Prose Poem Research Articles

“It always Takes a Long Time/to Decipher Where You Are”: Uncanny Spaces and Troubled Times in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry

The focus is on Atwood’s most recent poetry collections; Morning in the Burned House (1995) and The Door (2007), in addition to the prose poems volume The Tent (2006). They have in common, albeit with a different emphasis, a preoccupation with mortality and with the writing of poetry itself. They also share a special concern for space. This reading considers space and landscape to function as metonyms. Space here is far from being passive; instead it is constantly in the process of being constructed. The disorientation that the poetic personae experience in these texts follows a labyrinthine pattern where heterogeneity and multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality prevail. In this perspective, the identity of a place becomes open and provisional, including that of a place called home.

A Genealogy of the Prose Poem

This article looks at aspects of the genealogy of the prose poem. It does so by tracing correspondences, across a range of texts, in the ways by which characters and writers record themselves ‘profoundly sensible’ of an ‘awful parenthesis that had suspended them’, as De Quincey put it, in a place and in a moment of time. The experience of insulation, sequestration, and deep recesses, and then the looping together of ideas of suspension, trance, and syncope are witnessed at work in texts by Dickens, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Henry Mayhew, and Tim Dee, with patterns of influence or similarity discerned therein that are all suggestive of the prose poem's dynamics of containment and extension. Reference is made to representations of this involving both city and field, and to the poetic styles, including parallelism, that work to evoke encroaching and receding horizons.

You make me happy

This prose poem arose toward the end of a creative writing workshop offered at the annual conference of the American Association of Suicidology, when a group of 15 suicide loss survivors, myself am...

Playful seriousness and serious play: poetry as creative practice in the International Prose Poetry Project

The International Poetry Studies Institute’s (IPSI) prose poetry project was started almost accidentally in late 2014. Since then it has become a site of highly productive creative play. At the time of writing, the prose poetry project consists of 21 members who have collectively written more than 1,500 prose poems. We will argue that it is an exemplary site for creative practice because it enables its members to generate new prose poetry enjoyably while asking very little of them except the production and sharing of their creative work. By identifying key elements of play that help stimulate creative practice in the prose poetry project—including the elements of sanctuary and ambiguity, and the interactions among these—we aim to demonstrate the significance of play for producing creative encounters with the world.

The 1866 New York City cholera epidemic through popular periodicals and theories of contagion

In 1866 cholera struck New York City for the third time in the nineteenth century; previous epidemics occurred in 1832 and 1849. With a population of over 1.1 million, one fourth of whom were immigrants, the city was starkly divided between New York City’s traditional elite class and predominantly Irish immigrants and African Americans living in the city’s most neglected quarters, which became the main sites for contagion. In this essay, I discuss the periodical coverage of the epidemic in multiple “literary” genres that were part of the news cycle of the time, a topic that has been relatively unexplored. Through news columns, prose, and narrative poems, some of the city’s leading newspapers and story papers circulated the discourse of popular science. These periodicals featured cross-genre works that merged traditional wind poetry with miasma theory, generating coverage that was both entertaining and informative.

