Poetic Reflection Research Articles

IN PURSUIT OF TRUTH: D̲J̲ALĀL AL-DĪN RŪMĪ'S CONCEPTION OF HAPPINESS WITHIN THE MATHNAWĪ-I MA’NAWĪ

This article investigates the notion of happiness as presented in Mawlānā D̲j̲alāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s (d. 672/1273) Mathnawī-ī Ma’nawī, examining the intersection amid the scholarly discourse on the subject within the Sufi literature. Rather than a momentary sentiment, Rumi identifies happiness as the state of existence once experienced in the primordial realm. Having separated from the divine presence, the condition of human beings on earth would consist of pain and unhappiness. Since the worldly material is transitory, the happiness achieved through them is likewise. Therefore, Rumi encourages the individual to take a voluntary spiritual journey (sulūk) from the self (nafs) to the soul to be united with the divine (tawḥīd) to obtain celestial happiness once again, all while living in the terrestrial world (ʿālam al-s̲h̲ahāda)—the Mathnawī being a manual for the devotees on the path. This education provides an understanding for the individual of the nature of the objects, self-awareness, and divine enlightenment through the inner transformation of the self. Traversing through the stations and the states of the journey with the guidance of the spiritual master (murs̲h̲id), one purifies the ego (nafs) and eventually reaches the grade of contentment (riḍā). This stage signals the achievement of self-realization, wherein individuals grasp the divine spirit inherent in their existence and relish living in harmony with divine will, thereby, happiness. If the seeker reaches the state of self-annihilation (fanā‘), then the layers of nafs are completely unveiled (kas̲h̲f, leading to the gnosis (ma‘rifa). In this state, through celestial love, one begins to see Divine manifestations around them—placing true happiness as an intimate communion with the ultimate Truth (al-Ḥaḳḳ). This connection brings about a profound sense of genuine and celestial happiness. Through the Mathnawī’s elaborate narratives and poetic reflections, Rūmī encourages the reader to embark on a path of spiritual enlightenment. In contrast, happiness arises as the natural product of a life aligned with divine will, marked by a harmonious balance between the dual nature of human beings. This scholarly analysis highlights Rūmī’s significant contribution to the discourse on happiness within the Sufi tradition,h highlighting his contribution to the discourse within the Sufi literature and the enduring relevance of his teachings in our contemporary scholarly expedition for authentic gratification and the human condition.

Gathering

A poetic reflection emerging from a series of visits to Emma’s Acres, a farm led by people who were formerly incarcerated, which is part of a network of incarcerated people and their families in the Fraser Valley region of prisons.

The Art of Forgiveness: Art-based inquiry into how art helped in the process of forgiveness

This article is a condensed summary of original qualitative and art-based research from the author’s doctoral dissertation. The focus of this research was to examine how eight participants had been assisted by various forms of art to work through their forgiveness process following grave injuries and injustices committed against them. Using response art-based research, their verbal accounts, gathered through semi-structured interviews, were examined and further reflected upon through summative poetic reflection and visual art created by the researcher. In so doing, the researcher captured key aspects of how art-making helped participants and communicated those findings artistically. Results indicate that art was facilitative in many ways including the externalization of complex emotions into concrete art forms that could be accessed and transformed into finding forgiveness in the safe place provided by the art.

The Night Nurse: A reflection on On Being Sane in Insane Places by D. L. Rosenhan (1973)

In this poetic reflection, The Night Nurse draws inspiration from D.L. Rosenhan's influential 1973 study to probe the complex relationship between personal identity and the structural confines of higher education (HE). The poem presents a rich tableau that contrasts indigenous knowledge with Western educational paradigms, shedding light on the friction and marginalisation that arise at the intersection of these worldviews. It embodies the struggle for self-definition amidst a backdrop that often favours uniformity and compliance. By examining the similarities between psychiatric labelling and academic evaluations, the narrative challenges the reader to consider the authenticity of understanding and the significance of diverse perspectives in scholarly environments.

