Poetic Response Research Articles

ChatGPT, the voice from elsewhere: a poetic and therapeutic dialog between human and artificial intelligence

ABSTRACT With the recent advancements of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the dialog between humans and AI is no longer merely functional but can be a profound means of reflection and psychological growth, especially when artistic approaches, such as poetry, are included. AI has the potential to generate poetic responses that deeply resonate with human experience, facilitating the expression of emotions, promoting psychological well-being, and encouraging personal reflection. This article describes a poetic exchange over a seven-day period between the author and ChatGPT, personified as the “Voice from Elsewhere,” that explores an existential crisis. After each exchange, the results were analyzed from a Jungian perspective to highlight connections to symbols and archetypes that could be used in Poetry Therapy or other therapeutic environments. The results indicate that ChatGPT has the capacity to create poems related to existential questions which could open the way for new and enriching dialogs, capable of potentially supporting psychotherapeutic work. Poetry, whether human or machine generated, will remain an artistic means to explore and experience inner transformation.

Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night": A Poetic Response to Van Gogh's Masterpiece

Ekphrastic poetry is a poetic reinterpretation of a visual artwork. There are numerous poems, songs, and lyrics written with inspiration from paintings, sculptures, or photographs. An ekphrastic poem can immortalize a work of art adding a new perspective to it. This paper looks at the tradition of Ekphrastic poetry as a genre and explores Vincent van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night through the light of Anne Sexton’s popular ekphrastic poem “The Starry Night”. It observes how Sexton’s poem artfully attempts to capture the spirit of Van Gogh’s painting through words. It also suggests how combining poetry with visual art can enrich both art and literature.

Rough Excision: a poetic response to Great Expectations (1861) and Jack Maggs (1997)

ABSTRACT Read together or as stand-alone pieces, the thirteen poems offered below are conceived as a creative-critical response to two novels, a Victorian one, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), and its neo-Victorian counterpart, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997). Rather than simply inspired by these novels, the poems are the result of a critical reading of both Carey’s reimagining of Dickens’s great English novel and the source text itself. As such they implicitly engage with Carey’s critics, who have almost unanimously analysed Jack Maggs from a postcolonial perspective, thereby largely ignoring the rewriting of the women characters. Scholars have systematically pointed out how Dickens’s orphan Pip is rewritten by Carey as Henry Phipps, the Australian convict Abel Magwitch as Jack Maggs and Dickens himself as the great Victorian author Tobias Oates. Together with the annotations in part II, the poems offer a creative contribution to the critical engagement with Carey’s novel, by arguing that Carey’s Mercy, servant and mistress of would-be gentleman Percy Buckle in Jack Maggs, can be fruitfully read as a re-imagining of Dickens’s Molly, biological mother of Estella and housekeeper of unscrupulous lawyer Jaggers in Great Expectations. The poems raise questions concerning neo-Victorianism, patriarchal discourse and trauma theory from a feminist perspective.

"Miguel de Unamuno and the Redemption of Antero de Quental"

ABSTRACT: My analysis in this paper centers on Miguel de Unamuno's multifaceted engagement (commentary, translation, poetic response) with Antero de Quental's metaphysically-inclined sonnets. Like Unamuno, I focus on the sonnets "Redenção" and "Na mão de Deus." I first demonstrate how Unamuno unsuccessfully attempts to reconcile Quental's poetic descriptions of death as liberation, and of the individual's reabsorption in death into the universal consciousness, with his agonized faith in a personal God and his New Testament-derived belief in humanity's redemption from sin and salvation by Jesus Christ. I then argue that while Unamuno may have misinterpreted Quental, his misreading was nonetheless productive in that it furnished him with an Iberian exemplar of the sentimientotrágico de la vida – though I contend that Unamuno's elevation of Quental to the status of tragic exemplar is nonetheless misplaced

The stories we tell: supporting young mothers’ positive identity through personal narrative performance

ABSTRACT Personal stories can have the power to form new narratives where negative assumptions dominate. This paper celebrates the voices of a group of young mothers who participated in a community/school programme informed by performance making. The process consisted of a series of workshops devised in collaboration with the participants. The findings share a positive experience that generated poetic responses to the challenges of being a young parent. We describe the creative process that position the group as experts in their own lives as they consider their value and identity as caregivers and capable young women, staging new contemporary identities.