The Green Bear

The Green Bear Stephanie Rauschenbusch (bio) The Welcome David Joel Friedman University of Illinois Presswww.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog 96Pages; Print, $15.95 Soldier Quick with Rain David Joel Friedman Augury Books www.augurybooks.com/books-orders 72Pages; Print, $12.00 Of David Joel Friedman’s four books, two are long, two are short. One of the short chapbooks, Seven (2011), is tiny. From The Welcome (2006) through Soldier Quick with Rain (2013) there is a continuity of purpose and practice that is remarkable. Each book contains prose poems and only prose poems that nonetheless read quite clearly as poetic. They are poetic, because they contain thousands of unusual words, thus fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s edict that the poet keep the words of English speech alive and vivid. They are poetic, because their rhetoric is as emphatic and organizing a principle as Wallace Stevens’s in Harmonium (1923). There is poetry even behind the rhetoric and vocabulary—a sort of quicksilver feeling. Many of Friedman’s prose poems are stories about a Green Bear. He is a brilliant disguise for a shy author who can recount his triumphs, failures and muddlings-through without the boastful “I” or “You” so prevalent in modern American poetry. The contemporary poet is often addressing herself as a double—“You”—in a way that almost slaps the reader in the face. “NOT you,” she means, “I’M you. This is all about ME.” Friedman’s Green Bear is a most endearing character, at times a sort of Babar of gentility, but most often a stalwart hero of adventure—of wars, ocean voyages, trips to the moon, explorations and encounters of all sorts. Most of the technical words from All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Two Years Before The Mast (1840) turn up here—nautical terms, military terms, terms of archaic weaponry, Shakespearean diction, along with colloquial words like “i-chat,” wonderfully mixed. Fragments of conversations appear and disappear. There is a whole prose poem to prove that all the world is coffee (one pictures the narrator leaving his Grove Street apartment and hitting each coffee bar in the Village until he is in a state of caffeinated ecstasy.) In The Welcome, chosen in 2004 for the National Poetry Series by Stephen Dunn, we find “A Brace of Firearms” which shows us one of Friedman’s verbal games, an exercise in parallel expressions for a group of individuals—“a brace of pistols”, “a pride of lions,” “a pack of wolves,” “a nest of vipers.” Of the Green Bear, he writes: “Since there was only one of him, he deserved a brace of pistols to fight a pride of lions.” “Typewriter” is a complete tour de force of typewriter lingo: I am a typewriter. Practically an antique. Before I pass into oblivion, let me assert myself; so you may come to honor in passing the machine that has been a good companion to writers. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their typewriters. In my sculpted black steel body I house as zany a bunch of characters as you might want to meet, from A to Z; plus enough signs, symbols and numbers to read the future without animal entrails. I get good character references (this being one of them) despite the fact that I am occasionally shiftless. Upper or lower, I’m a case in point. If you keep tabs on me, you’ll find that I’m usually all keyed up. Nevertheless I travel in style, by carriage to the margins of existence. Feed me the old papyrus; I will produce literature (or camp or trash or tractate). Carbon paper, with whom I always had an uneasy relationship, has gone the way of the quill pen. Keep my platen clean, and I’ll always be on a roll. Stop by for a drink at my Space Bar (far out); try an ink cocktail, otherwise known as a Typewriter Mary. Scotch whiskey will clean my keys and your whistle. Rubbing alcohol makes a good (but lethal) chaser and will also clean your keys. Apply the proper dose of White-Out...

Literature for Nonhumans by Gabriel Gudding

Reviewed by: Literature for Nonhumans by Gabriel Gudding Bayard Godsave (bio) Gabriel Gudding. Literature for Nonhumans. Ahsahta Press, 2015. “There can be no pastoral as long as there is a slaughterhouse.” So reads the epigraph to Gabriel Gudding’s collection of prose poems, Literature for Nonhumans, though “prose poems” may not be totally accurate here. Speaking variously the language of manifesto, poststructural critique, taxonomy, and lyric essay, the pieces in this collection defy simple genre distinction—and maybe that’s what makes them prose poems after all. Whatever you call them, though, they become spaces where Gudding is able to write towards a revolutionary poetics, crafting poetry that is grounded in the ethical, an ecocentric writing that seeks to decenter human experience, to challenge the very idea that human should be the lens through which we view the world in the first place. The pastoral has always been an ideological construct, and like any ideological construct it is shot through with blindspots. According to Terry Gifford, in his book-length study Pastoral, an engaged pastoral presents an ambivalent picture of the natural world, one that often tries to cast light on its own ideological blind spots—it recognizes, perhaps, the effect human actions have had on the environment, or acknowledges the complex socio-economic relationships that define the “natural” space the writer is responding to. With his epigraph, and in the poems that follow, Gudding casts a cold light on a major blind spot that, he believes, has for too long marred the work of nature writers and leftist critics alike: animal suffering. Gudding takes as his anti-Arcadia the state of Illinois, whose ecology has in a short time been radically changed by human intervention. Three-quarters of the state was wetlands, he tells us, “prior to European settlement.” Nearly all of that has since been drained to make way for vast stretches of pasture land. “Now excepting a small portion of its 3% of public lands [Illinois] is an open-aired factory that manufactures a stark disavowal of other life.” And it is in this space that the human and “nonhuman animal” collide, as embodied in the repressive apparatus of the slaughterhouse. Gudding presents Illinois as a vast network of exploitation—a place where the land is exploited, where the animals, non-human and human alike, are exploited—and to get at the genesis of this exploitation, often his poems become examinations, and deconstructions of its underlying ideological assumptions. As he says in “What is an Illinois,” “a human community will, without vote, fanfare, struggle, or even consciousness, adopt an immense and even at times disabling set of abstractions, laws, judgments, names, and imagined and temporal frameworks. And they will both feel it real and call it reality.” Later, in that same poem, he locates the root of those assumptions in Christianity, which “posits a temporally unbounded metaphysical haven, exclusive to humans, beyond death, giving believers little reason to tend or maintain a physical world here.” The separation of body and soul—and the bestowing of a soul upon the human body exclusively—causes us to see this world, and the beings in it, as transitory, disposable. “What is an Illinois” opens with an extended quotation from the state’s “Humane Care for Animals Act,” which defines the term “animal” as “every living creature, domestic or wild, but does not include man.” And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? That divide, that notion that somehow we are different, [End Page 33] separate from the world around us. That we are not, ourselves, animals. For Gudding, not only is this notion that human beings are somehow different from other kinds of animals a flawed one, but the idea that animals aren’t somehow deserving of the basic right not to be killed is baffling. Throughout the book we see him shifting from one mode of discourse to another, from pastiche to argumentation to quotation. Often Gudding quotes from husbandry guides and FAQ sheets about the raising of pigs, and, re-contextualized in this space, their matter-of-fact treatment of things like tooth removal and euthanasia is chilling. There is never any attempt, though, to make the...