“If Earth Were Freed From Those Who Buy and Sell”: Albery Allson Whitman’s Abolition Agriculture

Abstract: This article examines three major works by nineteenth-century Black Appalachian poet Albery Allson Whitman, focusing on georgic scenes of agricultural labor to highlight the most radical of his agrarian visions. I show how Whitman imagines ecological thriving, decolonial cohabitation, and racial justice in terrains charted outside the political, economic, and geographic bounds of the expanding United States. On one hand, Whitman’s poetic reflections on the interface of land and labor in Black historical experience yield transformative visions that offer abolitionist alternatives to the violently extractive paradigms of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, industrial agriculture, and United States imperialism. On the other, Whitman’s rhetoric of racial uplift tends to uphold some of those extractive paradigms, precisely to the extent that it buys into the ideology of American exceptionalism. While acknowledging Whitman’s occasional lapses into the belief that labor contributing to national growth is the key to both individual and collective thriving, I reveal how Whitman’s works ultimately privilege local, subsistence, and regenerative forms of Afro-Indigenous agriculture as world-making enterprises that contest the racial and colonial order of the plantation form, as well as the United States settler state that upholds it.

“We Have to Be Everything at a Time America Tells Us that We are Nothing”: enacting justice as praxis as women of color in education

Our stories matter. Stories teach, heal, and affirm our presence, struggles, and perseverance. While the academy socializes scholars to privilege individual advancement, Women of Color consistently testify to the power of collective spaces as spaces of resistance, strength, and critical consciousness. As Asian/Asian American and Black women in academia, we present our stories using a methodological approach we call, “Third World Feminist Collaborative Autoethnography.” Epistemologically, third-world feminism honors the feminist transnational identities that situate us within a global majority. Methodologically, collaborative autoethnography focuses on our joint-individual and interactional critical reflexivity as we grapple with our role, expectations, and commitments toward justice as a praxis. Through narrative and poetic reflections, we analyze relationships between public justice work and private support. while simultaneously discussing our (un)learning processes across four themes: (1) navigating academic labor expectations in dehumanizing circumstances, (2) cultivating community, (3) storying temporality, and (4) signifying spatiality.

In Search of My Soul; Filial Piety (Poetry)

Abstract: The author recalls his struggle of being a biracial Filipino/Ukrainian son born before 1945, living in a Chicago, Illinois, public housing project milieu. He comments that the city's West Side public housing was intentional segregation. When Andres moves to Seattle, Washington, in his adolescence, the new social and ethnic environment challenges his becoming. He confronts his mixed-race identity, probes human nature tendencies, describes his action steps to achieve belonging, and accepts his Filipino American biracial identity. Closure is pro vided with a poetic reflection befitting a son.

Cultural Сode Figurative Picture of War in the Poetic Work of Blockade Children Evacuated to the Omsk Region

The subject of research is the poetic creativity of blockade children. The purpose of the work: setting the problem of studying the cultural code of a huge layer of the poetic heritage of children-blockades evacuated to the Omsk region. The methodology of research consists in the use of a problem-semantic approach to the analysis of poetic creativity. The results of the work: significant factors of perception, a system for encoding moral and patriotic meaning poetic images of war and rear through a figurative picture of historical memory, moral and patriotic meaning of images of war and rear. The field of application of the results: the field of patriotic education in extracurricular and extracurricular work of secondary and higher educational institutions. The novelty of the study lies in a new formulation of the problem of poetic reflection and reflection of war in children's and adult poetic perception. New is also the methodology for analyzing impressions and experiences concentrated in the totality of ideas of children-blockade, aimed at identifying moral and patriotic meanings and dichotomy of images of war and rear. An extraordinary methodology of a problem-semantic approach to the analysis of poetic creativity. Conclusions: 1. The figurative picture of the war, created by the children's blockade in adult and children's poetry, expresses the wartime cultural code, which is to strive to protect their homeland, to accomplish a feat in the name of life, in which the moral and patriotic features of genuine heroism are concentrated. 2. At the same time, the cultural code of the figurative picture of the rear and military childhood of blockade children was manifested in a number of noble qualities of Siberian saviors. 3. At the same time, the decoding of the moral and patriotic meaning of the figurative picture of historical memory created by the blockade children includes the transition from figurative signs of memory, a culture of love for the Motherland, enclosed in figurative clichés to symbols of struggle, images of selflessness, archetypes of heroism, exploits to universal human values, expressed in identical poetic means.