Insular Contemporary Poetry in Dialogue: Glocal Alliances Against Mass Tourism

This paper establishes a transnational dialogue between different island spaces impacted by mass tourism and highlights poetry’s contribution to the political reconfigurations of the Balearic and Caribbean islands. Notwithstanding these island spaces’ different historical circumstances, it acknowledges that the tourist industry illustrates crucial historical continuities in each archipelago. The poetics analysed question the pro-growth ideology of the industry, the subservient role of their islands’ political classes that disregard human well-being and environmental sustainability, and put the islands’ survival at risk. This study identifies resemblances in Caribbean and Balearic island spaces’ poetic responses to tourism and recognises local emancipatory alliances that not only bring to the surface shared forms of oppression, but also propose alternatives beyond the (hotel) chains of global capitalism.

Something out of nothing

Written from within Lyrik Kabinett, Munich, holding the second-largest poetry library in Europe, this essay provides a practice-based perspective on how the concept of ›literature as social practice‹ can find articulation in an institutional setting. Starting with a brief overview of poetry libraries internationally, the contribution subsequently focuses in on the artist’s book and poetry holdings at Lyrik Kabinett, our user and audience engagement, and on the way we initiate contemporary poetic responses to poetic histories. The concept of social practice is thereby also given a diachronic perspective, yet one that is attentive to the significance of decanonisation as much as of canonisation.

William Wordsworth and the French Revolution: A Study of Ideals and Realities

This research paper delves into the profound impact of the French Revolution on the poetry of William Wordsworth, one of the most eminent Romantic English poets. Through an analysis of Wordsworth's life, works, and ideological evolution, this paper explores the intersection of revolutionary fervor and poetic expression during a tumultuous period in European history. Drawing on primary sources and literary analysis, the paper investigates Wordsworth's initial enthusiasm for the Revolution, his subsequent disillusionment, and the enduring legacy of his poetic response to the transformative events of his time.

Jaime Sabines: The Role of the Everyday and the Mortuary in Diario semanario y poemas en prosa (1961)

The poetry of Mexican author Jaime Sabines (1926–1999) is situated within a period of change in Latin America (Cuban revolution, dictatorships, and stylistic changes in literature) that linked the author to colloquialism. According to Cesare Del Mastro, this is a form marked by the use of plain and popular language rather than academicism. Using this style as a platform, two central topics presented in the collection of poems Diario Semanario y poemas en prosa (1961) are addressed in this paper: the everyday and the mortuary. Both are shown as symptomatic expressions of an affront to modernity, with signs of oppression, and the tense relationships and poetic responses are analyzed as a response to deep historical transformations.

“Everything Is Going To Be All Right”: Poetry as “Covid Comfort”?

This article examines the artistic and, in particular, poetic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, that was witnessed in the Republic of Ireland in 2020. I will first try to show how this poetic response to the pandemic is linked to the historical and traditional role of the figure of the poet in Ireland, the “file”, and to the poet’s speaking out in the Irish public sphere during major historical events. With this in mind, I shall then analyze several case studies, such as the remarkable influence of a phrase uttered by Seamus Heaney used again during the Irish lockdown, or the impact of a poem by the President of the Republic of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, himself a poet, eventually leading to the launch of an advertising campaign designed to reinforce physical distancing during lockdown. After examining other Irish artistic productions linked to Covid-19, I shall conclude with a counterexample, that is poet Paul Muldoon’s critical analysis of Derek Mahon’s famous poem, ‘Everything Is Going To Be All Right’, which enjoyed immense success during the pandemic in Ireland and was perceived by many as a poem of comfort and hope. But can any poem be reinterpreted as part of the literary sub-genre of “pandemic poetry”?

Na Today?

Abstract The Lekki Tollgate massacre, which was part of the brutal tactics used to put down the #EndSARS protests, underscored the incorrigibly violent nature of the Nigerian state. It also ruptured the sense of linear progressive time which governs the hegemonic conception of history and memory in Nigeria—for instance, time as post-civil war, post-dictatorship, etc. The boundary of this idea of a nation on a progressive march, made up of people healed of all traumas, and cured of their historical scars is fiercely and violently policed. A case in point is the fervour with which Biafra as a form of collective memory is being resisted and silenced. However, the murderous incident at the tollgate brought to the fore the fact that each violent moment in Nigeria’s turbulent history has created a fractured sense of history for many victims, and consequently hampered the possibility of forging a settled sense of belonging and national unity. One site where this sense of history as violently fractured has been adequately imagined is the creative arts, especially poetry. Poems have archived, mediated, and remediated memories of violence that are mostly excised from official history. Thus, in this article I read selected poems from Soro Soke, a poetry collection curated by Brittle Paper in collaboration with James Yeku and Jumoke Verissimo. My aim is to examine how the poetic responses to the Lekki massacre generate alternative, unvarnished historiographies that call attention to the haunting and brooding presence of Nigeria’s brutal past in the present. I am also interested in the ways in which the selected works act as archives of violent memories and how they seek to recover the humanity of those killed by naming them and grieving their loss.

