Poetic Process Research Articles

Mapping black geographies

AbstractThis paper unfolds in three parts. In Part 1, I describe how I have contended with the fraught relationships among mapping, nationalism, and colonialism in my teaching and research. When writing my first book, Contesting Race and Citizenship, I had to reckon with the positivist impulse to enumerate and map Black Italianness—and, more broadly, with the politics of visibility at a time of increasingly virulent racial nationalisms, xenophobia, and outright anti‐Black violence. In Part 2, I describe the ways my own thinking about mapping has been pushed in new directions by insights from Black geographies. Drawing on Clyde Woods, Katherine McKittrick, and Édouard Glissant—as well as essays from the edited volume The Black Geographic—I argue that Black geographic counter‐cartographies foreground insurgent Black spatial knowledges and practices that have always exceeded racial‐spatial violence, and approach mapping as both a material and poetic process. In Part 3, I conclude by advancing some tentative ideas about what it might mean to map new or alternative geographies of abolitionist struggle that attend to the interconnections between Black Atlantic and Black Mediterranean histories of racial capitalism.

ТРАДИЦИЯ «ВИЗУАЛИЗАЦИИ» СТИХА ГЕНРИХА САПГИРА В СОВРЕМЕННОМ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОМ ПРОЦЕССЕ

The article is devoted to the examination of Sapgir’s work in the context of the modern poetic process. It deals with the issue of the influence of Sapgir’s poetic quest in the field of graphics and stanza (form) on the creativity of modern authors. During the consideration of the work of D. Vodennikov, N. Iskrenko, D. Sukhovay, A. Alchuk, N. Azarova and M. Stepanova we found various connections of poetic language of the authors such as external similarities, deep bonds and inheritance of traditions.

Poetics and Power in Phagwa: Media Representation, Cultural Identity, and Religious Play in Trinidad’s Festival of Colours

ABSTRACT We conduct a thematic analysis of digital news articles (2016–2020) about religious celebrations of Holi or “Phagwa” in Trinidad and Tobago to explore media representations of the festival of colors and Trinidadian cultural identity. We adopt Stuart Hall’s understanding of cultural identity and diaspora, and draw on Davis’ cultural performance framework that connects observable communicative practices to cultural performances. Two themes frame our analysis, Phagwa as (1) poetic process of performing religious identity and (2) power-play in performing national identity, suggesting that Phagwa rituals and local media attest to color-play as a complex, communicative practice used to demand attention and affirm participants’ religious (Hindu) and national (Indo-Trinidadian) cultural identities. Our findings represent a critical exploration of one religious festival played in a diasporic spatial context, interrogating issues around culture, power, religious identity, and digital media depictions in the act of celebration.

ECHOING VOICES OF COMMUNITY EDUCATION EVENTS: A POETIC SELF-STUDY

This paper is a poetic self-study based on a community education project in which the author was involved and in which poetry was a process of social transformation. There is a poetic process of weaving between writings produced during the project, occurred years ago, and writings created for this self-study. Its main purpose is to reflect on this poetic process, questioning how it can continue to illuminate our understandings, develop dialogue and transcend contradictions and ambivalences. A few meaningful events are selected where poetry played a relevant part and where poetic writing, combinins sounds and silence to create a singular musicality, is assumed as a way of deepening and transforming understanding and practice. It is a poetic organisation of rhizomatic relations that facilitates the flow of reflexivity and evocation of the movements experienced during the project and identified as important. They are in accordance with the principles of the project, where dialogical and critical approaches are emphasised. In the final sections the author discuss her positionalities and conflicts as researcher, educator and poet assumed along the process, and conclude by reflecting on some of the main contributions of this paper to the poetic self-study field and poetic inquiry.

Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Chrystal Ann Chemris. <i>The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation</i>

When dreams turn archaeological: The poetic dreamscapes of Anna Jacobson

This paper explores the dream-inspired poetry and video poetry of award-winning Brisbane poet Anna Jacobson. Jacobson’s surreal poetic narratives draw on memory, dreams, desires and destiny, using simple language and vivid imagery to evoke strong emotional responses. Her manner of exploring dreams in a number of poetic and narrative forms allows whimsical, gentle but also vigorous creative work of personal resilience and understanding. Her work is framed also by explorations of her Jewish culture and family and driven by unbridled imagination. In particular, the paper investigates Jacobson’s process of interweaving visions and memories for the purpose of tracing personal histories lost through periods of mental illness, exploring how she mines dreams for the purpose of writing and healing. It questions how her poetic process allows her to reclaim agency through unpacking experiences she wants to recover or further understand. Distilled from a series of interviews with the poet, the paper explores Jacobson’s interest in working at the cusp of different media and how this blend of the word and the visual image is particularly apt for dream exploration.

