more like folksy spoken American English than poetry. For example, “She woke at dawn and saw them slowly rise from their nests, sit for a spell, then go off to find food.” Winter’s illustrations are the delight of the book. They are simple, two-dimensional folk art works. In this volume Winter purposefully uses two distinct forms of presentation. In the early part of the book, which traces Goodall’s life from her English childhood until she travels to Gombe, the illustrations are square and centred on a coloured page with the text structured below them. Once Goodall has set up her camp in the forest, the illustrations are as wild and uncontained as the life Goodall led. The paintings splash out across the pages and the text fits in and around them wherever there is space. As an introduction to the life of a remarkable female scientist and role model, this is a work that belongs in every public and elementary school library. However, because the text is not exemplary of well-written English, it should not be used for classroom study. Recommended with reservations: 2 out of 4 stars Reviewer: Sandy Campbell Sandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Thronging the Ear: Hopkins and the Counterpoint of Prosody

Thronging the Ear:Hopkins and the Counterpoint of Prosody John Golden Hopkins Quarterly, 38.1-2, published by agreement of the editors in conjunction with Victorian Poetry, 49, no.2, as sharing the common theme, “Prosody.” "I fumble a little at music, at counterpoint, of which in course of time I shall come to know something; for this, like every other study, after some drudgery yields up its secrets, which seem inpenetrable [sic] at first."1 Hopkins, aged thirty-nine, wrote this to Richard Dixon in June, 1883; he would die six years later. There is more than humility in this self-caricature: Hopkins's life-long interest in music took the form of a perpetual amateur's struggle. As a child, he sang rounds and songs written by his father, but he could not read music. He never learned to play an instrument well, but in the last decade of his life he set several poems (usually not his own) to music. He would be seen in his last years at University College, Dublin, sitting at a piano and strumming with one finger, trying out melodies.2 Yet Hopkins has become a central figure in discussions of the relation of music to prosody in particular because of his notion of counterpoint rhythm. Counterpoint as a possibility of poetic rhythm continues to raise questions for prosodic theorists, but Hopkins's own difficulties with counterpoint suggest that productive difficulty itself lies at the root of its application to prosody, indeed at the root of the relation of music to prosody generally. Hopkins's aesthetic generalization of counterpoint, finally, illuminates his innovative sense of the dynamic, layered nature of cognition and self-recognition. It is in the "Author's Preface" of 1883, the year of his letter to Dixon about learning musical counterpoint, that Hopkins's most influential description of "Counterpoint Rhythm" occurs. Hopkins describes a reversal of meter (usually trochees substituted for iambs) for two consecutive feet: [Such a reversal] must be due either to great want of ear or else is a calculated effect, the superinducing or mounting of a new rhythm upon the old; and since the new or [End Page 51] mounted rhythm is actually heard and at the same time the mind naturally supplies the natural or standard foregoing rhythm, for we do not forget what the rhythm is that by rights we should be hearing, two rhythms are in some manner running at once and we have something answerable to counterpoint in music, which is two or more strains of tune going on together, and this is Counterpoint Rhythm.3 The ambiguity left open here—that the reversed feet might indicate simply the poet's "great want of ear"—is not duplicated on the side of the reader: "the mind," Hopkins unequivocally asserts, "naturally supplies the natural or foregoing rhythm" as it hears the "new" one. And yet this dual action is itself an open question for later critics. Thus John Hollander in 1975 urges us to see Hopkins's term less as a "fruitful analogy" than as a "startling metaphor":4 "[N]otice how Hopkins's own metaphors of 'superinducing or mounting a new rhythm on the old' lead him to an actually inaccurate musical analogy. The correct one would be rather one of syncopation." Hollander allows Hopkins a passage out of this semantic cornering by denying Hopkins the aural metaphor. What Hopkins was really thinking of, Hollander explains, was a visual image. "For Hopkins, counterpoint is generated by two musical lines, commensurate in category; but the two kinds of rhythm, the potential or schematic and the actual, are hardly so." Hopkins must have imagined the poetic line supplemented by two "alternative strings of scansion marks," one for the standard and one for the mounted rhythm. "Together, these two strings of syllable markers might have seemed to Hopkins like a staff of musical notation, like two musical lines being simultaneously generated."5 By removing Hopkins's metaphor to the visual realm, Hollander defuses even its power to "startl[e]" us: he makes it another formal notation, a side-effect of mere scansion. Derek Attridge, in The Rhythms of English Poetry, similarly refuses any audible reality...

Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend

The title of this editorial is translated from a Chinese poem. The words have been adopted, adapted, reinterpreted, repurposed, proclaimed, and misquoted repeatedly since 1956, when they were popularized in the context of the Chinese revolution and its international reception. In re-contextualizing the original spirit of the poetic line within the current situation of the CSCL research field, we strive to foster, articulate, and support openness within our community to multiple schools of thought. In particular, ijCSCL provides a venue for exploration of alternative perspectives and for dialog among them. While each CSCL researcher necessarily favors specific paradigms—more or less self-consciously—the field itself profits from a cacophony of voices: theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, technological, ideological, political, interdisciplinary, and international. Scientific revolutions—like political revolutions—advance through the confrontation of viewpoints and the critique of established paradigms. We can see this in the academic progress of our field as clearly as on the battlefronts of the Middle East. While dominant positions may facilitate short-term ends, they restrict innovative thinking and practices; they are eventually surpassed and their rules overthrown. Educational systems around the world are still striving to implement an industrial-era view of knowledge as factual content and learning as the testable transfer of knowledge from authoritative sources to individual students. CSCL is defined by alternative views, in which knowledge can be co-constructed by small groups and communities, particularly with the support of networked computers. Since its inception, CSCL research has built upon a wide variety of established and innovative approaches to pedagogy, theory, analysis, and technology. Through this open-inquiry approach, the CSCL field itself adopts the attitude of letting many flowers bloom, which it projects as definitive of a stance toward learning that is appropriate to the contemporary post-industrial world. The field of CSCL began as a multi-disciplinary effort, bringing together diverse concerns and approaches to the complex task of achieving the promise of computer-supported collaborative learning in actual school classrooms. Rather than converging on a single approach, the research community has increasingly recognized the need to incorporate more and more considerations. The goal of CSCL is inherently multifaceted. It must account for psychological, pedagogical, technological, and community-based phenomena. It must design for individual, small-group, and classroom interactions. It must overcome barriers involving entrenched beliefs and practices of students, parents, teachers, principals, school

Subliminal Histories: Psychological Experimentation in the Poetry and Poetics of Frederic W. H. Myers

The pursuit of poetry and the new science of the mind were inseparable strands of the seminal work of the late nineteenth-century poet, psychological and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers. An early passion for classical prosody translated in later life into a complex, nuanced poetry devoted to the performative externalization of intense psychological experiences of various kinds. Myers was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research and co-authored the two-volume study of ghost sightings, <em>Phantasms of the Living</em> (1886). He also conducted extensive research into trance mediumship, telepathy and automatic writing, immersed himself in contemporary continental work on hypnosis, dissociation, and secondary personality and was the first to describe the early work of Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud in English. This work, in turn, inspired Myers’s seminal theory of the subliminal self that profoundly influenced the psychology of William James. <br /> Myers described himself as a ‘minor poet’ and an ‘amateur savant’, the latter referring to his psychical research. But despite their minor status in the Victorian canon, Myers’s poetry provides a unique record of his concept of poetic language as an ‘intensification’ of private experience, in contrast to the objectivity and empirical drive of scientific language. Myers was deeply influenced by the poetics of Wordsworth and Tennyson. What he admired in particular was their capacity to reinvigorate the classical contours of the poetic line with modern rhythms, metaphors, and motifs capable of rendering the invisible or ‘subliminal’ aspects of everyday life visible, the most important of these being the laying bare of the mind in the act of dreaming, mourning, reverie, and reflection. Myers’s elegiac lyric to Tennyson, for example, written on the occasion of the poet’s death, is a self-conscious stylistic homage to <em>Crossing the Bar</em>. The motif of the immortal journey of the soul is infused with Myers’s spiritualist faith in the eternal presence of the departed, to quote the final lines of the poem: ‘Be stilled an hour, and stir from sleep/Reborn, re-risen, and yet the same.’ This resonates with Myers’s belief, stated in the prefatory autobiographical fragment that serves as a prelude to this and the following poems, that ‘all things thought and felt, as well as all things done, are somehow photographed imperishably on the Universe, and that my whole past will probably lie open to those with whom I have to do’. <br /> The proposed article will argue that Myers’s poetry and poetics sustains and develops a uniquely nineteenth-century poetic engagement with ‘scientific’ theories of mind that begins with the Romantics he admired. Poetry created a space for Myers to dramatize the dynamic and evolving dialogue between conscious and unconscious states that extended beyond the confines of the mortal body. Poetic language evoked and explored the mind of the speaker in a dialogic or confessional style, representing a secret history of subliminal thoughts and impulses, rather than prosaically resolving epistemological paradoxes or diagnosing the various crises that haunt the individual psyche. This article argues for Myers as a significant, rather than a minor, contributor to the Victorian poetic figuring of the mind as a ‘double’ phenomenon, to invoke the terminology of the new mental science.

