Prose Poetry Research Articles

Free Verse and Prose Rhythm

AbstractFree verse and prose rhythms, by definition, do not have metrical organizing schemes, but does this mean that rhythm in free verse or prose poems is like speech or prose rhythm? Taking up these questions debated since the advent of modernist free verse more than one hundred years ago, this essay draws on recent critical literary and linguistic findings to formulate a new method for scanning and comparing rhythm in English-language free verse and prose genres. The comparison of six texts suggests that in poetic free verse or prose texts rhythm constructs information-rich, multilevel, context-specific semantic systems in a way that does not occur in the nonpoetic texts. These results contest persisting prosodic theories that free verse and prose poetry are largely written in prose, and suggest that rhythm is a more important generic marker of the poetic function than lineation is.

The Thirdspace of Resistance Literature in Naomi Shihab Nye’s “1935” and Hala Alyan’s “Hijra”

This paper examines the poetry of the two Palestinian American poets, Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan within the concept of the “thirdspace” of resistance literature. With this premise in mind, the study uses Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace” (1998) to examine the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye and Hala Alyan as an articulation of “resistance poetry” exemplified in Ghassan Kanafani’s book entitled Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948-1966 (1966). The poem itself, as a form, is an imagined geography constructed by the poet’s personal and collective memories that build up his/her spaces of resistance poetry. In these artistic cartographies, memories traverse from contested lands and geographies to a “thirdspace” that recreates a timeline of stories and narratives that unfold the poems’ resistance manifesto. To foreshadow these imagined memories, the poem functions as: first, a documented tool of resistance to forgetfulness; second, an artistic device for articulating memory; third, a “thirdspace” where contested geographies of resistance and resilience dissolve to re-visioning history that curates hybridized literary spaces of prose poetry and cartographies of memory.

김수영 시의 리듬 연구

This paper is a study on the rhythm consciousness in Kim Soo-young’s poetry, as a preliminary work to identify the rhythm of his poetry. In particular, it is intended to clarify that ‘speed’ is the main gateway to understanding the modernity of rhythm consciousness in his poetry. To put it simply, ‘speed’ in his poetry appears in three major layers. First, ‘speed’ is the main characteristic of the reality of the time that represents the uniqueness of Korean society in the 1950s and 1960s. Second, ‘speed’ reveals the energy and direction of his poetic thought. It explains how the two vectors of ‘freedom’ and ‘sorrow’ can coexist. Third, ‘speed’ is a major indicator of the aesthetic value of his poetic speech. In general the repetition and segmentation of lines in poetry accelerates or decelerates the speed of reality and thoughts. This change in speed is what weaves the unique texture and stream of the rhythm of his poetry.
 To clarify this, in chapter 2, Kim Soo-young’s perception and attitude toward ‘the speed of civilization’ will be compared with that of Kim Ki-rim. In chapter 3, I will examine the unique view of time inherent in ‘speed’ and clarify that it is in contact with ‘Time of Kairos’. In chapter 4, I will confirm that the difference in tempo according to the length of the execution is the main index to measure the ‘speed’ of poetic speech. The contribution of his poetry to the development of modern poetry is not small in that the critical consciousness of the world and the self is expressed in everyday language and achieves an outstanding aesthetic achievement. In this context, it can be said that the ‘speed’ he tried to realize in free verse and prose poetry diverges the new archetype of modern Korean poetry.

Creative companionship as we face the apocalypse – an essay in conversation

This essay explores how a commitment to poetic collaboration, with daily writing and reading, changed the ways we perceived and lived our lives, particularly in light of living through the extremity of climate change (characterised by Australian bush fires and floods), and the isolation and stress caused by the pandemic. We explore collaboration, prose poetry and the creative process in the context of extremity, arguing that writerly collaboration can engender hope beyond the page. We discuss these topics in an essay-conversation format, moving back and forth between authors, building/ expanding/thinking and re-thinking through matters of process in light of the poetic and the extreme. Some of our creative works from this time are also included.