South-Asian niche as the poetic helicon of Taufiq Rafat: a metapoetic study

The genre of metapoetry thematizes the fictional elements – the inspiration of a poet, his poetic process, meta-poetic metaphors, the role of the poet in society, and intertextual references – partaking in the making of poetry explicitly or implicitly carried through a poem within a poem technique. This paper presents Eva Müller-Zettlemann’s theoretical pronunciation of meta-poetic elements, i. e., poetic inspiration, poetic process, and meta-poetic metaphors, at play in the metalyrics of Taufiq Rafat from his anthologies Arrival of the Monsoon: Collected Poems 1947-78 (1985) and Half Moon: Poems 1979-1983 (2008). Rafat’s inspiration is the South-Asian terra firma and lived experience that makes him infuse the regional sensibility through a poetic process of perceiving and penning down immediately. His meta-poetic metaphor involves the invention of an image of cultural genesis that informs the process of poetic creativity. Moreover, the study also considers the explicit expression of the role of the poet in society and the functions of poetry in Rafat’s poems, otherwise a prose phenomenon. Thus, the paper analyzes the conscious expression of the construction of South-Asian singularity inspired by the cultural kernel in content and form in Rafat’s metalyrics.

Unbreathed words: A Conversation with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Unbreathed words: A Conversation with Lillian-Yvonne Bertram Kyle Booten (bio) and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram (bio) In lillian-yvonne bertram’s Travesty Generator, their most recent book of poems, Afropessimistic thought finds expression through the brutal and precise procedures that take place on the inscriptive surface of silicon. Nearly all the poems in Travesty Generator have been composed in part by repurposed and modified computer programs, programs that were designed to splice and recombine language, often randomly, to forge new language, new poetry. Bertram takes Travesty Generator’s title from “A Travesty Generator for Micros,” a technical essay by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke originally published in the November 1984 issue of BYTE, a magazine for personal computer enthusiasts.1 Comparing Kenner and O’Rourke’s description of TRAVESTY, their program for generating language by stochastically recombining letter sequences within a source text, with Bertram’s repurposing of this program helps to clarify what for Bertram are the stakes of manipulating text with computers. Kenner and O’Rourke seem most pleased with their program when it is most clever- seeming—when it invents almost-passable faux-James Joyce or humorous but recognizable names of English towns. Bertram’s poem “Incident” runs the TRAVESTY program on their own poem, adjusting the program’s parameters so that the text that it outputs is often nearly nonsensical, a jumble of almost-words. The notion of a text “generator” here is ironic; the algorithm is far better at destroying—scrambling carefully composed human language into an entropic slurry—than it is at forging anything new. But, since Bertram’s original poem recounts a moment of racial insult, is the violence wreaked on it by the [End Page 261] TRAVESTY program an odd kind of mercy? If the signal that the world transmits is an oppressive one, is it better to drown this signal in noise? Or are the capricious workings of the algorithm analogous to the capricious violence that Black life has faced and continues to face? In the cases of other poems in Travesty Generator, programs for randomly assembling text from a bank of lines have generated meditations on, or rehearsals of, the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till. These programs can’t turn Bertram’s lines into something new, only something different; electricity is consumed, calculations are performed, memory is allocated, bits are flipped, lines are shuffled and reshuffled— but no epiphany is reached, no violence understood or avoided. We are living in a moment of great enthusiasm for the power of algorithms, including in the arts. Travesty Generator stands out from many contemporary examples of computer-generated poetry in the way that it pushes code toward moments of failure, confusion, and loss—moments that, in light of the book’s subject matter, become allegorical: racial violence isn’t a bug but a feature. At the same time, Bertram’s poetic practice is open to the ways that algorithmic media can indeed work in the service of the endurance of Black life and thought. Their web-based project Forever Gwen Brooks generates variations on a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.2 Unlike Kenner and O’Rourke’s TRAVESTY program, Forever Gwen Brooks is not a general-purpose program for textual mimicry; rather, the code emerges from a deep understanding of and love for the poem it modifies. It is this sense of care that makes Forever Gwen Brooks (as Bertram describes it in a blog at the Poetry Foundation) both a way of constantly refreshing one’s remembrance of Brooks as well as a traversal through “the space of the could-have-been.”3 During the late fall and early winter of 2021, I had the opportunity to converse with Bertram over email about how they think about inviting algorithms into their poetic process. —Kyle Booten KYLE BOOTEN/ I’d like to begin by asking you to tell the story of how you came to integrate codework into your practice as a writer. You have published four full-length collections of poetry as well as several chapbooks and an artist book. What drew you to the experiments [End Page 262] with code that we see in Travesty Generator (and a...