An Introduction to Magdalena Solé's New Delta Rising

110 | ecotone Even now, as you stand at the edge of one of those vast brown fields, you feel like you could walk and walk, walk into your own old age, and meet your Maker out there somewhere, kicking up dust. Some people who come here even say they have tumbled back in time, but I do not think that is true. They have merely slipped sideways into a place they do not recognize, and may never understand. Some places look made-up, look imagined. The art deco landscape of South Beach looks like it was dreamed up by the writers of a comic book; the skyline of Atlanta seems stenciled by bankers. Las Vegas was set ablaze by electricians; Richmond is ridden by dead soldiers on marble horses. This place is not like that. The Delta, while I am sure there are dreams here that have yet to die hard, was made, constructed, not imagined. It was hacked out of an immense, dark, primeval forest, and transformed by pain and blood and muscle, in an age of human bondage. Men felled the trees and burned the stumps and turned this wide, flat place into a landscape of forever fields, of cotton rows that stretched farther than a strong man could pick in a day. It is not, despite appearances, the end of nowhere. The empty fields are its destination. The weeds let you know where one crop ends and another begins . While other man-made places were covered in people and concrete, here it was the dirt that mattered, and there was just so much of it, between porch lights and schools and hospitals. There still is. In the open land between the towns and the broad places in the road, dark drops like a lid on a box, and that very isolation has shaped life here, held it, and marked it deeply and sometimes horribly. Its loneliness would be a stage for some of the most chilling moments in the struggle for civil rights. Its rivers would give up their dead; its nowhere roads hold secrets still. It would be called the most Southern place on earth, and I do not believe that meant tea cakes and cotillions. Here, the poverty hits you between the eyes like a hurled chunk of loose asphalt. It is one of the poorest places in the United States, where deep pockets of wealth are surrounded by thirdworld houses, tilting mobile homes, and one of the saddest infant-mortality rates in the industrialized world. Today huge corporate farms and rippling catfish ponds line the lost An Introduction to Magdalena Solé’s New Delta Rising rick bragg | 111 highways, dotted here and there with towns with names like Belzoni, Alligator , Indianola, Clarksdale, and Leland , where a man named Son Thomas summed up pretty much everything important in life in just a few guitar licks, a few poetic lines: Give me beefsteak when I’m hungry, Whiskey when I’m dry, Pretty women when I’m living, Heaven when I die. I have been coming here, off and on, for thirty years, usually, like most outsiders , to steal a little something from a place where the people have so little already. I took only stories, stories that, to me, had incredible value. I tried, one story at a time, to explain a place that has no explanation, to paint a picture that shifted between brushstrokes. This, I learned in time, is a hard, hard place to tell. There is a sadness here that some people can hardly bear, but it is also a place where people live, where you can get the best tamale in the whole wide world, where clean white sheets snap like pistol shots on the clothesline, propane tanks shine on the horizon like spaceships, and a man with mud on his boots is not sneered at but admired, because mud means money, squeezed from the catfish ponds and farms. Here, a man who runs a local pool hall quietly explains how a quarter can be worth more than a dollar, more than folding money, because a poor man might not have a dollar to give you, but just about everybody can...

