Poetic Voice Research Articles

Self-translation as a Form of Emancipation. The Case of Potseluy and A kushby Celia Dropkin

The article aims to address the emancipatory character of self-translation on the example of CeliaDropkin’s (1887–1956) poetic texts – Potseluy and A kush [A Kiss]. It introduces the linguisticbiography of the poet, which is an important aspect of the origins of both texts, and focuseson how the female character is constructed in the poems, and on how they engage various traditionsof Russian and Yiddish literatures. The discussion of Dropkin’s diverse poetic strategies shedslight on the potential of self-translation as a translingual practice that allows the author to createa new/different poetic voice.

O rețea a poeticilor feminine. Grațiela Benga, Vocile Penelopei: tonuri și accente în poezia contemporană românească

The present article proposes an analysis of Grațiela Benga’s volume, Penelope’s Voices: Tones and Accents in Contemporary Romanian Poetry, the first critical approach to contemporary (and ultracontemporary) poetry written by women in the Romanian literary space. The volume builds a muchneeded female network of poetic voices, through which Grațiela Benga aims to explore and revalue the poetry of contemporary authors while highlighting the heterogeneity and complexity of female poetic voices.

Recusatio, Prolepsis, and Popular Sentiment in Tennyson's Juvenilia

Tennyson’s early poems in Poems, by Two Brothers is remarkable for its insistence on maturity, a feature that Laurie Langbauer calls prolepsis, evident in an advertisement for this volume, presumably a jointly written by Alfred and Charles, in which the two brothers boldly announce their entry into the profession of poetry: “But so it is: we have passed the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate; though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from ‘the shade,’ and courted notoriety” (Tennyson and Tennyson, Advertisement). With this language and their subsequent volume of poems, Charles and Alfred Tennyson participate in a common schoolboy tradition of writing poetry as if already imagining themselves fully fledged poets. Moreover, in announcing their crossing of the Rubicon and “submitting to the microscopic eye of periodical Criticism” (ibid.), they strategically decide to disavow their youthful influences by means of the classical rhetorical strategy of recusatio. Yet while both Tennyson brothers participate in the normative schoolboy tradition of writing poetry in imitation of classical Greek and Latin poets, Alfred’s imitation also extends into the vogue for sentimental literature, including the gothic, that was popularized in Tennyson’s boyhood in such novels as Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic romances and in gift books, poetry albums, and literary annuals like the Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not. In so combining his schoolboy training in classical poetry with his reading of popular sentimental and Romantic literature, which were generally considered feminine and commercial, Tennyson forges a distinctive poetic voice and effectively launches himself into the vocation of poetry.

Voices of Resistance: Caste and Gender in Meena Kandasamy's Poetry

Dalit women's poetry is a powerful form of political expression that challenges the caste system and patriarchal structures in India. It gives voice to the experiences of marginalized women, exposing social injustices and demanding social change. Their poetry raises awareness about social issues, fosters community building among Dalit women, and inspires political activism. It disrupts the status quo and demands social change. Touch, the debut poetry collection of Meena Kandasamy, marks a significant entry into contemporary Indian poetry. Published in 2006, this collection offers a poignant exploration of caste, gender, and identity. Kandasamy uses her sharp poetic voice to address the socio-political issues that plague Indian society, particularly focusing on the experiences of Dalits and women. This paper delves into the themes, stylistic elements, and critical reception ofTouch, highlighting its impact on modern poetry and social discourse.