Biomimicry and Art

The concept of biomimicry has been used in various fields, from nanotechnology to machine intelligence, for various purposes, inspired by natural processes and organisms. The main application of biomimicry has been to produce artifacts and ideas from what we can know about what nature has already done. Many artists have devoted themselves to the development of works with poetics of hybridization and mimicry. How close would they be to biomimicry? Or would they be bioinspiration? This discussion is the starting point to present the “VIRIDIUM” project, which focuses on the development of semi-autonomous and translucent 3D-printed sculptures. In addition to the biomimicry (biomimetics), bioinspiration, and Darwinian evolution concepts, the concept of artification is also addressed as a possible model of understanding the poetic process, both in "VIRIDIUM" and in the works of the artists listed.

Biomimicry and Art: Transductions with Biology

This article discusses the concept of Biomimicry, which has been applying in many fields, from nanotechnology to robotics. It is appearing in smart materials and machinic intelligence, for diverse purposes, being inspired by natural processes and organisms. The main application of Biomimicry has been to produce artifacts and ideas from what we can know about what nature has already done. While the mimesis has been removed from the vocabulary of Art, the works of some artists are still full of possibilities to discuss under the concept of Biomimetics. Many artists have dedicated themselves to the development of works using the poiesis of hybridization and mimicry. How close they approach of Biomimetics? As examples, are brought Walmor Corrêa, Patrícia Piccinini, Liu Xue, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Alessandro Boezio, Joan Fontcoberta and Pere Formiguera. This discussion is the starting point for introduce my project “VIRIDIUM”, in which I´m developing some semiautonomous and translucent robots, printed in 3D. The poetic basis is the possibility that nature has in hybridizing and evolving, spontaneously, as well as being hybridized by genetic manipulation. I propose the development of objects / beings that do not exist in the nature but refer and simulate behaviors of those who inhabit the world, in different kingdoms of Nature. I describe the first stage of the project, which focuses the Plantae kingdom (also known as Metaphyta). Afterwards of the Biomimicry (Biomimetics) and darwinian evolution concepts I bring the concept of Artification, as a possible model of understanding the poetic process, both in “VIRIDIUM” and in the works of the artists chosen.

Review: Peach State, by Adrienne Su

Review: <i>Peach State</i>, by Adrienne Su

Chaucer's Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion

Chaucer's Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion

Modern Poetry and Heritage The Attitude and The Tributaries

This research paper studies the phenomenon of heritage inspiration, which represents the combination of awareness of heritage, and awareness of reality together. It shows the impact of heritage and its immortal artistic values, and living human principles on the poetic experience of modern poets. It further, studies one of the most influential resources of the heritage, which have provided poets with their positive energy, and their creative expressions. The study also clarifies the discrepancy in the attitudes of modern poets towards heritage, and their understanding of the nature of its relationship with their creative texts as a cultural given and an artistic form that has clearly contributed to the building the poetic process.

Тувинская песенная ритмика в свете общетеоретических категорий

The current stage of knowledge on Tuvan folk music allows outlining the transition from the descriptiveness to using the modern music theory categories. This paper proposes an approach to the analysis of musical and poetic rhythm tested on the material of folk songs of the peoples of the Volga region. The sound-time process in the intonation of songs by Tuvan performers consists of equal periods of time, referred to in classical theory as “mora”. This unit serves as the basis for all other forms of organization of the musical rhythm of a Tuvan song. Thus, the hierarchical scale of musical rhythm is built by summation, i.e., it is opposite to the verse scale formed by division. This means that the Tuvan song rhythm is organized according to the time-measuring principle and represents a kind of quantitative system. Rhythmic cells are combined into melodic and poetic lines, into poetic quantitative systems called meters. In Tuvan songs, lines of four cells prevail, corresponding to an eight-syllable verse. The correlation of the musical process with the syllabic structure of the verse in the musical and poetic process of Tuvan songs is found at the level of the primary grouping of a uniform pulse. A syllable can be sung both for each “step” of the pulse, and stretched or sung for two, three, four (etc.) moras. A complete catalogue (index) of both fixed and theoretically possible rhythms is built from the rhythmic schemes of the lines.

