Presence Of Poetry Research Articles

The Corpus of Contemporary Czech Poetry: A database for research on contemporary poetic language across media

Abstract Our article reports on the emerging Corpus of Contemporary Czech Poetry and the possibilities for its use. We describe the genesis of the idea of creating a specific corpus that combines the principles of synchronicity and genre instead of relying on the presence of poetry in the general corpus of contemporary Czech. We also characterize the structure of our corpus, which is designed to cover both of the basic media areas in which contemporary poetry is published and distributed: either in books or through open publishing platforms on the Internet (literary forums). We additionally describe the functionalities of the tools for mining the corpus data, which are designed to easily serve comparative analyses across media (print/web). We suggest how useful quantitative data analysis can be in the first phase of language-oriented literary research; or rather we point out the necessity of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. Only the researcher’s interpretative proficiency can decide on the boundaries of the field under study and the meaning of the elements present in it. In text-centred analyses, language corpora should start to play a similar role as other tools of scientific infrastructure, such as bibliographic databases.

¿Malos tiempos para la lírica? Poesía y propaganda en la revista Destino durante la Guerra Civil

El propósito de este artículo consiste en analizar la presencia del género poético en la revista Destino, creada en Burgos durante la Guerra Civil por un grupo de catalanes que habían escapado de la Barcelona republicana. Muchos de estos textos son inéditos y ofrecen un corpus poco conocido de la propaganda política en la España «nacional». Nuestro trabajo quiere responder a la pregunta de si los artículos y poemas publicados en el semanario describen semejanzas o diferencias respecto del panorama general, y de si contienen poéticas que se proyectarían durante los años cuarenta.

Wektor poetycki w biografiach artystów: Olga Boznańska, Wojciech Weiss, Jerzy Tchórzewski

Starting from the contemporary trends in biography and referring to findings in the field of anthropology of writing and new materialism, the author analyzes poetic forms created in painting studios. She considers the works of O. Boznańska, W. Weiss and T. Tchórzewski as poetic manifestations of the literary practice of everyday life, a type of poeticised documents. The presence of poetry in artists’ lives is multi-faceted: loose pages preserved in a scrapbook, entries in a journal and autonomous works printed in the press, hence their role in creative biography is different. The common ground is a syncretic perception of creativity; the preserved texts co-create a kind of artistic site where the boundaries between the publication, the exhibition and the project performance blur, requiring special editing operations.

<em>Research Notes:</em> Understanding the Physical Poetry of a Parallel American Dream