Specificity of Plastic Imagery of Competitive Dance Pasodoble

The purpose of the article is to reveal the specificity of the plastic imagery of the Pasodoble competition dance. Research methodology. The historical method was applied, which contributed to the study of the origin and development of Pasodoble; the typological method thanks to which the peculiarities of its formation as a competitive ballroom dance were revealed; the method of artistic-stylistic and art-historical analysis, with the aim of identifying characteristic stylistic features, features of performance technique and specifics of Pasodoble's plastic imagery; method of theoretical analysis and generalisation. Scientific novelty. The plastic imagery of the Pasodoble competitive ballroom dance is studied; the technique of its implementation is characterised; the history of the origin of the dance is considered; The peculiarities of the theatricalisation of Pasodoble's choreography as one of the ten dances of the international competition programme have been revealed. Conclusions. The dramatic Latin American dance, which originated in Spain, has become one of the most popular ballroom dances in the world over the last hundred years. The specific combination of dance elements and figures in the composition by French dance teachers in the 1920s create a unique Pasodoble choreography. In the 1940s, it was codified as one of the dances in the Latin American International Style programme. Pasodoble is characterised by strong, bold movements, and the use of dramatic poses in the process of telling the story of the bullfight. Due to its theatricality and unique music, the Pasodoble is commonly performed at ballroom dance competitions and used in stage ballroom choreography. Pasadoble dance and music are steeped in ritual tradition, with a high sense of drama and power. The specific attire of the dancers, the feel and atmosphere of the dance refer to Flamenco – these dances have a strong connection and symbolic origin in Spanish history and culture. The aesthetic expressiveness of Pasodoble is created by plasticity, a musical-plastic image, which embodies the combination of the inner potential of the dancing couple and the mastery of their bodily expressiveness. Specific theatricalisation by means of choreographic expressiveness is manifested in the Pasodoble competition ballroom dance in many ways. The creation of choreography oriented and theatrical interpretation is connected with solving a number of artistic tasks. The complex of expressive means used by dancers helps to clearly outline the meaningful line of the dance. The imagery of the Pasodoble competition ballroom dance choreography is characterised by its own poetic reflection of the bullfight, taking into account the current codification of steps and figures of the Latin American programme of the international style. The plastic image represents socio-cultural aspects, current social symbols, and meanings in the dance.
 Keywords: Pasodoble, competitive dance, plastic, artistic imagery, theatricalisation.

A Future Horizon for Restitution in a Film on the Argentinian Puna: Rubén Guzmán’s The Noise of Time

This article offers a detailed discussion of the film The Noise of Time by Rubén Guzmán (Argentina, 2021). The essay film is a poetic reflection on the morally questionable excavations and anthropological research by the early 20th-century Swedish-Argentine archaeologist-anthropologist Eric Boman (1867–1924), in the northwestern Argentinian high Andes (Puna). In this film Boman has to return as a ghost to the Puna to bury Carpanchay, his former indigenous guide, also now a ghost, in order to redeem for his bad deeds as an archaeologist-anthropologist in real life. This article explores the historical background and, extending on the film’s metaphysical message, makes an explicit case for potential restitution (of artifacts from Boman’s excavations that are now held in various museums in Argentina and Europe) in the context of the recent restitution debate.

"Powerful Strangers": A Reflection on Spirituality and the Chaplain-Doctor Partnership.

In this piece, Rachel Rim (Chaplain, MDiv) offers a poetic reflection on the nature of spirituality and the unique partnership between chaplains and doctors in the healthcare system, and particularly within the realm of palliative care. This piece was shared with a cohort of palliative and geriatric fellows and chaplain residents at the first Palliative Care Fellows Circle session in December 2022 at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Public art tourism: Atmospheric stories in city margins

Cities play a pivotal role in progressing cultural tourism, embracing everyday life, where particular cityscapes afford a diversity of cultural practices. The ethnographic storying of two city public artworks presents a backcloth of historical, cultural and religio-political outlooks. Public art and idiosyncratic atmospherics provide conflicting narratives of how pubic art attends wider religion-tourism concerns. Both public artworks observe ‘together-apart’ imaginings of a past-present legacy. This study traces their effect, through researcher short vignettes, visual culture and poetic reflection. This study contributes to the religion-tourism nexus, drawing on political, cultural, religious and social perspectives, which underpin these urban tourism sites. Public art has to make sense, have cultural competence and resonate with citizens.