NUOVA POESIA ITALIANA DAL 1980 A OGGI. NEW ITALIAN POETRY FROM 1980 TO THE PRESENT DAY. МOSCOW, 2023. 295 P

In 2023, a unique non-commercial edition was published in Moscow by the Italian Institute of Culture: the most extensive bilingual anthology of Italian poetry of the recent period. The book includes selections by 17 poets, and their performances could be heard during the Italian Culture Week in May 2021, held at the Rudomino Library of Foreign Literature. The book includes selections of texts published in 1985-2022 in translations by E. Solonovich, V. Kazartseva and the staff of the Institute of Italian Culture. The foreword by D. Rizzi, Director of the IIC, gives a holistic view of the book and the process of its creation. The article by the influential Italian scholar A. Afribo Traits and Faces of New Italian Poetry (translated by A. Yampolskaya) helps the reader to navigate the variety of poetic voices presented.

Tender Flesh: Theorizing the Hybrid Embodied Poetics of the Asian American Queer Femme in Franny Choi's Soft Science

Abstract: This essay investigates how the grotesque and transgressive aesthetic of Franny Choi's Soft Science (2019) reimagines the Asian American Queer Femme subject's relationship to language, the body, and consciousness. Choi's work unravels this relationship by destabilizing human/nonhuman binary through a polyphonic poetic voice. This act of shapeshifting between humans, cyborgs, cephalopods, and other forms functions as a critique of the oppressive power structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity. To theorize her poetics, I foreground the critical lenses of Donna Haraway's posthuman feminism, Lisa Lowe's Asian American aesthetics, Vivian Huang's inscrutability and Mel Chen's queer linguistic animacies in connection with each other as a framework for understanding the hybrid embodiment of the Asian American Queer Femme. Subsequently, I trace Choi's "hybrid embodied poetics"—a hermeneutic that emphasizes her multitudinous lyric voice—primarily within the poems "Glossary of Terms," "Turing Test," "Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul," "Chi." Furthermore, this essay emphasizes the interrelated nature of the Asian American Queer Femme's embodied experiences and identities, as Choi's work repositions the theoretical frames of Haraway, Lowe, Huang, and Chen in an intersectional dialogue with each other.

Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë

As a solitary mention within her juvenilia tale ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829), Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious reference to air balloon flight suggests a wider social and literary context for its author’s understanding of this new scientific phenomenon. This article examines the wider textual presence of this awe-inspiring invention and how her seemingly simple reference to balloons ultimately aligns her from an early age to a wider, Romantic female discourse, particularly to the writing of Mary Shelley. The prevalent references to balloon flight in newspapers, magazines and books available to Brontë at the time, imply a familiarity with these dialogues, which is ultimately suggestive of the material she read and was subsequently inspired by to include in her own writing. Brontë’s reference to balloons associates her work with a Romantic discourse contemporary to her, specifically a female one, which situates her as a young writer alert to the literary dialogue of the time, hinting at a style she would later use in her novels, one which juxtaposed scientific invention in the Industrial Age beside an emotive poetic voice.

La memoria cultural como proceso creativo, un enfoque post-memorial de la coreografía en <i>A time to mourn</i> de Iris Karayan

In the book Haut Karabakh, Le Livre Noir (Nagorno Karabakh, The Black Book), published last August 2022, several leading figures of Armenian studies recall the origins of the conflict that has pitted Azerbaijan against Armenia for decades, and give an account of their position as members of the Armenian diaspora. On this occasion the director and actor Simon Abkarian wrote: "A nation deprived of its poetic voice deprives itself of its political one. Both are inseparable". If poetic and the political are inseparable, this implies that every poetic or artistic work has a political dimension that sometimes extends beyond the very context of its creation or genesis. One explanation may be the environment, the context from which it emerged. Another reason may be the sexual identity, ethical, cultural, or social values of the artists, but also those of their audiences. Taking for granted that the understanding of politics in artistic contexts has given rise, throughout the history of both visual and performing arts, to works that protest, celebrate, present, represent or resist very often through the body, we can envision that the political stands as either an imperative or as a creative fuel. In the field of choreography since the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of constraint or creative task has almost always generated movement (corporeal, metaphorical, or kinesthetic). This paper therefore sets out to explore the extent to which the heritage of a culture and the traumas of a threatened nation such as Armenia constitute a creative constraint or a creative starting point that is self-evident or that performing artists impose on themselves. Our argument will be supported by a study of Greek-Armenian choreographer, Iris Karayan’s piece, A time to mourn, choreographed in 2009.