Imagining Resistance?

While “resistance” is often used to describe “fighting back” against oppression and subjugation, for young people the word resistance is often used by safeguarding professionals to refer to negative, disruptive behaviours rather than evidence of their creativity, agency and strength in the face of oppression. In this paper, we share findings and reflections from Imagining Resistance, a three-year multi-disciplinary project that explored how young people in England (n=20, aged 13–25) who have experienced sexual abuse, violence and exploitation engage in processes and acts of resistance. Imagining Resistance set out to utilise photovoice (Wang and Burris 1997), a qualitative research method centred on photography, in a series of creative workshops with young people. However, our approach changed over the course of the project, influenced by O’Neill’s (2012) concept of “ethno-mimesis”, which involves collecting ethnographic data alongside the creation of visual and poetic responses to prompts offered within flexibly structured creative workshop settings. This shift occurred as the young people pushed back, resisting the intended methodology while remaining open to other creative arts methods. This enabled us to think more critically about how the use of participatory and creative arts methods can facilitate emancipatory research practices that are responsive to young people’s developing understanding of resistance and their experiences of reimagining resistance as a fluid, generative and hopeful collective endeavour.

Irony and sentiment in the literary field: Prešeren’s sonnets and the Slovenian alphabet-censorship war

Restoration censorship forced European Romantic literature to retreat from society and politics into subjective intimacy, fantasy, mythology, history, and exotic places. In addition to conforming to restrictions, however, censorship also led writers to evade its control (pseudonyms, publication abroad, allusive style) and, more rarely, to overt or covert rebellion (petitions, satire, etc.). An example of this is the German sonnets written by the Slovenian romanticist France Prešeren in the mid-1830s as a poetic response to the public controversy over the cultural strategies of national revival (the so-called Slovenian ABC war) and the behind-the-scenes struggles over the censorship of the poetry almanac Krajnska čbelica (Carniolan Bee). With their illocutionary force, Prešeren’s sonnets are directed against prominent collaborators of censorship and the centers of ecclesiastical and secular power that wanted to keep the embrionic Slovenian literary field under their control. These poems move between satirical irony and sentiment, between the fictional suspension of dominant positions in the field and the search for sympathy for the depressing lack of consecration. The satire against the censors of his elegy dedicated to Matija Čop stands out with its acrostic and the affect of rage.

Trust the Pianofish: Shaun McNiff and the magically realistic expressive arts

In resonance with lived art-based research, this article aims to let the art speak through image and poetry and to reflect the phenomenon of imagination and reality within expressive arts in an interdisciplinary mode. The article focuses specifically on Shaun McNiff’s cover image Pianofish of his book Integrating the Arts in Therapy: History, Theory, and Practice through poetic response, dialogue and expressive arts theory of practice. The notion of different realities and imagination as we know it from the literary genre ‘magic realism’ have been central components since the inception of the field of expressive arts at Lesley University. This article reflects ‘magic realism’ in its play with different realities and Shaun McNiff’s appeal to stay with the image. The author refers to Salman Rushdie’s notion of ‘magic realism’ in the context of the phenomenologically based expressive arts.

Introduction: Poetry and extremity

In thinking about the relationship between poetry and the extreme, we wanted to examine how poetry functions in a number of ways: how it creates the space – and new forms of language – to articulate events which seem inexpressible; how poets innovate to enact resistance; how poetry helps to break silences and taboos; and how poetry, and the role of the poets, is so often linked to the transgression of boundaries. The submissions we received embraced the notion of extremity in a variety of ways, considering the mathematical complexities of the work of Louis Zukofsky, for instance, and the desire for liberation in the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, whose life, Caio Yurgel writes, might be understood as “a long preparation for suicide”. We received work on provocative ideas about nationalism and resistance, politics and disaster, about collaboration through the extremities of climate change and COVID, and how women poets might “disrupt and disturb” patriarchal systems to construct new visions of autobiographical memory, as Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton examine. The poetic responses also echo these themes, often eerily, focussing on abject bodies and the taboo, on autobiographical memories, on places overwhelmed by the devastations of extreme weather events, and on the “phenomena of perception” as a reaction to the alienating nature of pandemic ‘normal’. Importantly, the responses, both scholarly and creative, demonstrate the centrality of poetry to the difficult, wrestling with questions about selfhood and belonging, for example, as well as with language itself, its contortions and transformations in seeking to find new shapes for the ineffable.