Being “Off Course” in The Small House at Allington: Expectations, Realities and What Trollope Wants the Reader to Know About Love, the Novel and Modern Life

ABSTRACT This essay explores the many “off course” occurrences in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864). Whether these courses relate to geography, romance, morality, heroism, genre or the trajectories of modernity, Trollope’s novel persistently deviates from norms and expectations; not only with regard to reality but also in terms of how these conventions work as novelistic constructions. The essay reads Lily's failed romance with Crosbie, Bell’s rejection of societal expectations concerning her path, as well as Crosbie’s and Eames’s diverging motivations and avenues towards success to show that Trollope’s favoured expression “as a matter of course” here becomes a matter of being, or turning, “off course”. I relate these thematic deviations to Trollope’s poetic reflections on the novel. The essay suggests that Trollope, in fact, sees the novel’s harmony, honesty and “oneness” in a departure from expected ethics, character and plot patterns: only in these deviations can novelistic newness emerge and complex (modern) matters be discussed. Trollope thus fosters, in this novel, an awareness of how novelistic “truth” lies not in what readers—as people and consumers of fiction—expect but, rather, in what the collision between fantasy and reality reveals to them, in actual and representational terms.

Care Living

My inquiries into the poetics of Jamaican women’s aliveness enter through the space of care ethics and the dimensions of my own poetry. In my work, I syncretize Caribbean feminist praxis, resistance, creativity, collective catharsis, spirituality, imagination, community, friendships, kinships, and knowledge. In this crucible of being, care ethics and aliveness are not simply experienced as forms of decolonial resistance. Nor are they reduced to a mere disruption of intersecting oppressions. Rather, they are resources, continuously connected within and around each of us, forming the basis of our flesh, blood, spirits, and dreams. While aliveness and care ethics challenge inter alia, our most chaotic, tense, and violent experiences, they also go beyond these forces to become deep expressions, of what I call, the poetics of Jamaican women’s existence, healing, and release. To develop this framework, I draw on Kevin Quashie’s (2021) exploration of “Black aliveness” (p. 1), to argue (in poetic form) that Jamaican women’s aliveness is not simply the antithesis to death, but that which can address vital questions about the ethos of Caribbean feminist theory and praxis. As Quashie explains, Black aliveness is “the invocation of a black world [and] is the operating assumption of black texts, a world where blackness exists in the tussle of being, in reverie and terribleness, in exception and in ordinariness. This black world is not one where the racial logics and harming predilections of antiblackness are inverted but one where blackness is totality, where every human question and possibility is of people who are black…. Since blackness cannot exist fully, humanly, in the world, we will imagine a world where the condition of being alive is of us. In a black world, the case of our lives is aliveness; not death, not even death’s vitality, but aliveness” (p. 1-2 &12). Guided by the above statement, I articulate this concept in the context of Jamaican women’s lives, illustrating how, through a poetic reflection on care ethics and Jamaican women’s aliveness we can “imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary,” (p. 1). I argue that we can experience this through the, as Quashie puts it, “quality of aliveness notable in the worldmaking aesthetics of poems…in how those poems…can be read for what they tell us about our being: about how we are and about how we can be” (p. 2). The questions guiding my poetic inquiry are as follows: 1) What is the role of care ethics in the context of Jamaican women’s multiple acts of living? 2) How can the concept of “care” support and/or challenge our efforts to analyze the role of religion, ancestry, motherhood, land, and food in Jamaican women’s lives? 3) What are the possibilities of studying this association between care ethics and aliveness through poetry?