From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada Robert McGill (bio) Ian Rae . From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press. 2008. 400. $95.00 Why have so many contemporary Canadian novelists started out as poets? Ian Rae poses this question at the outset of his book but spends little time speculating about an answer, preferring to focus not on why authors have made the shift but on how they've done so. As successive chapters treat Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Anne Carson, Rae makes it clear that those who study these writers' fiction ignore the poetry at some peril. Tracking each author's transition from short lyrics to long poems and thence to the novel, Rae deftly illustrates how the writers' early preoccupations with language and narrative structure metamorphose along with changes in form, such that strategies and techniques first adopted for poetry are then productively brought to bear on fiction. Accordingly, From Cohen to Carson offers a persuasive map of continuities as well as innovations for each writer's career. However, what emerges even more strikingly is an implicit argument for a distinctive national tradition of the poet-novelist, one stretching at least as far back as A.M. Klein's 1951 [End Page 327] novel The Second Scroll. Rae is careful to emphasize that his authors don't form a 'monolithic school,' but he evokes amply a shared sense of artistic community and aesthetic mission. While recognizing biographical connections between the writers, Rae's interests are primarily formalist. He sees in his chosen authors a fascination with deconstructing varieties of narrative 'frames,' as well as a penchant for reiteration rather than chronological order. Rae's readings of novels such as Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Ondaatje's Coming through Slaughter, and Marlatt's Ana Historic are sturdy pieces of criticism building upon established scholarship. The book's highlight is a bravura reading of Carson's Autobiography of Red, a text that in this study could have been the fly in the ointment, since the book isn't self-evidently a novel. However, Rae argues Carson's text into relevance through the force of his analysis, offering exegesis that is at once impressively learned, keen to locate Carson in a Canadian poetic lineage, and scrupulously devoted to close reading. Having said that, most of Rae's book will be compelling principally for scholars studying the respective authors to whom each chapter is devoted. The exception is the final section, which offers a robust defence of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces and Ondaatje's The English Patient against Stephen Henighan's now rather notorious charge in 2002 that such novels amount to little more than politically dubious purple prose. Rae takes a laudably even-handed approach in his response, identifying certain limitations of Fugitive Pieces even as he insists, pace Henighan, that these books must be understood not as shapeless products of aesthetic decadence, but rather as participants in a growing national tradition of novels that are conspicuously self-conscious about their use of form and language. Indeed, the possibility of reading From Cohen to Carson as a rigorous refutation of Henighan's polemic might be taken as a sign of success of both critics. Henighan has proven the galvanizing value of provocation, while Rae has demonstrated that academic monographs can serve as a manner of literary senate where sober second thought might hold the day. Robert McGill Robert McGill, Department of English, University of Toronto Copyright © 2011 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Stress Weight: Unwilled Order, Clothes Lines & Crowned Teeth

There are many ways of describing rhythm in poetry, all of them to some extent artificial and none of them giving the absolutely true picture of what is happening. What follows is another such; it is one poet's way of hearing how language interacts in the tradition and the dialect out of which that poet works. At best, it describes a different way of hearing the rhythm; at worst it is the nearest this poet can get to describing how he hears language interact. In the paper that follows I intend to present and explain the interaction of words across the poetic line in a number of examples chosen from the work of poets with a Hiberno-English or Irish Language background and attempt to find reasons for those interactions in terms of their linguistic heritage. The paper will discuss how the line functions within this system as both the basic musical unit and the base unit of sense in a poem, exploring how tensions between the two can be exploited. Starting from two basic premises: that poetry is an aural art; and that part of the idea behind the art form is to reflect and imitate in an artful way the natural modulations of speech, the paper investigates one way of describing metrics which avoids rendering metre in a mechanical fashion but recognises the complexity of the living breathing language.

"Blue Under-Shirts Upon a Line": Orrick Johns and the Genesis of William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow"

Using William Carlos Williams's and Orrick Johns's early working association as members of the "Others" group as a starting point, the essay examines how Johns's now largely forgotten poem, "Blue Under-Shirts," possibly influenced the composition of Williams's iconic "The Red Wheelbarrow." The similarities between these two poems are striking, and I argue that Williams may very well have had the shortcomings of Johns's poem in mind when he composed "The Red Wheelbarrow." The essay proposes that what Williams likely recognized in his friend Johns' poem was the framework for a new modern American poetic line, demonstrated by his own one-sentence poem, that moves beyond the imagist principle of austere, objective description to a new focus on the distinctive linguistic features of the American idiom, an approach that draws the reader in as an active participant in the creation of the poetic experience.

Narrative Soup

The bricoleur principle in experimental social science writing need not be confined to mixing or blurring genres of subject matter and then representing the results in strictly conventional ways. Those messages are tied to forms of expression and the forms themselves can be manipulated creatively to open new modes of communicating experiences and knowledge and thereby potentially new dimensions for understanding the subject matter itself. Obviously not cast as conventional narrative, this story is also not a prose poem per se, it is not particularly rich with metaphor and allegory, and it lacks the economy and rhythms of poetic line phrasing in several parts. It does, however, have elements of all of these forms. It is a pool of expository rules at play. I offer it here as homage to all of the creative souls who have mingled and stirred such things in their own work (on the strength of muses, or in some cases, methodological gurus) and who have had the temerity to commit the results to print.