Взаимодействие заглавия и текста в функционально-семантическом аспекте (на примере стихотворения в прозе «Снег» С. Н. Сергеева-Ценского)

Взаимодействие заглавия и текста в функционально-семантическом аспекте (на примере стихотворения в прозе «Снег» С. Н. Сергеева-Ценского)

Proza. Przyczynek do ars versificandi Marcina Świetlickiego

This paper presents a study on the use of prosodic forms in Marcin Świetlicki’s last book Drobna zmiana (A Small Change), which is structured as a kind of set of poetic notations written in prose (prose poems). As a matter of fact, this, as the poet says, “small change” becomes a kind of the poet’s manifesto against the cultural and political deflation of the present social and cultural life; it becomes the very sign of poetry. By using the tools developed within the theory of versification, this paper shows how the versestructures break through the surface of the prosaic syntax, evoke alternative reading strategies and create some additional meanings typical for the poetry written in verse.

Net Needle

so it is compelled to be hypocritical in its denunciation of other [ideologies].” Toward the end of Vekerdy’s book, one finds two short pieces on education, the first of which is a sympathetic report from his visit to Boston in 2015 where he was invited by “Boskola,” a local Hungarian school, and the second (Dream about a school) describing the ideal school where the children are free to learn and play rather than just swallow chunks of information. Naplók könyve is organized on the same lines: it is both an entertaining and useful read from which we learn a lot about the author and his family as well as about the state of contemporary Hungarian society. George Gömöri London Verse Robert Adamson. Net Needle. Hexham, UK. Bloodaxe Books (Dufour Editions, distr.). 2016. 70 pages. In Net Needle, poet Robert Adamson spans the range of contemporary English prosody with poems that tenderly attest to an endangered environment. The book invites the reader to take these poems as a personal history. The first of four sections features mostly lyric poems. Adamson describes a childhood on the eastern Australian coast where old fishermen on Blue Point wove or mended their nets, where the urban mingled with the wild. This landscape is fifty years lost and sometimes so haunted that it becomes “difficult to move” there. Reflecting on this time and place in the poem “Via Negativa, the Divine Dark,” the speaker claims that he has “forgotten the names of most flora and fauna” and must reconcile himself to “forms / grown vague.” His attention to detail belies this sentiment. The men in the titular poem, “Net Makers,” populate his memory precisely with their craft and traditions. The second section becomes more dense and narrative: the poems are often in longer lines and stanzas. In “The SharkNet Seahorses of Balmoral,” the poet describes in third person the interior life of a boy as he snorkels in the bay, watching the wildlife of this protected sea. Adamson describes how “the boy looked for his favorite creatures, seahorses,” which hover “in clear sight of the old fish,” a dangerous predator rendered harmless on the other side of the shark net that encloses the bay. The seahorses, like the boy, are protected within the innocence of vague knowledge. Each of the four sections of Net Needle progresses thematically and prosodically. At the close of the second section, the main character becomes a young man serving hard time at Long Bay Penitentiary. In the third and fourth parts, there are lacunal, alliterative verses, prose poems, and fantastic pieces such as “Poem Beginning with a Line from William Blake,” which describes a kind of eight-story cabinet of curiosities. The first floor we visit is an apiary; on the eighth, we are challenged to “forget the myth of honey” and left searching “for the word trauma in the eyes / of strangers.” Wayne Miller Post— Milkweed Editions Wayne Miller’s newest collection calmly puzzles over a world striving against itself, toiling and disintegrating. Throughout, he presents scenes of disaster in an even tone, weaving them together toward a narrative of hope. Vadim Levental Masha Regina Trans. Lisa Hayden Oneworld The protagonist of Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina is a highly successful artist, but her rise in the film world may come at a painful price. Her story raises questions about the sacrifices required to re-create personal experiences in powerful art and whether these sacrifices are worthwhile. This novel’s portrayal of the artist’s coming-ofage as a profoundly philosophical experience illuminates the struggle between a compulsion for selfexpression and a desire to bury harmful memories forever. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 83 The poem that follows, “Ballad of the Word Trauma,” most clearly shows the bond that threads between many poems and in all sections of Net Needle. With attention to craft and detail, Adamson weaves together a book that captures the most enduring, most fragile landscape of all: living memory. Greg Brown Mercyhurst University Kuno Raeber. Watch Out: Selected Poems of Kuno Raeber. Trans. Stuart Friebert. Sandpoint, Idaho. Lost Horse Press. 2016. 90 pages. According to the back cover of Watch Out, “Many critics...