Research Notes: Understanding the Physical Poetry of a Parallel American Dream Travis McDonald (bio) Anne Spencer (1882–1975) was an African Ameri can high school librarian in Lynchburg, Virginia, who became nationally known, if not by her own choosing, as a poet of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. The 1903 house Anne built with her husband Edward is now a National Register property and Virginia Landmark house museum, known principally for its personal and eclectic interior and flower garden, which evolved over a sixty-two-year period. This essay considers how to interpret this remarkable yet little-known historic site, which represents an artistic and architectural creation that is inextricably based on, and exhibits, the ephemeral characteristics of flowers and poetry. Fieldwork at the Anne and Edward Spencer house prompts questions about how and why we record what we record. The site defies typical interpretations, and even the wide-net approaches found in VAF’s Invitation to Vernacular Architecture.1 In this case many of the fields through which architectural history is now studied overlap: ethnicity, gender, class, race, sociology, feminism, and economics. A Venn diagram of intersecting subjects at this site would thicken with the major themes of architecture, art, interior decorating, decorative arts, craftsmanship, material culture, gardening, and poetry. The diversity of new fields and the range of subjects within those fields have led to a broader but more fragmented view of architectural history. Dell Upton characterized architecture as “the art of social story-telling, a means for shaping American society and culture.”2 That is surely the more public macro lens though which to see the Spencer site. Upton also acknowledged that in some cases architecture was “a vehicle of individual aesthetic expression.”3 This is the more challenging and private micro lens through which to see Anne Spencer’s artistic creation. Particularly challenging to confront is how the ephemeral and ever-changing essence of Anne Spencer’s garden found expression both in her poetry and in her interior decorations and furnishings (Figure 1). Anne managed to describe the colors, smells, and textures of flowers in words, writing, “Earth, I thank you / for the pleasure of your language.”4 She effectively used poetry to capture the nuances of nature, but describing the poetry of colors, patterns, and textures of an interior setting, inspired by the same ephemeral beauty of nature, challenges our typical interpretive conventions. Literary and artistic shrines can evoke the autobiographical nature of a writer’s or artist’s home and garden, yet few have the symbiotic spirit and presence of poetry, flowers, art, and architecture that define the Spencer house and garden. While Anne Spencer’s poetry and gardening have been studied to an extent, the house itself had been minimally documented before I took on what I thought would be the modest task of recording the interior and advising on restoration issues.5 The authenticity of the house rests on the fortunate circumstance that it was left virtually intact as a museum when Anne Spencer died in 1975. In Half My World: The Garden of Anne Spencer, Rebecca Frischkorn and Reuben Rainey describe Anne Spencer’s garden and poetry as “subtle, original, richly nuanced, and carefully crafted.” I soon began to realize that this was equally true [End Page 95] for the architecture, decoration, and furnishings of her house.6 This site and story are even more unusual and significant for the way all these familiar themes are overlain by the filters of social, cultural, educational, political, and racial contexts of an African American family’s pursuit of happiness in a small traditional Southern city in the early twentieth century. The liberating equality and dignity achieved through this family’s accomplishments was private and public, local and national, unique and popular. Understanding this site as an autobiographical domestic creation poses one set of fieldwork questions. Another is how the site fits into a larger social, cultural, and architectural landscape, particularly in terms of race. In other words, how does it reflect the many studies and interpretations of the iconic single-family house in America? Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Anne Bannister Spencer in a 1901 wedding photograph. Courtesy...

The Presence of Poetry, the Poetry of Presence

The composition and performance of Arabic Sufi poetry is the most characteristic artistic tradition of West African Sufi communities, and yet this tradition has yet to receive the scholarly attention it deserves. In this article, I sketch an outline of a theory of Sufi poetics, and then apply this theory to interpret a performance of a popular Arabic poem of the Senegalese Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975), founder of the most popular branch of the Tijāniyya in West Africa.

Authorial Presence in Poetry: Some Cognitive Reappraisals

Authorial Presence in Poetry: Some Cognitive Reappraisals

DIMENSI SUFISTIK DALAM PUISI “TAPI” KARYA SUTARDJI CALZOUM BACHRI

Literary work which inflames a feeling of divine love and the prophetic spirit that led to the transcendental intensity enliven the Indonesian literary treasures. In this regard, it is worth to note the exiistence of Sutardji as a sufi poet. Many critics and observers who see Sutardji as Indonesian poet who has an intensity appreciation of divinity (monotheism) and high religiosity. It is proven by the presence of poetry O, AMUK, and AX that sensationaized Indonesia poetry. The research method that is used in this research is descriptive qualitative method.The data collection was done by using library technique and record, while data analysis was performed by using the method of semiotic reading model which consists of three stages of analysis, namely; syntax, semantic, and pragmatic. Poetry But, in this case, is loaded with ideas of Sufism Wahdatul Wujud, which shows the proverbial human existence with the existence of God, the proverbial human dimension and the divine dimension, merging creature with the Creator, with the result that there are two dimensions of Sufism, the transcendent dimension and immanent dimension.

Libros de poesía en bibliotecas del Siglo de Oro (1600-1650)

This study analyses the book inventories found in 65 Spanish private libraries between 1600 and 1650, from different social classes. After mentioning the problems posed by the sources of information themselves and comparing the presence of poetry versus other literary genres, we have analysed the proportion of poetry books found in the studied libraries, in order to compare it with the presence of other type of books, taking into account the difference of social classes. It is essential to analyse which authors and works are found in these libraries to reach any conclusion about the «literary excellence canon» in that century, as well as the differences with the literary canon according to the history of literature and the meaning of the presence/absence of some specific poets, etc.

