Poetic Form Research Articles

Redact to React: Deconstructing Justice with Erasure Poetry

The purpose of this article is to consider the philosophy, form and function underpinning erasure poetry. Erasure is a creative practice involving redaction or the striking through of certain words, phrases, or paragraphs in found documents and materials. The poetic form is comprised of what is left behind. The form has grown in popularity in recent years due to the advent of social media and the fact that erasure poems’ pictorial format is easily shared online. This article suggests that the poststructuralist philosophy underpinning the form is also key to its traction insofar as it enables poets to expose the fallacy of justice communicated by official documents such as court transcripts and government reports. In examining traditional conceptions of the page as interface and the authority of inscription, I will explore the extent to which erasure poetry heralds a new collaborative and democratic form of poetics. By conducting a close reading of two erasure texts—M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Nicole Sealey’s ‘Pages 1–4’, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure—I will argue that erasure poetry has the potential to reinvigorate postcolonial studies, drawing parallels between erasure and the censorship of black lives.

Notes towards an Afterword: On “Hundreds for Katie”

SummaryThis afterword performs a contradiction. It simultaneously describes a theoretical argument against finalization while serving as a type of conclusion to “Hundreds for Katie,” a multi‐authored, curated project engaging and honoring the influential work and mentorship of Kathleen Stewart upon her recent retirement from the University of Texas. “Hundreds for Katie” is a collaborative endeavor and comprises various experimental, often personal, styles and formats. Despite their poetic and theoretical diversity, each piece in the collection is about one hundred words long, honoring the same poetic form in the final collaboration of Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant, a collection of hundred‐word pieces published in The Hundreds (2019). This afterword attempts to engage some of the capacities in ethnographic voicing Kathleen Stewart pioneered. Like the other pieces in the collection, my article uses poetic license to achieve a specific affective and aesthetic effect.

The Refugee’s Tale: The Story of the Story

This essay explores the collaborative process of creating the poem ‘The Refugee’s Tale’, which was initially read at a live event and subsequently published in the first Refugee Tales anthology (Comma Press, 2016). It presents the metatextual process of interviewing the refugee to obtain their story, ‘The Refugee’s Tale’ itself, and the multifaceted aspects of the creative composition of the long poem. It examines a variety of literary and ethical challenges from the perspective of a participating writer: the imperative to do justice to the politics of the Refugee Tales movement as a whole and the individual tale in particular whilst concurrently attending to the aesthetics in creating a literary work; the intersections and differences between creating life writing and fiction; the decision to utilize the mnemonic properties of a particular European poetic form, the heroic crown, to tell the tale of a North African woman; the avoidance of pornography of pain; and, fundamentally, questions of voice – generating it, giving it, lending it, and silencing it. The author concludes that the merits of this collaborative process, the pairing of refugees with literary writers to craft and recite their life story, is the most effective way to capture the public imagination and enable those silenced voices to be heard.

The Development of a Poetic Tradition. A Study of a Dutch Renaissance Poetry Corpus

The present paper introduces a corpus of Dutch Renaissance poetry which was automatically annotated by using neural networks. The analysis of the annotations provides a clear picture of the process of implementing the new poetic form into Dutch poetic tradition, and of its different stages. The development of iambic metre was a gradual process that required various attempts; this can be well observed when comparing Dutch poems from a 100 year time window. While syllabic instances can be observed among the first attempts, most of the earlier poems are not isosyllabic and have a rather varied syllable length. This study shows that isosyllabicity developed together with iambicity. Finally, automatic poetry annotation allows for testing and validating theoretical hypotheses and for investigating literary questions with the aid of large amount of data.

Strophes in Peshitta Psalms? A Study of Selected Examples

As the Peshitta plays an essential role in literary and textual criticism, the literary features of the Peshitta must be examined not only from the perspective of translation technique but also from the perspective of other factors, such as poetical devices and form. Little attention has been paid to the translation technique in the Peshitta Psalms despite the substantial research conducted on the Peshitta. Most studies have focused on the relationship between the Peshitta Psalms, the Hebrew Masoretic text, and other ancient versions. Therefore, the Peshitta Psalms have yet to be examined from the perspective of classical Syriac poetry. This study investigates how well the Syriac translator employed poetical devices to produce strophic structures and poetic style in the psalms, with particular attention to potential approaches to strophic structure that have not previously been explored. The paper addresses the question of whether the Peshitta Psalms are strophic. The study indicates that Peshitta Psalms 29, 96, 136, and 148 use strophic markers such as word repetition, alliteration, repetition of syntactical structures, parallelism and a balanced number of syllables and words.