The Octopus Game by Nicky Beer

Reviewed by: The Octopus Game by Nicky Beer Yasmine Kaminsky (bio) Nicky Beer, The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), 80pp. As its title suggests, Nicky Beer’s The Octopus Game playfully explores the figure of the octopus (as well as the occasional cuttlefish and squid) in all its exotic grandeur. At times esoteric, her narrative-driven poems are largely accessible and inviting, particularly in their wide range of octopus-inspired associations. As Beer noted in a recent interview with The Rumpus, “one of the things that attracted me to the octopus was its malleability; its ability to manipulate its own form into something else, often for the sake of illusion.” Beer meditates on the octopus as a way to explore human life. The Octopus Game achieves a concentrated study of the external, fleshy self in relation to the internal, protean self. The image of the octopus over the course of the collection is kaleidoscopic. The octopus is both a “marine Prometheus” and “Disembodied / dishwasher hands.” It is a “pupil-Pandora,” a “beast,” “Medusa,” “mechanical / threat”—an apocalyptic monster. Yet, it is also a “circus tent,” a “self-tossed / parachute,” “a willow tree.” Most often, though, the octopus takes on distinctly human forms: a “proprietress” and hostess, a priest-like figure, “a drunken friend” and victim, a rambling “crackpot,” erotic lovers past and present, a “sideshow freak” and “tattooed girl,” a celebrity, a “sadist, apologist, revisionist, hypocrite (my double? my sister?), adulteress, assassin.” Beer works out the figure of the octopus through a deluge of poetic speakers, references, and languages, ranging from a documentary voiceover to an insomniac to Robert Frost to a lover to the octopus itself. [End Page 151] The various speakers embody a multiplicity of approaches: technical explanation, introspection, insult and morbid grandeur, kinky fantasy, sassy yet chilling retort, as well as snippets in a range of languages: Latin, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Many of the poems serve as responses to different media, including news reports, films, paintings, and art criticism. The implication of multiple individual perspectives that are not universally comprehensible is that the octopus, the self, is an entity we can, at best, understand only partially and fleetingly; we can understand compartmentalized parts of ourselves but struggle with our whole. The collection begins with a quotation from Pia Tafdrup that speaks to both humans and octopi: “You embrace me, many armed, / so hard that I grow a heart on both sides.” Two further epigraphs elsewhere in the book echo the book’s variety: “I marvel at thee, Octopus; / If I were thou, I’d call me Us,” from Ogden Nash’s poem “The Octopus,” and “Everything becomes shadow and ardent aquarium,” from Rimbaud’s more somber “Bottom.” Across the collection, we see sonnets, pastorals, prose poems, tercets, couplets, stitchic verse, nonce forms, a pantoum—as well as a poem Beer jokingly dubs a “can’toum” for a failed pantoum. The multiplicity of forms, or in the case of the “can’toum” the creation of one, creates a plethora of shapes on the page. Beer’s malleable use of forms is well suited to the malleable nature of the octopus, providing clever camouflage for the elusive creature. Of course, we see formal camouflage within single poems as well. “Black Hole Itinerary” comprises a series of self-contained couplets that begin with the anaphoric “Today.” The content varies wildly with each new stanza, creating a disorienting effect. In “Poem,” the text appears in landscape, rather than portrait, orientation, which renders the text’s meaning momentarily hidden behind its rotated lines. Although “Frost on the Octopus” is a Shakespearean sonnet, it pushes against tradition by disguising the octopus as a “sideshow freak” in the first quatrain, a murderess in the second, and “tattooed girl” in the third. In the collection’s title poem, “The Octopus Game,” the couplets, tercets, and quatrains visually chronicle a couple “becom[ing] each other’s arms” and—both literally and metaphorically—becoming one another, a functional unit. This poem is emblematic of what I admire most about The Octopus Game: it succeeds in taking on a concentrated subject and in perpetually recreating the angles at which we view it both formally and contextually...