The Presence of Poetry: Response

journey to British Columbia for this year's NAVSA Conference was a relatively short hop in the general scheme of things, but I boarded the plane at Sacramento carrying the same load of guilt. Air travel for both work and leisure now requires the kind of embarrassed excuse that lighting up a cigarette in company used, for a while, to elicit: I know it's a dirty habit, and it's not good for me or you or anyone else, but I can't seem to stop myself from doing it just yet. In our current climate (literally and otherwise), I keep wondering whether the academic conference is doomed. It is, of course, dangerous to focus our reformist eyes solely upon flying: the necessary path toward sustainable living has to be built from billions of changes to daily behaviors and longer-term choices by individuals, businesses, and nations alike. Nevertheless, air travel looms large both as a devastating source of pollution and as an especially resonant symbol of the global arrogance of the privileged. We do not need to re-read David Lodge's Small World to remind ourselves that the coming together of academics under the aegis of intellectual exchange has always been a potentially self-indulgent affair, but the deleterious effects of one of our favorite professional activities now seem on a different scale altogether. Is it possible to justify the culture of the conference in this day and age? I do not write these introductory words to prepare the ground for a redemptive, or an exculpatory, narrative in the remainder of my pages here: on the contrary, this is obviously an issue that we need to keep, or start, thinking about, both individually and communally, in order to make significant changes to our habitual practices. Rather I offer the remarks as prelude to, and explanation for, an opening focus upon the following question: under what circumstances is the physical presence of a group of academics crucially constitutive of new and important ideas? Are there some kinds of understanding that cannot occur easily, or at all, through the reading of each other's words in print or on

The Prophetic Gaze of Orpheus: Charting New Lands in Small Poetry Journals

When Orpheus and his Eurydice walked up from the underworld, they thought of the light up there, how beautiful it was, how much they longed for, needed it; but even so, they'd been a long time in the dark, too long. They'd learned it needed them. —"The Look Back," William Bronk The gaze of literary history always retraces and rereads what has come before as if the comprehension of the present is contingent upon a backward glance and inventory of what has been. While the literary historian may seek to sanctify a text by situating it within a historical context or tradition, the act is more akin to Orpheus' look back toward Eurydice that, despite his desire to free her, sealed her fate in the underworld. That is, the desire to validate a text within a literary historical continuum and thereby preserve a writer's place within the canon can lead to ascribing certain categorical imperatives and characteristics that freeze and crystallize a text as representative of a "movement," such as high modernism or concrete poetry. Most anthologies, with their project of representing and sanctifying literary history, circumscribe the place of a work within certain boundaries. A journal, on the other hand, is part of a more fluid, evolving continuum that is engaged in the ebb and flow of the now: in its most ideal form, a journal is Orpheus at the mouth of the cave before he turns, looking forward with the past trailing behind. During the so-called "anthology wars" of the early 1960s, when Donald Allen's New American Poetry challenged New Poets of England and America, edited by Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, as the definitive representation of the force of (then) contemporary poetry, [End Page 105] journals were relegated to a marginal status within the debate over canon formations. If anything, the journal was regarded as merely a means of validating the table of contents of the anthology. Yet the conception of the journal as less significant than the anthology ignores the role of the journal in the lifeforce and the presence of poetry. As Jean-Luc Nancy explains, "Presence is what is born, and does not cease being born. Of it and to it there is birth, and only birth." 1 The journal, and not the anthology, assumes a vital role in the eternal birth of poetry, and in this regard the place of the journal as secondary to the anthology in the shaping of the continuum of the "history" of poetry needs to be drastically reconsidered. As a way of demonstrating the vitality of the small journal within the larger body of published and canonized poetry, this essay focuses upon Maps, the journal that John Taggart edited from 1966 to 1974, as a means of interrogating American poetry as rendered by anthologies and journals. In doing so, it addresses, in its philosophical stance, how a journal, unlike an anthology, can avoid subjecting poetry to the fate of Eurydice. Using Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as a critical springboard, the brief introduction to the first issue of Maps speaks of "the need for making new maps of man's consciousness now, and of the past as seen from that now." 2 As opposed to using the past to valorize the present, Maps suggests that the "now" supercedes the past by bringing that past into relief. Within the pages of Maps, the past is not used as a means of validating the present moment, but rather, as the introduction explains, as one of the voices of the evolving heteroglossic poetic moment: The maps would be of those regions just discovered, somewhat known, but not to the extent of the older areas or of the most recent projections. MAPS, then, takes its title and purpose from Kant's observation. These poems are not on...