Collaborative Poetic Inquiry as Micro-Resistance

Two teachers explore conflicts at the intersection of their personal and professional identities in public university spaces, examining reconciliation of identities in dissonance using collaborative poetic inquiry. Normative expectations permeate the academy, defined in the United States through White, male, middle class, non-disabled, able-minded, heterosexual, and Christian values, requiring teachers operating outside of these frameworks to perform in ways which place them in contradiction. This article proposes a collaborative, experimental poetic process to reflect on marginalized aspects of identity, intellectualize power dynamics involved in workplace conflicts, explore dynamics of privilege-oppression, and assess which parts of identity to sustain and which to reconcile to enable coexistence. Suggestions for art teacher outliers include finding tertiary relationships, creating collaborative poetic assemblages to bring clarification to workplace conflicts, and creating opportunities to reposition oneself within new narratives. This research provides a space for all teachers to build resilience in education spaces.

George Amabile on War, Trauma, the Creative Process, and His Latest Collection Martial Music

Liana Cusmano’s interview with poet George Amabile focuses on his prize-winning 2018 collection Martial Music and the art of writing in general. He offers insights on the poetic process, how to research and produce a collection of poems. Amabile’s poetry is inspired by what he has experienced or witnessed. He talks about dealing with war and trauma. He shares his frustration with daily life getting in the way of the creative process. “Life is the subject and the inspirational/ motivational source of our work, but it also sucks up our time and frustrates our ability to give our unstinted attention to our creative efforts,” says George Amabile.

‘When the Animals Came’: The Genesis and Writing of an Ecotheological Poem, with Commentary

This article traces the genesis and composition of my poetic sequence, ‘When the Animals Came’ including as illustration of the poetic process a section from Part IV, ‘Spring’ with commentary. In order to understand the culture, art and religious beliefs of Paleolithic society, extensive research was needed, both at prehistoric sites, and in the archaeological literature, which I discuss; writing this poem also led me to re-assess how deeply and anciently faith is linked to our place in nature. Thus, the compositional process afforded me a new understanding of the complex relationship between humankind, environment and spiritual belief. Paleolithic culture engaged all three directly, seeing them as interdependent; this has considerable relevance to modern ecological concerns. My poem is an attempt to show creatively how such engagement constitutes part of our identity as human beings.