Poetry and precarious memory: Ways of understanding less and less

Poetry as an art form has traditionally registered tropes of feeling and memory, often with astonishing power, especially since the Romantics began to focus on projections of the self. Yet, when poetry invokes memory, anchoring people to their pasts and identities, it frequently reveals that, at best, memory offers a precarious connection to what is certain or secure – and this is particularly the case for women writers. For example, much of Emily Dickinson’s poetry reveals that memory’s recesses are often uncomfortable, and studies in autobiographical memory confirm poetry’s intuition that all may not be what it seems within the “house” of the recollecting self. This paper explores ways in which poetry’s elusive suggestiveness, and memory’s more fraught instances, confirm the provisionality and precarity of what most people are inclined to take for granted – that they know themselves and can speak securely of who they are. This has always been a challenge for women in patriarchal societies as gender inequality and precarious work – often in atypical employment – has informed and affected their expressions of self and identity. We conclude with examples from the work of two contemporary women poets, Emma Hyche and Mary A. Koncel, in order to focus on their particular approaches to precarity in their poetry and prose poetry and to posit that women poets often disrupt and disturb aspects of the patriarchal language system to offer new constructions of autobiographical memory.

Communication and Violence in the Poetics of Terayama Shūji: From the Poetic to the Theatric

This article will focus on the theory of poetics Terayama Shūji develops in Postwar Poetry: The Absence of Ulysses (Sengoshi: yurishīzu no fuzai, 1965) and Language as Violence (Bōryoku toshite no gengo, 1970). Postwar Poetry, his first theoretical writings on prose poetry, can be said to be a book about the poetic communication and “discommunication”—a wasei-eigo coinage of Tsurumi Shunsuke’s that Terayama frequently invokes—that occurs in mass communication, stemming from the conflict with print (katsuji). In this book, Terayama develops not autonomous “monologue”, but a theory of the taiwa/dialogue of poetry. However, Language as Violence contains not only the taiwa (dialogue) of his early poetics but the problem of bōryoku (violence) in his later theatrical works and theory of theater, which becomes an important theme in his body of work. Comparing with Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence that he cited, I would like to examine the description of the book’s titualar violence. As I shed light on Terayama’s poetics and view of language, I will attempt to establish a connection with his plays and theory of theater.

Attention Seeking: Tristan Tzara's Art Critical Prose Poetry

This article examines Tristan Tzara's innovative art critical writing of the 1940s and shows how the poet's engagement with European avant-garde painting developed ideas that shaped Paris Dada during the 1920s. Focusing on essays about Joan Miró and Paul Klee, it is argued that Tzara employed an unorthodox language for writing about art and promoted a distinctive style of art critical prose poetry. His approach to art criticism is shown to raise specific issues about attention by problematizing how audiences might have regard to words, sounds, and pictures simultaneously. Taking his cue from the distinctive ontologies he finds in works by Miró and Klee, Tzara uses language to perform with painting rather than conveying ideas about it. In a distinctive linguistic performance that borders on music, Tzara's art critical prose poems are seen to mobilize elements of language and visual art in non-hierarchical, undirected ways, thereby prompting a complex phenomenological exercise in attention. Cet article examine les essais critiques sur l'art que Tristan Tzara a écrit pendant les années quarante et montre comment l'engagement du poète avec la peinture d'avant-garde européenne lui a fourni l'occasion de développer des idées qui ont façonné les débuts de Paris Dada. En se concentrant sur des essais sur Joan Miró et Paul Klee, il est soutenu que Tzara a créé un langage peu orthodoxe pour écrire sur l'art et a promu un style distinctif de poésie en prose critique. Cette façon d'aborder la peinture soulève des questions spécifiques sur l'attention en problématisant la manière dont le lecteur pourrait considérer simultanément les mots, les sons et les images. S'inspirant des ontologies distinctives qu'il trouve dans les œuvres de Miró et de Klee, Tzara utilise le langage pour jouer avec la peinture plutôt que de transmettre des idées à son sujet. Dans une performance linguistique distinctive qui frôle la musique, les poèmes en prose critique de Tzara mobilisent des éléments du langage et de l'art visuel de manière non hiérarchique et non dirigée, provoquant ainsi un exercice phénoménologique complexe de l'attention.

Inside the History of the World: Syntheses of Literary Form between Prose Poetry and China

AbstractWhat is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.

Is it time to reconsider Henry V?

Abstract The average word length of the verse sections of Henry V is greater than that of the prose sections. Contrary to the assumption that word length primarily reflects literary medium (prose–verse), a more extended examination reveals that differences in word length can also reflect differences in authorship. Since 1998, a variety of stylistic analyses have pointed in the same direction: the verse of Henry V is not generally by Shakespeare who wrote the play’s prose.