Vladimir Nabokov’s Poetry in Russian Émigré Criticism: A Partial Survey

Vladimir Nabokov began his illustrious literary career as a Russian poet. This simple comment bears stating if for no other reason than to draw attention to an aspect of Nabokov's writing which is often neglected. The author of many unpublished poems and a considerable number of published ones in several volumes which span his career, Nabokov retained a life-long interest in poetry. Indeed, Nabokov's oeuvre is symmetrically and suggestively contained within the matching bookends of two volumes of poetry-his first publication of 1916 and his final, posthumously published work of 1979-both entitled simply Stikhi. Despite the prominent presence of poetry in his oeuvre, criticism has accorded Nabokov's poetry far less attention than his prose. Possible reasons for this relative neglect are close at hand. Foremost amongst these must be Nabokov's brilliance as a writer of prose. Whatever the relative merits of his poetry-and as we shall see below, judging the aesthetic quality of his poetry is not an unproblematic undertaking-the startling quality of his prose contributes to the diminishing of his achievements in other artistic realms. Relatedly, Nabokov's poetry suffers obscurity in part as a result of historical and linguistic circumstance. Published in Russian and often in emigre journals with limited circulation, much of Nabokov's poetry bore the same undeserved fate which afflicted much of emigre Russia's astounding artistic output between the wars. In transferring the bulk of his artistic activities to English and prose, Nabokov began the process of winning a larger audience for his art. In making this move, however, he seemed to leave behind the language and genre which helped to form his art and which introduced him to his first extended readership. It is to this art form and audience that I would like to return in the following paper. With this study, I intend to make a limited contribution to the larger topic of a much needed critical assessment of the place of poetry in Nabokov's oeuvre. Here I wish to undertake a partial examination of the response to Nabokov the poet in emigre criticism from the early 1920s, when Nabokov first began to appear as a regularly published poet, until 1956 and the appearance of Gleb Struve's Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (Russian Literature in Exile).2 My reasons for concluding this survey in 1956 are essentially twofold. By 1956, Nabokov was a well established English language prose writer, who no longer sought an extended audience for the occasional Russian poems he continued to write. Secondly, Struve's seminal account of emigre Russian literature offers a synthesising interpretation of this particular cultural phenomenon which, in its very conclusiveness, seems to suggest a historical point of closure. With regard to an appraisal of Nabokov's role and value as a poet, Stuve's sensitive assessment also had something of a finalising, and in this sense restricting, function. In the final analysis, Struve's influential interpretation judged Nabokov to be a prose writer who wrote poetry until he switched to the medium better suited to his skills. Rather than placing Nabokov's efforts in prose and poetry on a continuum of related abilities, the two realms were conceived of as separate and even conflicting in his art. Already in 1956, Struve looked back on Nabokov's poetic production as if on a closed chapter in Nabokov's writing. Since then, critical reception of Nabokov's poetry has been effectively entombed in the perception of it as the immature expression of his artistic ability, cut off by language and artistic mode from the remainder of his oeuvre. As much by accident as design, this interpretation, while undoubtedly not intended to be restrictive, has remained the dominant approach to Nabokov the poet and has yet to be systematically examined. As the totality of his oeuvre makes clear, however, Nabokov retained a life-long interest in poetry. His numerous fictional and non-fictional works continually return, in the most diverse ways, to poetry. …