Проблемно-тематическое своеобразие «итоговой» книги стихов А. Вознесенского «Тьмать» (2008)

The paper is devoted to a comprehensive study of the specificity of A. Voznesensky’s "final" book of poems. The aim of the study is to identify the problematic and thematic uniqueness of the book "T’mat’" (2008). The scientific novelty of the study consists in the fact that this publication of the contemporary poet is for the first time comprehended as the "final" one, its genre-typological features are analysed. As a result, the researchers have found the following: firstly, the hallmark of A. Voznesensky’s poetics is represented by declarativeness, provocative nature, a prominent subjectivity of the poetic voice of the persona, which is closely merged with the image of the poet. Secondly, A. Voznesensky’s book "T’mat’" demonstrates a vivid example of a "final" book of poems, the genre canon of which was developed by poets in the last third of the 19th century. The book is organized chronologically and embodies the author’s view of his own fate and the fate of Russia. The book actualizes the farewell motif, the loss motifs, the desire to share the most intimate things, to remember the best moments of one’s life, to thank loved ones; biographism is combined with a dialogical address to the "other". Thirdly, the attention to religious and philosophical motifs and images is increased in this publication, this fact is connected with rethinking the life lived, summing it up.

“I Walked Out”: Perambulatory Poetics, Authorial Independence, and Isabella Whitney’s Poetic Voice in A Sweet Nosgay

ABSTRACT The act of walking energizes the formation of Isabella Whitney’s poetic voice in her second volume of verse, A Sweet Nosgay (pub. 1573). Walking out of her house, trespassing in Plat’s garden, and traversing the perimeter of Bedlam are just a few of the striking scenes that depict Whitney’s perambulation. To examine the connection between walking and the formation of her poetic voice, I suggest that Whitney’s walking operates in two distinct registers. Firstly, walking is a thematic concern that exposes her interest in the contours of intellectual independence, the process of artistic production, and the vulnerability occasioned by impecunity. Secondly, walking operates as a form of poetic performativity, figurative of her trajectory towards print publication. This essay expands discussion on Whitney’s mobility, suggesting that perambulatory poetics are a crucial component of her authorial self-presentation in A Sweet Nosgay.

Moneta: Keats’in 'The Fall of Hyperion' Şiirinde Zelil Anne

In July 1819, Keats began to compose The Fall of Hyperion, an allegorical poem about the Titans vanquished by the Olympian deities, concentrating upon the fall of Hyperion. Yet, Keats grew frustrated with the poem’s progress and left it incomplete in September 1819. In this fragment, the poet-narrator encounters Moneta, the goddess of memory, who guides him to draw a boundary between genuine poets and pseudo-poets. The poet-narator’s confrontation with Moneta lies at the centre of this unfinished poem. Therefore, this article explores the poet-narrator’s relationship with Moneta by employing the Kristevan theory of abjection. Moneta is a pivotal character around whom the discussion of the abject coheres since she simultaneously incorporates the abject and that which expels the abject. Moneta represents the attempt to expel the abject because she as a mentor guides the poet-narrator to maintain boundaries between poets and dreamers. Nevertheless, she also emerges as a smothering maternal figure for the poet-narrator. The poet-narrator journeys into Moneta’s “globed” mind that “enwombs” the tragedy of the Titans to recount their story (Fall I.245, 276-7). This journey is regarded as a venture into the realm of the abject maternal body. During this journey, the death-bearing visage of the maternal muse appears. Thus, the poet-narrator confronts the abject as he descends into the pre-linguistic realm where the abject emerges through the sickening collapse of borders. This paper argues that the poetic voice is choked and the poem remains incomplete owing to this confrontation with the abject mother that swamps the symbolic.