Haydn-Gellert, Betrachtung des Todes: A meeting of tradition and innovation

Haydn’s Betrachtung des Todes , a late little masterpiece by the composer, represents the simultaneity of the old and the new. The text is the second verse of Gellert’s fourteen-verse poem ‘Wie sicher lebt der Mensch, der Staub!’, No. 50 in the volume Geistliche Oden und Lieder , 1757. In the short catalogue at the end of the volume Gellert names the hymn ‘Herr Jesu Christ, meines Lebens Licht’, as the appropriate melody for the poem. Haydn’s vocal trio with basso continuo is perhaps the most extraordinary setting in the series of the Mehrstimmige Gesänge (Hob. XXVb:3). Its harmonies and key changes uncannily foreshadow the language of Schubert and Mendelssohn. The musical representation of the poetic lines, on the other hand, is full of rhetorical devices. Most startling is the presence of figured bass, as an anachronistic code for the keyboard accompaniment. Co-existence of Baroque and Romantic, or ‘First Viennese Modernism’ (James Webster): the roots of the composer’s professional education preserved in a highly innovative setting of an old Protestant poem, in the very last years of the eighteenth century.

From Blake to Beardsley: "On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry"

'I sing,' says modern Bard, 'speaking to eye alone, by help of type-founders, papermakers, compositors, ink balls, folding, and stitching.' Published in review of Eliza Cook's poetry in Anglo-American in 1847, statement testifies to nineteenth century's growing recognition of expressiveness of poetic book, whether in elite folio, high-end quarto, everyday octavo, or, as in this case, common reader's duodecimo. (1) Observing that days of oral tradition, when the song and singer were one, had been supplanted by print culture, reviewer went on to note compensations offered by visual and material: For charm thus lost, we must make up, as we can, in other ways. The painter's and graver's art does something; reader's mind must do rest (p. 343). When William Blake, in his Introduction to Songs of Innocence, had his piper substitute pipe for pen and stain the water clear in order to write a book that all may read, (2) he too commented on poetry's metamorphosis in print culture. He enacted this insight materially, in bibliographic, linguistic, iconic, and graphic features he conceived and fashioned himself. Except that all may not book he made: few of us have been fortunate enough to view, let alone handle, one of physical copies of Songs of Innocence from 1789, 1795, 1802, 1804, or 1811. (3) As we know, none of these copies is identical in coloring, sequence, or contents. Each necessarily stages its own argument about poetry, pictures, print, and possibilities of pastoral innocence. Until relatively recently, most of us Songs of Innocence in printed collections and anthologies, assisted by facsimile reproductions of plates from one of extant copies. In digital age, thanks to work of Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi on William Blake Archive, we have recourse to virtual representations of multiple copies and better understanding of uniqueness of each of Blake's individual productions. (4) But we still, for most part, and teach Blake's poetry apart from material forms he designed for its expression. And perhaps this says as much about our own limitations as it does about access. How do we read Blake's graphic ornaments in midst of poetic lines? Do semantics always trump iconic and graphic elements? How much close attention do nonreferential squiggles require? Does color signify? What is meaning of paper, layout, calligraphy and sequence? In this most material of poetic productions, how much does matter actually matter? Blake's creative control over processes of production was unique, but his interest in expressiveness of printed page was not. As we are beginning to recognize, an extraordinary number of nineteenth-century poets, artists, book designers, and publishers experimented with interplay between bibliographic form and linguistic and iconic content. Yet our study of Victorian poems as embodied, graphic forms is in its infancy. As Johanna Drucker remarks in one of essays collected here, we lack basic critical vocabulary for talking about organization and composition of pages, way these create development over sequence of openings, use of patterns, decoration, typographic formats and styles, and specific ways methods of print production are thought about in conception of work. Bindings, typographic treatment, and other matters are usually left for bibliophiles to ponder in their own peculiar backwater of terrain once known as bibliographical studies (VP 48, no. 1: 139). Contending that bibliographic forms are as significant as linguistic, this special issue of Victorian Poetry and Book Arts explores some methodological and conceptual premises and vocabulary for talking about Victorian poetry as physical text. Analyzing material features of wide range of poetic texts made in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, its essays historicize and theorize Some of Characteristics of Modern Poetry. …