A Jamaican Response to the Call to Act Together

AbstractThis article is an exploration of following the way of Jesus regarding apologies and restitution for slavery. Three stories of good practice from the North American Jesuits, the United Reformed Church, and the Church of England are contrasted with stories of the abuse of children from First Nations people in Canada, poor families in Ireland, and the transportation of allegedly indigent children from Britain to Australia. These accounts are used to examine critically how far the church is following the call of Jesus to care for the vulnerable and identify with the marginalized in interactions with those sexually abused in churches, in engagement with sex workers, and the treatment of the LGBTQ+ community. A poetic reflection from the voice of the man who lived outside his community of the Gadarenes concludes the article.

Desiring Queer Motherhood and Mothering Ourselves

ABSTRACT This essay is an open-ended, poetic reflection connecting findings from my ethnographic research on same-sex desiring women in southern Ghana with my own journey of becoming a queer mother in Switzerland. It suggests that desires for motherhood cannot be reduced to the wish for procreating or tapping into the power of extending our heteronormative lineages, but reflect feminist desires for loving, growing and connecting across generational divides. It asks to what extent mothering a child and sugar-mothering a younger woman lover can be thought (and lived) alongside each other while connecting us to our own mothers. By documenting the challenges of finding ways into queer motherhood, it hopes to encourage collective ways of “doing” families beyond marriage and childbirth.

УТОПИЯ СОВЕРШЕННОГО ЯЗЫКА: ЛИНГВОФИЛОСОФИЯ ХУГО БАЛЛЯ

Philosophical and poetic reflection on the role of language in the era of modernism are characterized by an intense search for a new perfect language. The result of this search is a discussion about the expressive possibilities of poetic language and attempts to create new forms of poetry. The subject of the research is Hugo Ball’s theoretical views on the problem of language. One of the founders of the Dada movement, Ball creates sound poems, which should be analyzed as a reflection of the avant-garde concept of abandoning the outdated rules of ordinary language. They represent an absolute deconstruction of language, but its significance lies in an attempt for an innovative understanding of poetic creativity and its reception, which is in the spirit of the time. Ball’s reflections on poetic language are viewed in the context of the romantic philosophy of language, modern philosophy, and also in the context of philosophical thought of the beginning of the 20th century. At the heart of the radical literary experiments of the Dadaists (as well as those of the Russian and Italian Futurists) is the idea that the existing conventional natural languages are unsuitable for poetry. Hugo Ball rethinks the concept of the language norm and the principles of poetic communication between the creator of a new formation and his listener. Doubt, concerning the success of such communication, leads Ball to comment on his own hermetic texts using conventional language. The article formulates the concept of a perfect language in the understanding of Hugo Ball. The main features of Ball’s new poetic language are irrationality, magical nature and fundamentally different sound. “Poems without words” are proposed to be interpreted as metaphors which point to the idea of a perfect language behind them.