Radical Ecopoetics: The Apocalyptic Vision of Jorie Graham’s Sea Change

Jorie Graham’s Sea Change (2008) addresses the environmental crisis engendered by climate change, sending us a dire warning of the end of humanity by featuring an apocalyptic world. Sea Change gives a poetic voice to the dynamics of climate change by embodying the catastrophe in linguistic forms and thus enabling us to experience the ecological crisis. For Graham, poetic imagination is an act of physical or bodily engagement as it brings together linguistic and emotional factors into an embodied performance. This paper explores the affective dimension of Graham’s experimental poetry to demonstrate how her radical ecopoetics allows us to (re)engage with the material world, and how it changes our perceptual and sensorial registers to awaken our sense of interconnectedness with nonhuman others.

Sor Juana and Elvira Sastre – Ecological Advocacy and the Female Voice as Witness in Patronage Economies

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is frequently hailed as Latin America’s first feminist, in whose writing activism and art converge to advocate for education for all. Throughout her literary corpus, knowledge is connected with light and divinity, and one’s connection with the natural world further strengthens a philosophical relationship with God. In Sor Juana’s writing, the destruction of the land in post-Conquest Latin America becomes an assault on the self, where the poetic voice both observes and critiques ecological and patriarchal violence. In the modern day, the social media platform Instagram is employed by a new generation of Spanish poets for the publication and promotion of their work. Elvira Sastre engages with rhetoric surrounding the climate crisis whilst negotiating her personal expression through representation of the body as Earth. Again, by observing the literal destruction of the Earth, Sastre’s poetic voice rises above this violence, self-fashioning as an advocate for change. This paper therefore explores ecological advocacy in both female authors’ work and positions, underscoring how they both use their positions as writers within their respective creative patronage economies to reconcile (male) violence with the female voice.

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

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

Specialties of Tamil in Vaanidasan's Works

Poet Vaanidasan can be admired as "poets are born not made". Poet Kannadasan has mentioned in Thentral magazine that if his works are translated into English, he may win the Nobel Prize. In the history of twentieth century literature, he is distinguished as an ideal poet and influenced by poet Bharathidasan. He is Bharathidasan's first student. He has received all the special titles like Tamil Kaatha Pudumai kavinar, Poet of Nature, Bhavalar Mani, Kavinareru Bhavalar Mannan. Awarded "Chevalier" by the French Government. All his poems are about Tamil language, Tamil people, it's culture, features and so on. He gave importance to nature. A poetic voice for the advancement of women. This article aims to highlight the special features of Tamil that are revealed in the works of Vaanidasan.

“A Sign We Are”: A Poetical Theology of Passing in Hölderlin’s “Rousseau” and Other Late Poems

The birth of modern aesthetics cannot be separated from the emergence of a new, non-dogmatic conception of religion and theology. Friedrich Schlegel advocated ‘art as new religion’ while Friedrich Schleiermacher developed a vision on religion as a deeply aesthetic experience. In this rich intellectual context, one author stands out as deeply steeped in this field of innovative dialogues between philosophy, religion and art (against the backdrop of profound historical transformations) and as a singular figure beckoning towards a future (and a future language) that was still to come: Friedrich Hölderlin. In his later work, Hölderlin’s poetic voice retreats into a process of meticulous reading and writing, a complex score of traces and signs that articulate difference, not-yet-presence and potentiality, which is nothing other than the experience of finite time. In doing so, Hölderlin retraces the divine in history and in human existence: its retreat and expected arrival. In this article, we present readings and interpretations of Hölderlin’s later poetry, with a specific focus on the Winke or hints of the gods, and the vocabulary of nods and signs (Zeichen) signifying the experience of time’s passing as the announcement of an unthinkable future. By involving Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of the Winke as intersections of the divinity of humanity and the humanity of divinity, we will arrive at a new understanding of Hölderlin’s emblematic figures of modernity: the stranger and the passer-by as receivers and transmitters of these Winke.