Towards the Systematization of Stanza Forms in the Russian Folk Song

In both byliny and literary poetry texts are organized such that each succeeding line adds something new to the exposition, which proceeds without interruption from the beginning to the end (ABCDE ). In literary verse the division of a poetic text into stanzas does not alter this principle. Folk songs, in which stanzas are formed by the regular repetition of lines or by the regular inclusion of a refrain, traditionally differ, because these features do not supplement the information being conveyed in the text. Such repetitions are explained by the melody of a song, which is more developed and longer than the accompanying verbal material. This demonstrates the non-linguistic nature of stanza forms, which were in their formation long ago connected with choreography and the music created by it. Just as a stanza in poetry represents a group of lines, so the melody of a song is an articulation of several musical sections, which may be related to each other by similarity (АА), contrast (АВ), or a combination of both (such as АВАВ or ААВВ). The end of a song's stanza is perceived together with the end of the melody and the following stanza is perceived from the outset as a repetition of this melody. However, the melody alone, without the text, does not permit a more detailed judgement about the internal structure of the stanza in a given song. Thus Rudneva [1994] demonstrated that several kinds of poetic stanza can be sung to a melody with the same sequence of musical sections; the reverse correlation seldom occurs. On the contrary, the text of a well recorded song permits the stanza structures to be classified with maximum accuracy. In reality, the number of lines in a stanza simultaneously represents the number of musical sections in its melody. In this case, the line represents a single rhythmic principle which determines both the melody and the words of a given song; over and above this, it also contains a specific verbal pattern for combining poetic lines into stanzas. As a measure of the overall musical-poetic rhythm, the line is more accessible and intelligible than the melody. It is no accident that stanza forms are classified by line in literary as well as in musicological studies. Although some argue for song stanza forms to be studied as a coordination of word and melody, and although musicologists have accumulated some experience

Between Jesus and the Besht

Two particular groups of poems from Itzik Manger’s largely unpublished early work (1921–1929), those about Jesus and those about the Baal Shem Tov, form a poetical polarity in his work; at the same time they act as complementary forces in the psychological unfolding of Manger’s creative process. As an itinerant poet travelling on Romanian back roads, Manger encountered many wayside crosses with scenes of crucifixion, and found in the image of Jesus a tragic companion, who embodied homelessness, helplessness, and human pain. From 1921 to 1928 this companion mirrors in Manger’s work the shadows of the poet’s soul and also engages his fascination; in the figure of Christ Manger was able to name the unbearable in his own life, experimenting in that process with symbolist and expressionist forms and models. In 1927, Manger discovered his deep connection to the Besht. Childhood memories of travelling with his grandfather in the Carpathian Mountains reinforced the connection. Mesmerized by the figure of the Besht, Manger then developed in a new group of poems a healing counter-world to the one depicted in the Christ poems, a world that is tangibly inhabited by the sacred. Manger thus moved from Golgotha into the open space between Kosev (Kosov) and Kitev (Kuty), and in so doing created poems with a new sonority, poignantly evocative of Yiddish folk songs. The Christ figure disappears once Manger becomes aware of this poetic and psychological fault line in himself, though Christian motifs remain part of his poetic vocabulary.

Allen Ginsberg's Biographical Gestures

As Beat archivist turned biographer Bill Morgan makes clear in the title of his recent biography of Allen Ginsberg, I Celebrate Myself: Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006), Ginsberg's and works are subject to a Whitmanian commerce of publicity and privacy. Having authorized and aided in the production of his letter and journal collections, Ginsberg reveals an intense awareness of the literary-historical importance of his own development as a poet. As I will demonstrate below, a close look at the archival record of his early (pre-Howl) career reveals that Ginsberg has always exercised an editor's control of the face of his private life. In fact, Ginsberg's development of this editorial control of biography and the development of his craft as a poet take place concurrently. Indeed, in reference to Ginsberg's role in the publication of his journals, Mark Schechner explains that Ginsberg understands . . . that he matters less as a poet than as a figure, an exemplary life (334). I will continue this argument, examining Ginsberg's real-time modification of the historical record about the production of his breakthrough poem, The Green Automobile. Alleging to have written the poem in concert with a three-way letter exchange with Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, Ginsberg crafts a biographical gesture that formalizes public privacy as the essential condition of Beat literary production. In other words, he highlights the importance of intimate, collaborative exchange as a precondition to the kind of revolutionary texts that have emerged from the Beat movement. Ginsberg's careful manipulation and publication of written materials not originally intended to be (i.e., letters and journals) marks Ginsberg as a curator of his private life. His goal in part, as Schechner claims, is to clarif[y] the example of his extraordinarily singular (334). But Ginsberg's biographical gestures are also poetic gestures; they expand the palette of the poet from the published poem into the gritty realms of private life. Making authorial use of things other than poetic lines, Ginsberg indicates that his poems extend, like the declamatory lines of Howl beyond the orthodoxy of published print. In a sense, then, I continue a conversation,