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Laugh Lines: Humor, Genre, and Political Critique in Late Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Requiem for Naomi Long Madgett

ABSTRACT “Requiem for Naomi Long Madgett” opens with Madgett’s funeral, expressed in poetry in poetic prose. “Requiem” captures prominent moments in the last weeks of one of the most productive and influential literary figures in American culture, as it reflects on her legacy as a poet and a publisher. Madgett met Langston Hughes when she was a student at Lincoln University. He was so impressed with her poetry that he read one of her poems during his poetry reading, and he continued to mentor her literary development. The article considers this impact on Madgett’s career and contains a critical discussion of her most prominent poems as well as the release of her ninth book of poetry a few months before she died. Comments from prominent writers, in particular Detroit’s award-winning playwright and poet Bill Harris, capture the profundity of her work as a parting gift. The article also reiterates her creative production as founding editor of Lotus Press during the Black Arts Movement, a time when publishing opportunities were limited for Black writers. In tandem with Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press, Madgett’s Lotus Press made Detroit the most productive site for Black poetry production during the 1960s and ’70s.

Aretino Jesuited: an English Translation of the Sette Salmi in Seventeenth‐Century Douai

AbstractThis article offers the first focused analysis of John Hawkins's 1635 English rendering of Pietro Aretino's Parafrasi sopra i sette salmi della penitenza di David, situating the translation within its Catholic and translingual context. Nearly a century after Thomas Wyatt's versified treatment of the Sette Salmi, a sequence of seven Psalms framed within the narrative of a penitent King David, this prose version appeared in Douai, a city known for its English Catholic university. I analyse this translation's discursive and bibliographical elements in relation to the dynamic book trade supplying England's Catholics with religious texts, and with particular emphasis on the ways Hawkins's rendering dresses the Sette Salmi in the rhetoric of imaginative contemplation for devotional purposes. ‘Contemplate on the subiect following’, he urges in a preface to the reader; in his English treatments of the paraphrases' prologues, meanwhile, the translator embroiders the text with emphases on both ‘phantasy’ and heightened suffering. Though Hawkins never names Aretino explicitly, this translation takes part in a transnational effort to revisit the Sette Salmi and to rehabilitate an author known commonly in the Anglophone world, if not more widely in Europe, as the ‘scourge of princes’ and author of the scandalous Ragionamenti.

Spatial Reconstruction and Aesthetic Expression of Feminist Narratives

The movie Song of Spring with beautiful images tells the story of a middle-aged and elderly mother and daughter after encountering sudden changes in their lives. They heal each other in their plight and redeemed each other. Director Yang Li Na uses a new female perspective to look at society, dissolving the male gaze through the female point of view and voice. She uses a beautiful mirror narrative to show the growth and image of women, revealing the historical complexes and cultural psychology of contemporary elderly women and reflecting the richness of the female world; through a dreamlike polyphony narrative, she reconstructs the narrative time and space, with real life time and space interspersed with the ever-present illusory memories, highlighting the plight of women behind the warmth; through the beautiful narrative of "prose poetry" and the poetic metaphors of beautiful romance, a gentle and serene feminist expression is presented. Based on feminist narratology, this research uses documentary and qualitative research methods to analyze the film Song of Spring reconstruction of feminist-themed films by surreal expression techniques and poetic metaphors spanning time and space, exploring the "other" perspective and gender aesthetics of feminist narratives in the film Song of Spring and the reflections on the meaning and value of women’s lives behind it.

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Four Novels of 1939: Ambition and Redemption; Ethnicity and Race

Choice lines, or: [

In Prose Poetry: An Introduction (2020), Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington suggest that ‘prose’ within a prose poem “becomes a revitalized medium that focuses less on a narrative’s progress” and more on how “language itself, and its ways of making meaning, may be understood newly and differently.” This creative work—a prose poem—offers a brief meditation on the themes of women’s bodies, reproductive rights and self-determination. The subject muses on a series of unlike yet connected moments in time, and on the sense of bewildering wonderment that extends from conflicting possibilities. As with the prose poem's refusal to present a contained, straightforward or singular narrative, the woman identifies the fact of a difficult choice, yet is grateful to be allowed that choice.