Primitive Passions, Blinding Visions: Arthur Rimbaud's “Mystique” and a Tradition of Mystical Ekphrasis

In 1935 the Dutch scholar Johannes B. Tielrooy argued that Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem “Mystique” (c. 1872) was an ekphrasis, or literary description, of the central panel of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's altarpieceAdoration of the Mystic Lamb(1432). Although this hypothesis was deemed credible for a number of years, it is now thought to be unlikely that the painting inspired the poem or that the poem is an instance of ekphrasis. However, Tielrooy's ekphrastic interpretation can still be used to reveal elements of the poem otherwise hidden to the reader. I demonstrate the potential of Tielrooy's speculative practice, what I call mystical ekphrasis, by juxtaposing Rimbaud's poem with a chromolithographic representation of one of Jean Fouquet's illuminations, with which the poem also has possible but not conclusive links.

The Slip, Streamlined

The Slip, Streamlined James Tadd Adcox (bio) Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman Aimee Parkison University of Alabama Press www.uapress.ua.edu/product/Refrigerated-Music-for-a-Gleaming-Woman,6567.aspx 96Pages; Print, $14.95 The term that kept occurring to me as I read Aimee Parkison’s Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman was “slipstream.” Which admittedly seems like a weird association for a book published in 2017. The term slipstream debuted in a 1989 essay by Bruce Sterling in the magazine SF Eye. Sterling intended it to describe a kind of writing that was not yet a recognized commercial category but might be: writing that slipped between genres, particularly between mainstream literary fiction and science fiction. As a genre itself, slipstream has never had much luck. “Serious” SF fans didn’t want it, and most of the mainstream literary world assumed it had something to do with starships. These days a pall of the 1990s clings to the word, as if one might expect to find it among old flannel shirts and discarded Nirvana CDs. Perhaps instead of a genre or commercial category, though, it’s more useful to think of slipstream as a strategy, a set of aesthetic moves for slipping through and around and between set categories. These might include not just commercial genres like science fiction or fantasy, but the genres of the novel, the short story, the prose poem. If nothing else, this would be a good place to start in describing Refrigerated Music, a linguistically daring, slippery book that refuses to be pinned down. “Code Violations,” the collection’s first story, functions as a sort of ars poetica for the book as a whole. It describes the inside of an apartment that had “once been an actual closet,” in which “the toilet had been installed inside the shower, located inside the makeshift kitchen, which was also the bedroom and the living room, as well as the dining room.” The story takes place “during the early years of marriage, when there was no such thing as boundaries.” The narrator’s life, during these years, takes on something of the oceanic feeling that children are supposed to experience before they learn that there is a border between self and other, sink and shower. The careful reader will detect an announcement, perhaps a warning, that the author of these stories is uninterested in distinctions between one story and the next, one narrator and the next. Phrases pass between stories like echoes. The title of one story will often appear, in passing, in the previous or the one to come. Narrators from one story to the next might be the same person, or they might not be; perhaps one narrator is a character in a previous story, or a thought that occurred to a previous narrator at some point, while going about the duty of narrating. Who’s to say where one consciousness ends and another begins? Sentences at times snake away from themselves, reaching just beyond the point you expect them to end: “He spoke to her in strained tones underwater where the needle etched his name across her thigh, the needle that once read dust from his hands and banjo music on the scratched records in his grandfather’s collection.” The first part of that sentence, before the comma, would be strange, pleasantly so, if allowed to stand as a sentence on its own. What follows the comma pushes it momentarily past parsability. Though not an especially long sentence by modernist standards, it’s a slithery one—by the time we reach its end, the beginning has twisted itself free of our grasp. The collection’s standout story, “On Flooded Roads,” begins in realist drag, the story of a kidnapping told by one of the volunteers aiding in the search for the kidnapped girl. Soon, though, the realism skews, sours and shifts—the search party, following the voice of the kidnapped girl, realizes she is running from them. The narrative, too, begins evasive maneuvers, slipping into a fragmented tale of ghosts, mistaken identities, and retired cadaver dogs, aiming for something beyond comprehension: the violence of the girl’s death. “Girls...