Meditation as the Non-Mediated Perception

The ways of God are inscrutable and consciousness of people traveling in mental spaces and divided by the distance, time, culture, and religion are likely to meet and even merge, resonating by similar emotional-imaginative experiences against eternal problems, objects, and thoughts.Concentrating and now on the view of the majestic mountain ridge or looking at the horizon of the great ocean, we experience states close to the ones experienced by another person standing here and wrapped up in contemplation centuries ago. At this instant of time the past and the present, as well as the future (in perception of a person, who is not born yet) run into one another, and we feel the abyss of eternity. This is a feeling of a person facing the incredible, similar to the feeling of a sailor from the sailing fleet, who stands on the ocean shore (peering into the sea distance) and misses lands - dangerous and alluring - that are not discovered yet. In ancient Chinese short stories these resonant mental states could serve for literary characters as channels for traveling in space and time (Nu Sen-Ju, 1970).The poetic line of a long since dead poet, as an abscissed leaf of the autumn garden awakens thoughts about the evanescence of genesis and recollections about the feast of the gone summer, and for a while we become this poet, live his feelings.The task of this article - is to arouse and interest of Russian psychologists and psychotherapists to meditative practices of the Buddhism and Hinduism, giving, in our opinion, the invaluable experience of touching the infinite and studies of which are the inexhaustible fountain of psychological knowledge. Western psychologists, beginning with C.G. Jung (Jung, 1997; Moacanin, 2004) and continuing in the persons of leaders of the transpersonal psychology: S. Grof (2002), A. Mindell (2004), K. Wilber (2004), R. Walsh (2004) have already got in touch with the fathomless depth of these studies, and took a lot into their own practices and psychotechnics. In the Russian psychology there are also bright researchers (Kozlov & Maikov, 2000; Kozlov, 2006; Karitsky, 2002; Lobzin & Reshetnikov, 1986; Volkova, 2002; Ozhiganova, 2002), working in resonance with Buddhist experts. In humanitarian areas of studying culture and history related to psychology there is a deeply rooted tradition of the Russian school of studying Buddhism, represented by works of S.F. Oldenburg (1994), O.O. Rosenberg (1991), F.I. Scherbatskoy (1988), N.V. Abaev (1989), G.M. Bongard-Levin (1980), B.D. Dandaron (1997), A.M. Piatigorsky (2004), G.T. Tsybikov (1991), and continued in the work of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (V.N. Androsov, 1990), Institute of Oriental Studies of Saint Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (E.A. Torchinov, 2005; V.I. Rudoy, 1990), Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Mongol, Buddha, and Tibet Studies of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (A.A. Bazarov, 1998; S.Yu. Lepekhov, A.M. Donets, and S.P. Nesterkin, 2006), Saint-Petersburg University (A.V. Paribok and V.G. Ehrman, 2003).This article is not a systematic research of a certain psychological problem within the framework of the Buddhism philosophy. It is also not a certain guide or glossary interpreting ideas of Buddhist mentality to the language of the modern psychology. It is not even a summary of books on philosophy and psychology of Buddhism that we have read. More likely, the genre of this article can be characterized as the response of consciousness of modern psychologists of the beginning of the 21st century, whom we actually represent are, to the experience of comprehension of the Buddhist mentality, overlaid on our internal experience of work in the altered states of consciousness. This experience of comprehension of the Buddhist mentality includes both the experience of communication with Buddhist lamas that we acquired within the framework of the expedition of our laboratory members Communication psychology and psychosemantics of psychology faculty in MSU, in summer 2006-2007 to Buryatia[1] and Tuva to the Buddhist datsans, and the knowledge scooped out of Sutra and Shaster - canonical Buddhist texts. …