Séculaires par Olivier Barbarant

Reviewed by: Séculaires par Olivier Barbarant Khadija Khalifé and Deborah Gaensbauer Barbarant, Olivier. Séculaires. Gallimard, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-298386-3. Pp. 128. In his latest autobiographical collection, composed in Barbarant's characteristic supple blend of diverse forms of poetry and sonorous prose pieces, the poet, born in 1966, meditates at a mid-point in his life on both intimate and broadly historical memories and experiences spanning forty years. Crucially for Barbarant, they bridge a change of centuries and altered personal perspectives, hence the title conjuring a significant sweep of time. "Jadis j'étais l'été/À présent je le vois" (38). The first section, essentially an affective balance sheet, continues in the lyrical and sensual vein of his Un grand instant (prix Apollinaire 2019). Barbarant probes in "ma mémoire grenier en désordre" childhood vignettes blended by time into dream-memory hybrids, conjurations of intimate moments with lovers, and confrontations with aging (20). Engagingly, too, he chronicles the relationship to words, sounds and rhythms that has impelled him to "faire entendre quelque chose de sa perception de son émotion, dans le corps respiratoire du langage" (49). His melancholic meditations become more searingly political in the second section, which he opens by declaring: "[i]l n'y a plus de paille dans l'étable espérance" (55). An extensive segment entitled "Complainte à la charnière des temps" limns consequential events for each year from 1981 through 2020. The strongest pieces, corroborating his conviction that "[c]'est à l'intérieur que la vérité creuse son sillon," capture his acute sense of light and color in evocations of intimate experiences that bear historical weight (95). The prose elegy on the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, for example, conjures student memories of emerging from the train "directement sous son soleil/Elle était maternelle volumineuse et couleur de blé tendre," to render the momentous reverberations of the cultural loss with poignant simplicity (18). "C'était comme si chaque pierre était un sable cristallisé/un morceau du pays mêlé à l'intime mémoire" (95). As the calendar moves toward the millennium, the poetic reflections increasingly focus on social injustice: "[d]es violences du temps naissent celles des êtres/Brillent dans les regards l'éclat d'affreux couteaux" (99). Séculaires advances toward a grim finale with "Fils de feu," ten poems concerning a global rash of self-immolations. Barbarant concludes, nonetheless, by juxtaposing darkness with a positive entreaty. "Que vaut un siècle dont les fils/souffrent tant qu'ils se font bûcher?" (125). This despairing query in the final poem, "Envoi," is followed by a plea that alters the strictly personal context of his earlier paeans to corporeal intimacy: "[e]nfants, brûlez/de colère/et [End Page 217] de désir, mais laissez/l'ardeur à l'âme, à la langue,/et que d'étreinte seule/flambent vos paumes nues" (125). "Envoi" connects to previous affirmations of life in the collection but responds to concrete socio-political violence by tempering the ferocity of an earlier exhortation: "cri ou couteau mais que/ la vie/ déborde" (20). A disciple of Louis Aragon, Barbarant fears neither emotions nor the mundane: "[i]l sut que frémir ne serait jamais ridicule" (45). Although a few poems in Séculaires come across as palely sentimental and nostalgic, his intertwining of personal intimacy, public history, and combat against the "grésil des écrans" creates overall a compelling work (105). [End Page 218] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Making meanings out of me: Reading researchers’ and participants’ bodies through poetry

This article offers autoethnographic reflections on the experience of qualitative research that account for the embodied subjectivity of interviewing as a research practice and the embodied practice of research outside of a traditional ‘field’. The article reflects on the ways in which the author was underprepared for the shifting power relations and shared vulnerabilities within research interactions to be experienced in an embodied way. This article then reflects on the process of experiencing research in the body during the writing-up process. The article draws on data collection experiences and fieldwork notes from a research project on trans and intersex activist relationships undertaken by a trans researcher with a history of LGBTI+ and trans activism. Furthermore, this research project was undertaken by a disabled scholar who had to negotiate a complex web of access needs and decisions over in/visibilising disabilities in order to complete the research. This early career scholar experienced a lack of research methods teaching and training on the complexities of in-community/insider research for those who may be members of communities made vulnerable by society and a lack of training on the expectations of embodied fieldwork practice. This article does not offer teaching or support suggestions to fill this gap although those are illustrated in detail by Pearce’s (2020) ‘methodology for the marginalised’. Instead, the article invites early career scholars, and those teaching research methods, to imagine research and imagine fieldwork with embodied researchers in mind. The article uses poetry to take readers on a journey of the embodied research of one trans and disabled scholar in the hopes it may speak to other scholars with a range of diverse identities and experiences who may be made vulnerable by society and those who have the privilege of teaching them. The article uses poetry as a means to express these embodied reflections drawing on Richardson’s (1999, 2002) creative analytic practice of ethnographic poetry and Anderson’s (2001) embodied writing. The poetic reflections are offered as an interruption to the body of the text with an embodied poetry to touch the reader in a different way. Although these poems deliberately interrupt the body of the text, they can be read in their locations as reflections on their closest sections or a collection of poetic reflections after reading the article.

Be/longing: forever Par/des(i)

In the western academy, scholarly research is pre-dominantly informed by Euro-western philosophical understandings which in turn influence methodologies, and methods used. Assumptions made that researchers categorized as the Other apply similar paradigmatic lenses create tensions for these researchers whose ways of being, doing and viewing the world diverge from the mainstream. Using narrative and poetic reflections, a Par/des(i) approach to qualitative inquiry provides an onto-epistomological lens for those existing in liminal spaces whose experiences have been influenced by geographical, spiritual, histo-political, emotional, familial, and spiritual disruptions and dislocations.