Rzeczy, które się do nas zbliżają – Anaglify Krystyny Miłobędzkiej

The article is focused on the early poetry of Krystyna Milobedzka viewed from the perspective of the so-called turn towards the things context known from the literary and anthropological studies. The prose poems from Milobedzka’s debut called Anaglify are chosen for analysis and interpretation. The author discusses the most crucial elements of the background of the texts: the circumstances of Milobedzka’s debut, consequences of the events of 1956 and the turn towards ordinary things and daily life in the Polish poetry of 1960s. Milobedzka’s attitude to the material world is presented in the light of the beginnings of modernism (C.K. Norwid) and the postwar poetry concerned with the “life” of objects (M. Bialoszewski, Z. Herbert, T. Rozewicz). The poetic contemplation of the world of things in Anaglify is confronted with the late philosophy of Martin Heidegger, especially his considerations about the Tool-Being and Thing. Milobedzka explores the relations between humans and objects, taking the non-anthropocentric perspective and trying to capture the essence of their and our being-in-the-world. In her poetic vision, the thing seems to be released from the obligation to be ready-to-hand and reveals its individual dimension of “being.”

Baudelaire’s Feminine Counter-Signature: “Mademoiselle Bistouri”’s Photographic Poetics

This essay reconsiders the enduring impact of Charles Baudelaire’s modernity in light of his writings on photography. By reading his essay “Le Public moderne et la photographie” in relation to other texts in which he describes how modern life transforms the art of seeing, it is argued that photography is not to be seen as a medium in itself for Baudelaire, but rather as a general threat to a poetic mode of seeing. Like his own poetic writings, photography displaces existing aesthetic categories and reconfigures the relationship between art and the world. Baudelaire explicitly refers to photography only once in his entire poetic corpus, in the prose poem “Mademoiselle Bistouri.” Through a close reading of that text, this essay argues that photography is not in fact simply opposed to art for Baudelaire, but rather it exposes critical aspects of the production, reproduction, and circulation of his poetic images.