ШУХЛЯДИ І СТРУНИ (химерно-єретичний есей)

With this essay, I continue the long-standing heretical polemic with the practice of literary generalizations, which drive the artistic achievements of unique creative people into the drawers of "-isms", uniting them with one or another precedent name, such as "fancy prose" or "fancy novel". Vasyl Zemliak's diverse work does not fit only in these drawers, because he wrote not only epic or lyrical prose, but also prose poetry (it is denoted by as many as four incorrect terms: "prose poems", "prose poems", "prose poetry", " prose poetry"), and also worked in the field of related arts, participating in the creation of film scripts, and some of them (such as "Conscience") do not at all fit into the "quaint" commune. For example, the work "Dialogue with the city" is traditionally classified as "small stories", while in fact it is a prose-lyrical monologue-message in the form of a dialogue, with elements of an ode, meditation, memory, urban landscape and with a rhythmic melody, tropes, rhetorical figures, etc. corresponding to this genre. The essay also includes a comic strip by V. Zemliak's, which was preserved in the archive of the film director and writer M. Mashchenko and was published in his memoirs, posthumously. Written in 1960, this comic belongs to the period of the socalled Khrushchev thaw, but even then it was dangerous for the author, who worked as the chief editor of the film studio named after O. Dovzhenko (1963−1968). However, after the events of the "Prague Spring" in 1968, Vaclav Vacek, a Czech by origin, who took the pseudonym Vasyl Zemlіak, no longer worked at a film studio. I also support my long-standing statement about the need to finally introduce film dramaturgy, just as dramaturgy was introduced, to artistic literature, and its analysis to literary studies as a branch of art studies. And therefore − about the need to explore the creativity of artists in view of their diverse interests, in particular in the genre of film scripts. The world has long been moving towards a new syncretism of the arts, in which the art of the word and its visualization should occupy a prominent place. Not seeing all this is, at best, narrow-minded myopia.

К ВОПРОСУ О ЦЕЛОСТНОСТИ ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННОГО МИРА ПИСАТЕЛЯ (на материале текстов Г. Ф. Лавкрафта)

The foundations of the wholeness of H. P. Lovecraft’s artistic world are revealed in the article. On the basis of plot and motif connections between separate texts, the writer constructs a mythology that uses the specifics of archaic thinking. The core of the system is the poetic cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth”: the thematic organization and symbolism of the sonnets manifest many similarities with prose texts. The interaction of poetic and prose components is of a synthetic nature and has forms of metrized prose, prose poetry, intertextual parallelism. The components of the artistic world are combined into an anti-anthropocentric theory of the indifferent universe, developed in hybrid genre coordinates of the Gothic and science fiction.

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature

Marxism for Single Mothers: Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women

In this reading of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women I argue that the poet’s 2015 collection of prose poetry positions literary and intellectual labor as both historically and currently oppressive to women through its figurative engagement with early capitalist textile production. I further demonstrate that despite Boyer’s overt engagement with a narrative of modern labor rooted in eighteenth-century industrialization, her writing is indebted to the work of a contemporary American Avant-garde. I show that the poets Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, whose works have culled material from spheres of life traditionally understood as both feminine and anti-poetic, have served as precursors for Boyer’s overtly Marxist and feminist works.

Variantes d’éditeurs et évolution syntaxique au XVIe siècle

Abstract This article sheds light on the linguistic modifications found in nine successive sixteenth-century editions from Paris and Lyon of the anonymous prose version of La Belle Hélène de Constantinople. Particular focus will be placed on aspects of syntactic revision, such as subject-verb inversion in declaratives, placement of object pronouns, introduction of embedded clauses and separation of relative clauses from their antecedents. After a presentation of the textual tradition, linguistic variants will be examined in light of previous studies on Middle and Preclassical French, and then compared with data found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammars. It is in prints from the second half of the sixteenth century that one tends to find linguistic variants that became predominant and spread. This confirms the hypothesis of a global linguistic change in the middle of the sixteenth century, which allowed the frontier between Middle French and Preclassical French to shift at that time. Corpora comprising various successive editions of the same text thus make it possible to observe and date phenomena of linguistic evolution and offer a window into the editorial habits concerning the language. They make it easier to see how the process of language standardisation was linked to the development of printing.