Poetry and COVID-19: the benefit of poetry and the poetryandcovidarchive.com website to mental health and wellbeing

ABSTRACT From June 2020 to June 2021, the website poetryandcovid.com (now archived as poetryandcovidarchive.com) served as a platform for poetic responses by people from around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. The site featured 1000+ poems by 600+ poets and received c. 100,000 views by people from 128 countries. The poetry, their author’s testimonials, as well as “comments” submitted to the organisers and public website, expressed how people felt during the pandemic. In the project’s final three months, the website hosted a survey adapted from the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), targeted at understanding the value of poetry, in general, and the website, in particular, to mental health and wellbeing. 400 people took part, 373 completed the WEMWBS, and over 250 participants provided “final comments”. The results show that the writing and reading of poetry – as well as the website itself – were of considerable benefit to mental health and wellbeing.

Rubens and his landscapes: Reflections on the notion of ‘otium’

This essay sheds light on Peter Paul Rubens’ intentions or possible underlying reasons for the ‘organic’ growth of his landscape paintings by analysing the fundamental contemporary notion of ‘otium’ (fruitful repose). Understood as contemplative leisure encouraging artistic and intellectual endeavour in accordance with Cicero’s advocacy of ‘otium cum dignitate’, it was deeply rooted in the classical writings of Horace, Virgil and Pliny the Younger. Ample research has shown that life in early modern Europe was tempered by the conceptual force of ‘otium’ and its opposite form, ‘negotium’. However, Rubens’ response to this dyad, and especially the effect it had on the creation of his landscapes, has only been addressed superficially. By teasing out the strands of ‘otium’ and ‘otium ruris’ (fruitful repose in the countryside), the author indicates multiple ways in which the topos of retreat played a notable part in Rubens’ poetic response to nature and landscape, to the aesthetic appreciation of the countryside in real life and in painting. Exploring both places and spaces present in the notions of ‘otium’ and ‘otium ruris’ in Rubens’ day not only consolidates our understanding of the personal dimension of landscapes, but it also sheds new light on the artist’s attentiveness and receptiveness to and his ongoing preoccupation with many of his large compositions in the 1630s. Although Rubens did not follow the idea of ‘otium’ programmatically, exploring it as a form of contemplative leisure nonetheless offers a key to understand the productive energy, artistic invention, and unique evolution of many of his landscapes. The examination of the important, but hitherto neglected landscape Return from the fields (c.1635-1638) at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence not only provides new insights to the painting’s intriguing genesis, it also demonstrates that Rubens’ landscapes may have provided a growing space of ‘otium ruris’ – for their creator and beholders alike.

A Review of Teachers and Teaching On Stage and On Screen

This piece is a review of Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen: Dramatic Depictions, edited by Diane Conrad and Monica Prendergast (2019). Mortimer’s personal poetic response opens the review to honour her artistic ways of knowing and responding to the content. The book’s contributing authors, all educators, provide diverse cultural, social, and socio-economic perspectives and insights into how teachers and teaching are represented in film and on stage. Conrad and Prendergast’s book invites a range of audiences (from pre-service teachers to academics) to reflect on dramatic depictions of teachers and to use them to deepen understandings of the complexities of teaching, schooling, and students—and, if readers are teachers themselves, to examine their own practice.

(Extra)ordinary artistic and poetic responses to COVID lockdown (2020–21)

This essay is about the making of a visual essay as a response to the conditions of COVID lockdown (2020–21). It explores how two artists worked together and apart to develop inquiries through making and sharing art and text. We worked apart to produce artworks and together to construct the visual essay. Applying a duoethnographic method we created this visual essay to reveal our making processes within the limitations of COVID lockdown.

Of Loss, Belonging and Remembrance: Indian Poetic Responses to World War I

This article undertakes a critical exploration of the Indian poetic responses to World War I. The most striking feature of this poetry was its uniquely diverse nature, which reflected in full the multicultural character of the Indian army at the Western Front and elsewhere in the world. The immense diversity of Indian soldiers triggered a wide range of emotions and ideas from combatants and civilians alike. While we have established writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu on the one hand, we have a poetic miscellany of lesser known creative voices on the other, some even documenting their first-hand experiences of the War. Poems, lyrical propaganda, folk-songs, epistolary verse, elegies and even verses accompanying posters make up the various modes of literary circulation during this time of unprecedented global turmoil. Making use of both original compositions and various other works in translation, this article argues that most of this poetic evidence often serves as crucial testimonies, chronicling not only the major historical events of the War years, but also assiduously recording the wide gamut of feelings and emotions associated with the conflict.