Rhyme in dróttkvætt, from Old Germanic Inheritance to Contemporary Poetic Ecology I: Overview and Argument

This paper is the first in a three-part series or tryptic that argues for the Old Germanic origins of rhyme in the Old Norse dróttkvætt meter. This meter requires rhymes on the stressed syllables of two words within a six-position line, irrespective of the syllables that follow. This first instalment introduces both the Old Germanic poetic form and the dróttkvætt meter. It outlines the background of the discussion and presents the basic argument. The second instalment presents a portrait of rhyme in Old Germanic meters outside of Old Norse, providing foundations for viewing rhyme as an inherited part of the Old Germanic poetic system. That portrait highlights the use of rhymes including the stressed vowel within a short line and the tendency to use such rhymes in the b-line, corresponding to the rhymes in even lines of dróttkvætt. The third instalment turns to dróttkvætt within its poetic ecology, beginning with a portrayal of rhyme in Old Norse eddic poetries, followed by dróttkvætt in relation to its contemporary poetic ecology and unravelling its impacts on that ecology, gradually working backward to a perspective on the ecology in which it emerged.

The emergence of praise-poetry recitation in the Ịjọ community

This article focuses on the emergence of praise-poetry recitation among the Ịjọ of Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. It argues that until the contemporary period, the Ịjọ had no such poetic form. The article therefore examines how Chief Adolphus Munamuna, Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe (The Chief Oral Poet of the Ịzọn Nation), was influenced by Yoruba bards to begin a poetic tradition that was previously alien to the Ijo community. It further compares the tradition, as it is practised by the Ọụbẹbẹ Kẹnị Ịzọn Ibe, with other ethnic groups in Africa, including the Yoruba, Hausa, Somali and the Bantu-speaking peoples of southern Africa where the culture of praise chanting continues to this day.

Working with Fluids in Mary Collier's "The Woman's Labour"

Abstract: This essay centers Mary Collier's work with fluids as part of her lifelong profession of nurse and washerwoman to the content and form of her poem, "The Woman's Labour" (1739). By giving textured specificity to Collier's labor, my effort is to make meaningful her work itself, rather than only her working-class identity, to her poetic practice. The essay reviews the arguments that body fluids provide the feeling material for poetic rhythm. I then draw a parallel between the movement of body fluids as a mechanism for poetic rhythm and the regular movement of body fluids as necessary indicators of health in eighteenth-century understandings of the body. As Collier depicts the experience of gendered work in her poem, the specific work of maintaining healthy bodily flows leads to intimate fluid connections with the people the working woman cares for, and these connections produce sensations of bodily change and alienation. As Collier works with poetic form to manipulate the rhythmic feelings of bodies and move us towards troubling intimacies akin to the experiences of caretaking, her poetry becomes a form that holds the rhythms of bodies in fluid relationships.

Perspectives on Poetic Language Construction of Identity through Language

The present research article aims to investigate the intricate tapestry of language and its profound role in shaping and conveying human identity. One of the most pivotal movements in the intellectual history of the twentieth century revolves around the exploration and understanding of language and its fundamental roles in the human experience. Since the dawn of civilization, language has served as the conduit for narrating, preserving, and influencing the multifaceted dimensions of human experience. It stands as a reflection and assertion of individual and collective identity, offering insights into the diverse ways through which human beings perceive, interact with, and interpret the world around them. This article embarks on a comprehensive examination of the burgeoning human interest in language, transcending its functional use as a mere tool for communication. It scrutinizes the significant transformation in the conceptualization of language, primarily initiated in the twentieth century, wherein language evolved to be seen not just as a medium of communication but as a crucial construct that interlaces with diverse dimensions of human existence and identity. The study delves into various facets of language, encompassing its poetic dimensions, which provide a rich, multi-layered platform for the exploration and expression of identity. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the article explores the symbiotic relationship between language and identity, acknowledging the myriad ways through which language informs, shapes, and is shaped by human identity. It investigates the poetic construction of language, unveiling the nuanced ways in which language, particularly in its poetic form, serves as a powerful instrument for the articulation and construction of identity. There is a dynamic interplay between language and identity, providing a robust foundation for future research and exploration in the realm of language studies, with a particular focus on its poetic dimensions and its role in the construction of identity. The paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discourse on language, adding depth and breadth to the understanding of its multifarious roles in the human experience, particularly in the context of identity construction through poetic language.

CLASSIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF SOME TEXTUAL REFLECTING ALEVI- BEKTASHI ORAL TRADITION IN POLITICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL CONTEXT

Abstract
 First, it should be noted that the Alevi culture was created, transmitted and maintained mainly as an oral discourse. Alevi poetry played the biggest role in this process. In this study on Alevi poetic discourse, cem, poetry, dance, semah, prayer and recitation of hymns, which are an Alevi ritual, will be discussed. The Alevi poetry, which is the creation of Bektaşi, urbanite Alevi poets who used the poetical forms of the classical Ottoman literature, or court literature will be excluded from my discussion. These forms include gazel, kaside, kıt’a, terciibend, terkib-i bend, mersiye etc which follow the form, style and the metric system used mainly by the Medresse educated court poets. Up until now the Alevi-Bektashi people have maintained their beliefs, thoughts, policy, philosophy, traditions and practices through some cultural instruments (muhabbet) which they perform in or out of cem rituals (worship gatherings), such as folk poems, folk songs (nefes, deyiş, duvazimam and so on) and folk dances (semah). Cem rituals have social, educational, cultural and political dimensions as well as their inherent religious dimension. Cem rituals, folk poems and dances change from one region to another. Despite the differences between them, it is believed that their "essence" is same. We can say that the saying "there is one path but a thousand ways" is the major notion in their cosmology. In our research, the belief structure of the Alevi culture and the way of worship are discussed based on the mâni and the koşma. In addition, the syllable structure and meanings of mâni, koşma and deyiş are presented with Turkish and English examples. Alevi ashıks, such as Kaygusuz Abdal, Hatayi and Muhiddin Abdal inserted their pen name in that short poetical form and transformed it into an individual creation. The koşma, may be known by several names, such as deyiş, deme, düvaz imam, mersiye, depending on musical tune it is associated with in the local tradition, social context, the geographic area, other performance components. These word structures and formulas reveal the Alevi cultural structure in religious rituals, music and art. Brief history of the Alevi-Bektashi society, which forms the basis of this belief structure, is also evaluated in our study. The Alevi poetry, which is the creation of the Alevi aşıks, minstrel, played a major role in transmitting the Alevi moral principles, the social and individual behaviors, the history of the Alevi community, the legendary life stories of the Alevi Babas and Dede’s and most importantly, the Alevi religious beliefs and ritual.

The multilingual poetry task: Innovating L2 writing pedagogy in the secondary classroom

This multiple case-study explores how a multilingual poetry task can be used to support multilingual writers in mainstream U.S. high school English language arts (ELA) classes. The purpose of the investigation is to closely examine the affordances of a multilingual poetry task and discuss its innovative pedagogical aspects in terms of the results that the task achieves—the learning it promotes—as well as highlight interdisciplinary collaboration between (English as a second language (ESL) and ELA teachers. I argue that the multilingual poetry task can innovate L2 writing pedagogy, address common problems that multilingual writers and their teachers face, and provide resident immigrant learners with affordances such as innovative developments in multilingual writing techniques, an understanding of compositional aspects of writing via open poetic forms, and an opportunity to explore humanistic aspects of language learning. A qualitative evidence-based approach is applied to analyze samples of multilingual poetry from two resident immigrant writers of diverse backgrounds (e.g., Belarus and Myanmar). This analysis is offset with learner immediate post-course and delayed interviews, learner reflective writing, and classroom observations and interactions. Finally, utilizing data from post-course ELA teacher interviews, the article discusses how interdisciplinary ELA-ESL teacher collaboration can better support emergent multilingual writers and move the field of second language writing forward.