William Carlos Williams, Description, and the Avant-Garde

For anyone interested in descriptive poetry or the role of the object in twentieth-century poetics, William Carlos Williams seems an obvious starting point. As quondam Imagist, ally of Objectivism, originator of the famous dictum “No ideas but in things” (Paterson 6), and most importantly, as a poet whose oeuvre includes a considerable number of unusually pure descriptive poems, Williams seems poised at the forefront of a modernism of object-hood, the father of an entire poetic lineage devoted to the disinterested investigation of physical reality. But the more one looks at Imagism—“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether objective or subjective”—and Objectivism—“achieving form. That’s what ‘objectivist’ really means”—the less these movements seem to center on an interest in objects qua objects (Pound 3; Oppen 160). Similarly, the more one looks at Williams’s poetics, with its emphasis on voice and the poem as an object (rather than the poem about an object), the less interested—or, at least, the less consistently interested—in real objects he appears. In truth, Williams’s relationship to the physical world is much more complicated than at first it seems, and any attempt to examine his poetics of description and trace its influence on subsequent developments in poetic history will require some delicacy. Later I will address the question of Williams’s historical role. Indeed, this study’s largest gesture will be a rather counterintuitive revision of recent literary history: I will argue that the descriptive mode most uniquely Williams’s own is in fact anathema to the very avant-garde poets—Objectivist, Projectivist, language—we generally consider his heirs. First, however, I need to draw out the

Intimations and Imitations of Immortality: Swinburne’s “By the North Sea” and “Poeta Loquitur”

Remarkably little attention has been paid to a poem that Algernon Charles himself preferred in metrical and antiphonal effect (1) to all of his previous poems. The first sustained study of By the North (originally published in Studies in Song, 1880) is found in the introduction to a translation of Heinrich Heine's Die Nordsee in 1916. Howard Mumford Jones, despite using By the North to demonstrate why Heine's is the superior North Sea poem, reads Swinburne's work sensitively and critically. Much of the early twentieth century criticism of the poem, however, echoes Matthew Arnold's observation that has a fatal habit of using one hundred words where one would suffice. (2) Even Swinburne's most favorable critics, his early biographers, struck blows at the poem that long hindered its critical acceptance. Harold Nicolson, in 1926, wrote it off as one of long sea pieces, competent but wholly uninspired. (3) In 1929, Samuel Chew claimed that relinquished gladly the unnecessary function of thought, and yielded himself to the rhythmic undulations and eddies of the verse that seems to take color and motion from its theme. (4) George Lafourcade, in 1932, said that the poem contains a fatal discrepancy between matter and form. (5) Most famously exemplified by T. S. Eliot's 1920 essay Swinburne as Poet, the charge of excessive verbosity and lack of meaning or import has been part of studies from the beginning) It is particularly unfortunate, that such a masterful and central poem as By the North Sea, one of Swinburne's most powerful lyrics, was so long obscured by this biting criticism. By the North enjoyed a minor renaissance in the 1970s, initiated by a discussion in Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (1972). Although he devotes only a brief three pages to it, McGann engages the poem in the serious critical reading that previous scholars had avoided or ignored. Kerry McSweeney's 1973 article-length explication of the poem immediately followed. David Riede's excellent analysis of the poem as regards the Romantic heritage in 1978 is the only other detailed study of By the North Sea. (7) Although most scholars no longer jumble the poem into the heap of bad Putney poetry or whimsical nature poetry, none have studied it closely since the 1970s. In this essay, I attempt to demonstrate the centrality of By the North to an understanding of Swinburne's thought by tracing his complex interweaving of mortality and immortality. In doing so, I read the poem on three different, but equally important levels: as it relates to Romantic, specifically Wordsworthian notions of the natural world and immortality; as it relates to the poetic lineage from Homer and Sappho to himself; and, in dialogue with his palinodic self-parody Poeta Loquitur, as it relates to poetic meaning. Poeta Loquitur was first published posthumously in 1918. Although the date of authorship is unknown, it was likely written soon after By the North Sea. (8) Poeta Loquitur not only parodies the content of By the North Sea--the case could be made that at the level of content Poeta Loquitur parodies many of Swinburne's poems--but it also links specifically with By the North through their shared distinct meter and rhyme scheme. As I explore in my third section, however, anything writes on the sea, even a self-parody, has larger implications for his entire body of work. Whether or not one agrees with Cecil Lang that he is the greatest parodist in our language, is certainly notable for writing self-parodies that confront not only his poetic style, but his most cherished meanings, especially those of By the North Sea, the target of Poeta Loquitur. It is remarkable indeed that no scholar who has written on By the North takes Poeta Loquitur into account. Poeta Loquitur as a parody offers a vital critical statement on By the North from the poet himself and thus should be of great concern to any understanding of that poem. …