Modernism’s Anti-Advice

Modernism’s Anti-Advice Beth Blum (bio) For a fortnight I was confined to my room, and I surrounded myself with the books of the day (sixteen or seventeen years ago); I mean those volumes which treat of the art of making people happy, wise, and rich, in twenty-four hours . . . I was in a state of mind bordering on intoxication or stupidity. —Charles Baudelaire, “Let us Flay the Poor” (1865)1 A reader of Suze Orman or Tony Robbins might well have written this passage, but it actually expresses the frustrations of the proto-modernist poet Charles Baudelaire in 1865. Baudelaire’s eulogy for self-help as “the books of the day (sixteen or seventeen years ago)” was somewhat premature. At the same time, his prose poem indicates that the parameters of the self-help industry are more capacious than most would think. Self-help’s origins extend much further back than Dale Carnegie’s American handbook, and, contrary to what Baudelaire optimistically implies, its influence has only escalated. Baudelaire’s fascination with “those volumes which treat of the art of making people happy, wise, and rich, in twenty-four hours” was hardly anomalous among his contemporaries. “On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed . . . they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books,” complained British essayist G. K. Chesterton in 1909.2 The annus mirabilis of modernism—1922—also marked the international tour of Emile Coué, the French pioneer of positive thinking, and the founding of guru George Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff and Coué were causes célèbres of the day, boasting modernist disciples such as Jean Toomer, [End Page 117] Katherine Mansfield and Roger Fry, and detractors including John Dewey and Ezra Pound. References to Coué’s famous affirmation, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” made their way into novels by John Galsworthy (1924), Dorothy Sayers (1930), and Graham Greene (1945) (fig. 1).3 During modernism’s heyday, books by Lytton Strachey and H. G. Wells vied for space on the bestseller list beside Coué’s Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto-Suggestion (1922), Josephine Jackson’s Outwitting Our Nerves (1921), and Lulu Hunt Peters’s Diet and Health (1918).4 Modernism has long been defined by its rejection of Victorian moral imperatives. However, the concomitant rise of the self-help industry uniquely illuminates the stakes and objectives of modernism’s own genre of anti-advice. Despite their significant oppositions, modernism and self-help developed as overlapping discursive communities, united by a shared investment in the problem of how to live. Though the modernist period witnessed the commercialization of counsel at an unprecedented pace, self-help has an ancient history. Some date it back to the ancient Egyptian genre of life-instruction called “Sebayt” (“teaching”), others to the spiritual insights of the Bhagavad Gita, the injunctions of the Hebrew Bible, or the aphorisms of the ancient Greeks.5 Every culture has its wisdom tradition, but the first glimmers of a textual industry in America premised on practical counsel can be traced to Protestant New England, where the Puritans’ anxiety over salvation created a market for guides to the devout life such as Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good (1710), which provided instructions on how to assure God’s grace through diligence, thrift, and industriousness. Benjamin Franklin adapted the religious manuals of Mather and others to fit his more secular program of social mobility in works such as Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732–1757), which sociologist Max Weber has influentially argued inaugurated a shift from the Protestant to the capitalist work ethic, and which later found a narrative counterpart in Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches morality tales.6 In Europe, a parallel tradition of practical advice had developed in the form of the conduct book, which began in Medieval courtesy literature, had its golden age in courtly Renaissance counsel, and remained popular well into the eighteenth century, when it shifted its focus from politics to etiquette and tackled subjects germane to the rise of the bourgeois middle class such as household management...

Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City by Mark Miscovich

Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories. Trans. Srinivas Rayaprol. Goa, India. Under the Peepal Tree. 2016. 192 pages. Perspectives: An Anthology of Telugu Short Stories is a collection of nineteen short stories by as many authors (sixteen men and three women), selected and translated from the Telugu by Srinivas Rayaprol (1925–98), arguably one of postcolonial India’s most interesting and least-appreciated anglophone poets. Telugu, a Dravidian language spoken by some seventy-five million people in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, was Rayaprol’s father tongue as well as his father’s literary medium. This may explain his choice of English, and American English, over British models. His father, the distinguished poet, scholar, and academic Rayaprolu Subbarao, was a great admirer and translator of English Romantic poetry. Back in India, he founded and edited a short-lived but important literary magazine , East and West, and published three collections of poetry in three decades, eventually turning his creative attention and skills to the translation of modern and contemporary Telugu poetry and short fiction . At the time of his premature death, he had contributed to various anthologies and prepared at least one selection of his own. The present volume was “nearly finished ” when Rayaprol’s daughter, and manager of the Rayaprol Literary Trust, asked the editors to prepare the manuscript for publication. In their prefatory note, they explain how the translator’s method was “so radically different” from their own that they “decided not to tamper ” with it, simply ensuring consistency across the entire volume. They further point out how the selection “seems to be purely personal” and its arrangement “unique, for it defies chronology.” In reality, Rayaprol’s choices are fairly representative of what scholars and critics tend to see as the single most significant subject in modern Telugu fiction, namely the condition of women in India’s rapidly developing society. Most and some of the best stories are about women (although not always written by women), whether they have female protagonists or subjects or address various (and variously disguised) representations of femininity and its discontents. More relevant—and revealing—than the selection of the stories, though, is their arrangement, which is indeed “unique” although in a different and deeper sense than what is indicated by the editors. By juxtaposing stories with obvious affinities and stories linked by more intimate, subtle , and subterranean meanings, Rayaprol effectively invites readings that are both complementary and alternative to those suggested by previous anthologies of the same kind. This makes the present volume an important addition to both Telugu fiction in English translation and to Rayaprol ’s body of published work. Graziano Krätli North Haven, Connecticut Wolfgang Hermann. Paris Berlin New York: The Color of the City. Trans. Mark Miscovich. Greenville, South Carolina. KBR. 2016. 217 pages. Western literature is full of accounts of vagrancy and tales of the flâneur. So why would we need yet another? Wolfgang Hermann’s Paris Berlin New York, collected here in one translated volume with a critical essay by Mark Miscovich, is a work that exceeds expectations and proves that the theme is anything but exhausted. In fact, Hermann’s book situates him in the same orbit as Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as the postmodern master W. G. Sebald. In terms of writing style, Hermann’s is closer to Baudelaire’s than the others, despite carrying the feeling of being absolutely contemporary. Paris Berlin New York reads more like prose poems than a series of short stories. What the reader gets is a series of snapshots of place, often eerily uncanny places like those that arrive in dreams. Reading Hermann is like grasping at the residue of a dream that stays with us just long enough to either make a suggestion or leave an ephemeral imprint on our consciousness. The book is divided into four sections . “Paris,” “Berlin,” and “New York,” which make up the first three sections, are told in the first person, and the narrator wanders those cities like a ghost moving through the walls of some ancient ancestral home. There is a sadness, an errancy, to these pieces...

Temporal Models of Expansion of the Present Tense in the Grammatical System and Literary Text (With Reference to Krokhotki by A. I. Solzhenitsyn)

The aim of this article is to carry out a conceptual analysis of the usage of present forms in the mini-stories Krokhotki (Eng. Miniatures or Prose Poems ) by A. I. Solzhenitsyn. The author tries to show the relevance of grammatical semantics to the study of perception of time in a given language community. The features of the Russian tense system are defined by the interaction of tense and aspect. Imperfective present forms express all types of present semantics bringing together the current, generalised, and metaphorical present (Praesens Historicum). Thus, there appears a mechanism of expansion of the present in the Russian language. The image of time in the Krokhotki , defined in literary studies as “coarsening of a moment”, becomes particularly important in connection with the comprehension of changes in the perception of ontological parameters of time described in sociology. Such changes occur under the influence of modern computer technologies and the global Internet. More particularly, the notions of experiencing a moment in a linear flow of time, and the boundaries of the present time change. The model of time in Krokhotki is characterised, on the one hand, by the effects of time dilation and concentration of the narrator on the current moment with maximum detail of all aspects of the depicted events, and on the other — by the expansion of boundaries of the current moment due to its generalisation. This is how the full conceptual potential of the present tense is implemented. A wide range of grammatical semantics of the present tense allows for the creation of a multi-dimensional image of time, revealing the value of life moments with maximum detail of all aspects of the depicted events and generalisations of their significance. Such an image of a moment of time serves as a semantic dominant of the whole literary work consisting of 17 miniatures. The composition of two cycles of miniatures in the Krokhotki is very important for the image of time, too; each cycle ends in miniatures in the form of prayers. As a literary genre, the poetic prayer, keeping the basic features of a religious prayer, gets some features inherent in lyrical literary work: it allows the artist to reveal the deep layers of the creative and the human “I” and to express what generally refers to the area of the ineffable. The analysis of temporal patterns of language is important to determine the cognitive landmarks in the cognition of time ontology preserved in the Russian language.

Four Short Essays

A series of four prose poems, each considering a distinct content, but the proximity of each to the other suggested the poems should be read as part of a single argument.

Adrift in Remains

“[Adrift in remains]” is a segment taken from a longer prose and broken-line verse poem called “Shine.” It explores the interpenetrating textures of contemporary media and urban experience, following closely the neoliberal political climate and its effects on exploited regions of the Middle East and elsewhere. It is also a secular poem of ritual and renewal, addressing disparate threads of literary continuity from Emily Dickinson to Elvis Presley.