New voices in an old form: rethinking the earliest Chinese translations of ‘The Isles of Greece’

ABSTRACT This paper reexamines the first translations of Byron’s ‘The Isles of Greece’ by Liang Qichao, Ma Junwu, Huang Kan and Hu Shi to highlight an essential facet of Chinese literary modernity – namely, the recourse to traditional poetic language and forms, which, though often dismissed as outdated and incapable of representing modern reality in the dominant narratives of Chinese literary history, nonetheless reflects a growing sense of urgency to find a new voice during the late Qing and early Republican periods. With considerable emphasis placed on the poetic form and narrative mode of both the original and its translations, this study facilitates a productive textual investigation into the temporal–spatial paradigm of progression and evolution of early modern Chinese poetry as well as modern Chinese literature from a historical perspective. The findings suggest that the poetic manipulations by the respective translators were in line with the nationalist discourse of the day and that their act of rewriting poetic tradition to integrate the legacy of the past into a new vision of the present established a far-reaching basis for the construction of Chinese literary modernity.

The Possibilities of Plant Vocalization

The poetic possibilities of plant vocalization take new directions in the poetry of Lőrinc Szabó and Attila József, feeding on the traditions of romantic and modern poetry, but also renewing them, as we see in the translations and reading methods. They come into contact with the poems of Percy Shelley, Charles Baudelaire, and George Meredith. The study focuses on two poems: Attila József’s “Trees” [Fák] and Lőrinc Szabó’s “In the Black Forest” [A Fekete Erdőben] contextualized with other poems in the oeuvre, the antecedents of the poetic forms, and the comparative influences. In the case of “Trees”, plant thinking and biological operations are paralleled, creating the sound effects of the poem together; in the poem “In the Black Forest”, the equivalence of human and plant life is emphasized through sensual-poetic communication.

Network Temporality in Percival Everett’s Poetry

Drawing on new media scholarship, the article suggests that Percival Everett’s poetry can be understood through the lens of hypergraphical knowledge. In this context, Everett’s poetry operates as a synchronic and diachronic exploration of poetic movements, genres, forms, and inheritances, embodying network-temporal relations similar to the hypernarrator(s) of his fiction. Ultimately, this analysis observes the expansive and cohesive nature of Everett’s work, inviting readers to refocus their attention on the indeterminate surface of, and the intricate web of meaning in his poetry.

THE CRISIS OF LANGUAGE IN THE POETICS OF MODERNISM

The article deals with the topic of linguistic skepticism in modernistic literature, using works of German, Austrian and Russian literature as examples. The crisis of rationalistic thinking at the turn of the 20th century led to an extensive discussion about the functions and role of language. The reaction to the crisis of faith in the power of language was the search for ways to overcome this crisis - from the demand for voluntary poetic silence to the utopian project of creating a perfect language of poetry. Numerous avantgarde linguistic experiments resulted from the recognition of the inconsistency of former poetic forms. The anarchist rebellion against conventional language and its conscious deformation are paradoxically combined with innovative artistic projects that set the transformation of the world with the help of the revived word as their ultimate goal.

Prefigurative Poetics: Language Writing’s New Sentence and the Politics of the New Left

This article argues that prefiguration is an essential concept for understanding the postwar avant-garde’s affiliation with social movements. Against the backdrop of important recent arguments that link Language writing to the failings and inner conflicts of the 1960s, this essay claims that Language writing was bred out of a complex dialogue with the New Left as both a result of a disillusionment with political speech and an attempt to carry on the New Left’s democratic experiments. I show how the technique invented by Ron Silliman and other American West Coast poets called The New Sentence not only was a way of posturing in the established language of the New Left, but actively sought to continue the political legacy of the 1960s in much more direct ways than previously acknowledged. Most importantly, the New Sentence inherited the notion of prefigurative politics and the hopes that such a politics, if transferred to poetic form, could enact change by constructing an alternative model of society. As a merger between New Left politics and institutional critique, the New Sentence—and other avant-garde strategies after ‘68—prefigures new ways of life through aesthetic form.