Exploring the Inevitability of Death in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry of the Children' Poem

The Cry of the Children is one of the significant poems written by the Victorian poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In this poem, the poetess protested an industrial society that employed children as an industrial workers. She showed the social realities of the era where women and children were inferior individualities. Because of the Industrial Revolution, poverty, unemployment, diseases and death increased. What’s more the death of the children increased rapidly. The poetess through this poem expressed the situation of those children who worked in factories and mines. Thus, this paper tries to examine briefly the Victorian period in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to put her poetic voice. It also focuses on her poetic career and individuality as a female poet and her place in social and public sphere. Furthermore, this paper tries to analyze the aspect of death in the poem The Cry of the Children.

A Feminist Act of Defiance: ‘Iphigenia says no’ by Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

AbstractIn ‘Iphigenia says no’, Anghelaki-Rooke provides a critique of the myth of Iphigenia’s sacrifice that gives the story a distinctively feminine poetic voice designed to subvert the unchallenged authority of myth. Her poem is an impassioned plea for a feminist poetics that gives women a voice and agency, rejecting any form of control or authority over the female mind and body. The choice of Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis and an emphasis on the chorus are central to the anti-war message of the poem, but other contextual factors also frame the poet’s choice of myth and determine the direction of her rewriting: these are a feminist anti-war stance that is distinct from the anti-war stance of male poets like Seferis; the peace movements of the Cold War period and their political reverberations in Greece in the early 1960s; archaeological excavations and the renewed interest in the play that these inspired; classical reworkings in popular films of the years immediately prior to the writing of the poem; and the national curriculum and its underlying ideology.

“I Seek the Stars in the Daytime”: Citation, Recitation, and Leah Goldberg’s Hidden German Poem

Abstract This article examines the German poem inserted in Leah Goldberg’s debut novel Mikhtavim minesi’ah medumah (Letters From an Imagined Journey 1936/37). I argue that the novel serves as a framework through which Goldberg can momentarily become a German poet, stretching the limits of her Jewish subjectivity and of the monolingual Hebrew literary sphere. Whereas studies have addressed the intertextual references in Goldberg’s novel, scholarly discussions have failed to attend Goldberg’s German poem, overlooking her non-Hebrew poetic voice and the literary genealogy to which she ascribes herself. To understand this moment, I attend Ruth’s intercultural relations with Erich Kästner and Rainer Maria Rilke, whom she quotes over the course of her travels. In so doing, Goldberg points to Ruth’s imagined literary genealogy while putting herself into this tradition as a way to form her voice as a German poet. Written by the protagonist, the poem is recalled and recited in German by Shnithalel, Ruth’s friend from India. This German poem, I argue, offers a key to understanding Goldberg’s prose as a dialogic mode of writing that grapples with Jewish subjectivity and voice, emerging poetically between self and other (Ich and Sie) and interlinguistically between Hebrew and German.

La transgresión de la letra. Poética y feminismo en Cristina Peri Rossi

This article investigates the transgressive will of female and feminist poetry in the poetic work of the writer Cristina Peri Rossi, who has recognized pursuing an ethical will of writing to face the injustices of her time. Recently, she has been awarded the Cervantes Prize 2021, the most important award in Spanish-language literature, granted by the Ministry of Culture and Sports, which is given to the recognition of an entire literary career. The objective of this essay has been to verify how in many of her verses Cristina Peri Rossi, aided by the word poetic, puts together a discursive strategy against the prevailing machismo and misogyny. A large part of the Rossinian poetic work is articulated as well as a space of resistance facing an androcentric canon that has made female writing impossible and invisible. Not in vain, Peri Rossi’s writing project was originally born as a transgression of the female fatum, conquering the place of enunciation, taking the poetic voice and subverting through language the writing that had been denied to her.