“As Clear as It Needs to Be”: A Conversation with Thomas Kinsella

“As Clear as It Needs to Be”: A Conversation with Thomas Kinsella Adrienne Leavy and Thomas Kinsella (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 24:1. the following interview, first published in Reading Ireland, is given to New Hibernia Review in advance of its inclusion in a book of essays on Thomas Kinsella that is forthcoming from Wake Forest University Press. The Wake Forest collection is edited by Adrienne Leavy, with essays by writers on the varied aspects of the poet’s career. Thomas Kinsella’s interview, with email questions from Adrienne Leavy in Phoenix, Arizona, and replies from Dublin, gives his memories of growing up in working-class Dublin; his time as an Irish civil servant and in US universities; and many general comments, in particular on publishing and politics, poetry and the poetic process. ________ AL: You grew up in the Inchicore-Kilmainham area of Dublin. In your book A Dublin Documentary (2006), which is part memoir, part poetry book, you refer to this place as “The Ranch.” Could you describe what it was like growing up in Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s? TK: Inchicore is a district on the western outskirts of Dublin. The Ranch is a settlement of six small streets westward from Inchicore. In the 1930s and 1940s if you went one step further westward from The Ranch you were heading into the country toward Ballyfermot and picking blackberries. I believe The Ranch was designed for workers on the Great Southern Railway, though I have never checked this. It is connected with the railway works [End Page 65] by a pathway people called “the Khyber Pass,” which suggests a date around the time of the Boer War. The Ranch was a perfect place to grow up. The streets safe, free of all traffic. One boundary was the Liffey Hill. From there, downhill and across a wide field, and you were on the bank of the River Liffey. The other boundary a high blank wall—the wall of the old landlord Inchicore Estate, in walking distance from the Model School. AL: Poems such as “Hen Woman,” “Ancestor,” “The High Road,” “A Hand of Solo,” and “Tear” evoke the world of your childhood and the people and places of your early life. The aforementioned poems were first published in Notes from the Land of the Dead, and Other Poems (1973), after you had started reading Jung. Do you think that Jungian philosophy facilitated this imaginative exploration? TK: Awareness of Jung came after the event. I had been wondering at the insistence of certain subjects: detailed memories of random places and happenings, gestures and voices, distinct as though they were there. A phrase heard only once, a glimpse through a doorway, that would never go away, always part of my daily thoughts. With these insistent memories it was not enough to leave them as recorded memories. There was a need to put them in intense words—words that would try to remake the memory and my response so as to make it possible always to re-experience the exact memory and the response. Reading Jung’s psychology of the unconscious, I recognized and understood. Art as a means to resist, in Jung’s own words, “the relentless flight of time . . . the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time . . .” AL: On April 10, 2019, you attended the opening of a sculpture garden with President Michael D. Higgins and his wife Sabina Higgins at the Inchicore Model School which you attended as a child. Your poem “Model School, Inchicore,” from Songs of the Psyche (1985), celebrates the school. Can you describe the school’s significance for you? TK: The Model School was small and a place of discovery. I learned there, for the first time, that there was a world outside The Ranch with enormous activities and things to understand. Our classes were small. We had two teachers, friendly and willing to answer all questions. There was a growing awareness of the troubles in Europe; I remember being uneasy at talk of General Franco and the voice of Hitler on the radio, full of hate. Our time in The Ranch ended with the...

Особенности развития книги стихов в современной русскоязычной поэзии Мордовии (на материале поэтических книг А. М. Шаронова «Монологи» и С. Ю. Сеничева «ВИНоГРАДвШОКоЛАДе, или Словосложение»)

Introduction: the article is devoted to the study of the development of books of poems as a major genre form in modern Russian-language poetry of Mordovia and fits into the complex of Russian literary studies concerning the peculiarities of the development of the Finno-Ugric literary process. In the course of the research, the typological features of a thematic and «final» book of poems are revealed; the poetological features of this genre in the works of the poets of Mordovia belonging to the «traditional» and «avant-garde» paradigm are analyzed. Objective: to analyze the main trends of the development of a book of poems in the literary process of Mordovia. Research materials: the poetry books by A. M. Sharonov «The Monologues» and S. Yu. Senichev «Grapes in Chocolate, or Compounding». Results and novelty of the research: the analysis of the modern Russian-language poetry of Mordovia has shown that today there are two ideological and artistic paradigms: «traditional» paradigm based on the experience of classical Russian poetry and «avant-garde» paradigm developing with the support of postmodern experiments. The diversity of poetic practices makes it possible to determine the ways of development of a book of poems in the poetic process of the republic. In the creative works of the poets of Mordovia two genre-specific forms, such as thematic and «final», are developing. Moreover, the traditional poets most often comprehend the problems concerning the preservation of the national identity of the Mordovian people. They poetically sum up the plots and images of national mythology and folklore. The genre form of a «final» book of poems allows the most representative to convey the scale of significant historical and sociocultural events of the era, as well as to present the author’s biography against the background of these events. The avant-garde poets, on the contrary, move away from national attributes. The associative and metaphorical principle of constructing a book of poems becomes more important for them, where along with the lyrical understanding of the world there is a philological game, intertextuality, and allusiveness. Through the techniques of literary play authors often express nostalgia for lost values. The analysis of the poetic of the books of poems by A. M. Sharonov and S. Yu. Senichev will allow not only to determine the features of their creative manner, but also to trace the ways and character of the development of modern Russianlanguage poetry in Mordovia as a whole.

Pleasurable Reading: Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

The best-known of Donne’s poems of “Valediction” is a lyric whose analogies of gold and a compass have long been considered touchstones for the so-called metaphysical style. Reading the poem, I have realigned these analogies with the Renaissance practice of making the invisible visible through analogy. In particular, the compass results from a poetic process that is simultaneously intellectual, material, and affective. Its polyphony is amazingly attuned to the multiple pressures and possibilities of Donne’s culture.