The Formation of the Sonnet in Kurdish Modern Poetry

If Kurdish poetry was dominated by Persian and Arabic poetry in the classical period, in the modern period, either directly or indirectly, through Turkish literature, it has been influenced by European literature. The sonnet as a European poetic form has been used by Kurdish modernist poets, especially rhymes of the sonnet fragments. This research, entitled "The Formation of the Sonnet in Kurdish Modern Poetry", is an attempt to present the reflection and the use of the form and rhyme of the sonnet in the poetry of Kurdish modernist poets, who renewed Kurdish poetry between 1918 and 1970. The research problem is related to the novelty of the sonnet form and rhyme and its application in Kurdish Modern poetry. Sonnets have been discussed in previous studies more in terms of rhyme because they are rarely constructed as they are in terms of form. However, Kurdish modernist poets have worked on the structure of the sonnet with many techniques, innovations and variations, which requires a more detailed and comprehensive study. For this reason, the study is based on the literary theories and employs qualitative descriptive analysis approach in order to investigate the texts used the framework of sonnet forms and employed sonnet rhymes.

Hundreds of words for Kathleen Stewart: A four‐dimensional retirement party for metaphysical rhizomes

SummaryThis essay introduces a collection of one‐hundred‐word reflections celebrating Kathleen Stewart's retirement. Dozens of scholars participated in this celebration. Each participant wrote a one‐hundred‐word reflection to stand alone as an individually authored piece. The disconnected brevity of these reflections may catch some readers off guard. Thus, this introduction develops a lingua franca to welcome as many potential readers as possible. This lingua franca combines five dialects: poetic, metaphoric, bibliographic, historic, and dialogic. Grounded in poetic form, this introduction speaks in the metered voice of one‐hundred‐word chunks. Many of these chunks offer metaphorical proposals for how to read our celebratory collection. Bibliographic citations, appearing throughout, create affective resonances with various scholarly literatures. Acknowledging anthropology's emphasis on context specificity, some chunks describe the historical development of the one‐hundred‐word form. Dialogically, this introduction uses the second‐person pronoun, you, to invite conversations rather than critiques. Such a five‐part lingua franca engages two camps of readers: readers who enjoy experimentation may think this introduction is too paranoid; readers who cringe at experimentation may think this introduction is too poetic. Alienating as few readers as possible, this essay proposes a Goldilocks solution: not too paranoid, not too poetic, but just right—or “good enough” (Milo 2019).

Incongruent Enjambments: The Case of Classical French Verse

In versified texts, congruence is one facet of the concordance between the edges of metrical constituents and those of grammatical constituents. Congruence may be characterized roughly as the requirement that no element within a syntactic constituent be in a stronger metrical position than the final element in that constituent. If break strength is defined in terms applicable to any constituent structure tree, syntactic as well as metrical, incongruences are discrepancies between the relative strengths of two breaks in metrical structure and the relative strengths of their counterparts in syntactic structure. Although our primary source of data is classical French verse, the characterization of congruence we present is a rather abstract one that does not make reference to features that are specific to French poetic forms or to the grammatical structure of the French language. This should make this characterization applicable in other poetic traditions.

Renewing the Structure of Mustazad in Goran's poems

Mustazad as a poetic model, is not new in Kurdish literature. There are many classic Kurdish poets who wrote poems in the form of Al-Mustazad. Mullah Al-Jaziri was the first to organize a poetic in Mustazad in the history of Kurdish literature. But in the stage of renewal of Kurdish poetry after the First World War, Kurdish poets contributed to renewing the structure of the meter in terms of weight and rhymes and the formation of the different composition in terms of number and arrangement of verses and their component parts.
 The title of the research (Renewing the Structure of Mustazad in Goran's poems) is an attempt to show the characteristics of the techniques of renewal and creativity of Goran the poet, and renew the structure of Al-Mustazad at this stage.
 There is a clear gap in academic studies of literary theory of comparison to the creativity of Kurdish poets in this field. There are a number of studies that describe Mustazad among other poetic templates, but there is no specialized research in this poetic model to study the renewal techniques and creative attempts of the Kurdish poet.
 The research consists of two chapters: the first chapter is concerned with defining Mustazad and its techniques in both the classical and modern stages, while the second chapter is concerned with Goran's creative attempts in this regard. Through this research, the researcher reached to new results on which this poetic form was based.