Group Of Poets Research Articles

Ryan James Kernan, New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes, foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Ryan James Kernan, <i>New World Maker: Radical Poetics, Black Internationalism, and the Translations of Langston Hughes</i>, foreword by Robin D.G. Kelley

(Re)Tracing the Radical Poetics and Vision of Guru Nanak: A Socio-Political Perspective

Todo el panorama de las prácticas religiosas del norte de la India experimentó un cambio radical en los siglos XV y XVI con poetas santos de Nirgun como Kabir y Guru Nanak. Nanak invariablemente se convirtió en una de las principales voces de su época cuya visión modernista se puede visualizar a través de su poética. Su cosmovisión igualitaria lo ha hecho popular entre todos los sectores de la sociedad. Eligiendo un idioma lingüístico de masas, refutó el valor consagrado otorgado a las escrituras, invalidó muchas nociones predominantes de Karma Kand (rituales védicos) y su enfoque hegemónico y mostró un camino revolucionario hacia la devoción. Su Japji sahib es un modelo cultural de pluralidad coexistente resistente al autoritarismo rígido e implica un misticismo democratizado. Es una filosofía única que desmantela a los defensores regresivos de ideologías represivas. Sus Shabads y Gurbani en el Guru Granth Sahib son poéticas de la pluralidad que ofrecen un modelo alternativo de apertura y multidimensionalidad. Con reminiscencias del estilo de los románticos ingleses, en Nanak, lo mundano y común se eleva a un significado más amplio en su poesía. La racionalidad, la igualdad y la ideología liberal predicadas y plasmadas en su poética se oponen rotundamente a la irracionalidad, la desigualdad y la ortodoxia predominantes. El fundamento importante de la filosofía de Nanak es la libertad psicológica que otorga a los despreciados y desposeídos por su casta, clase y género. Va más allá de los límites de la comunidad, la religión, el idioma, la cultura y la nación. La filosofía consecuente de liberación holística se vuelve más relevante en un ethos indio multilingüe, multicultural y multirreligioso actual. Por lo tanto, este artículo explorará el potencial radical y emancipador de la poética de Guru Nanak, su relevancia contemporánea en una época de polarizaciones religiosas, intolerancia y división; Además, explora cómo los paradigmas pluralistas de la visión y la poética de Guru Nanak se convierten en una panacea para las invasiones en curso de las creencias democráticas seculares.

“I think of Chaplin”: Poetry and the Tramp in Cold War America

AbstractThis essay explores how Charlie Chaplin’s tribulations under McCarthyism, which culminated in his exile from the US in 1952, occasioned a minor chorus of poetry on the American Left. Through case studies of Bob Kaufman, Edwin Rolfe, and Louis Zukofsky, this essay explores how radical poets from across different literary groupings were drawn to Chaplin in the Cold War’s early years out of personal and political solidarity, while also finding in him a figure through whom they could collectively register and resist the Left’s broader postwar decline. The article also sheds light on the much longer history of Chaplin’s connections with poetry and poets. It traces his relationship with socialist writers back to the 1910s and suggests how postwar poetry’s imaginative investment in Chaplin as a political figure has a deeper layer of significance, given that the filmmaker had for decades been influenced by his friendships with poets on the Left. The essay proposes that poetry’s unique potentiality as a form through which to oppose Chaplin’s struggles under McCarthyism is a consequence of poets having fostered his political consciousness in the first place.Reading [texts] . . . about Chaplin’s postwar political isolation comparatively and cumulatively, what emerges is a poetry whose shared references bespeak a form of fraught solidarity and whose full force resides in their being understood as a kind of communal response.

Neo-Barroco, the Missing Group of the New American Poetry

The New American Poetry anthology delineated “schools” of North American poetry which have become seminal: The Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure). The word seminal is used in a traditional way, from the root: “of seed or semen … full of possibilities”, but here also because the work is dominated by men and the omission of poets like Diane di Prima and Joanne Kyger seems especially egregious now. As compared to the whiteness of academic verse of the time, the New American Poetry was radical and more diverse, but could be seen as quite inadequate in those aspects from a contemporary perspective. Of course culture must always be judged in proper context, including its era and the anthology has had a powerful impact on the poetry of the continent from which it came. This paper posits that The New American Poetry, had it looked even slightly off the shore of North America, could have included the Neo-Barroco school of Latin American poetry. The affinities are almost endless and the limited scope of even the most radical poets of the post-war generation is exposed.

Open Form in American Poetry: Essays by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

<i>Open Form in American Poetry: Essays</i> by Burton Hatlen. Ed. Bruce Holsapple. U of Maine P, 2021. 309 pp. plus seven color plates. ISBN 978-0-89101-131-6. $28.00.

1820: Poetics “In the Spirit of Outlawry”

ABSTRACT Far from simply a miscellany of what are now canonical poems, Keats's 1820 volume (1820) puts forward a consistent program of radical poetics. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” I argue that 1820 unfolds a theory and practice that experiment with what poetry refusing a “palpable design” might look like. The romances in 1820 are read thematically as dramas of successful or unsuccessful attempts at controlling the desires of the other. In all the poems the poet seeks to disclose in form and language something acting beyond the reach of the poet's knowledge and management. He formulates lyric poetry as ephemeral and performative, poetic language as independent of its maker's orchestration as “venturing syllables” and as “Chattertonian” (native English) and not “Miltonic” (“artful” and imposed), stanzas as occasions for expansive, that is, paratactic, syntax, and furthermore as deformances of the monumental sonnet form. This project, the article concludes, explains Keats's displeasure at his editors’ inclusion of Hyperion, a poem whose “march” is “undeviating” and written with a “god's” foreknowledge, in a book that experiments with the idea of a poet only as facilitator of an independent artistic life.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

“Nothing tires a vision more than sundry attacks / in the manner of enclosure”: An Afterword to Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte

Abstract The following text was published in German as an afterword to the bilingual poetry collection Charles Bernstein: Angriff der Schwierigen Gedichte (München: luxbooks, 2014). Originally intended as a critical survey and introduction for German-language readers, it traces Bernstein's work as a radical modernist poet, distinguished scholar, and critical theorist in his own right from the late 1960s to the early 2010s. From his early poetry to L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E magazine, from his major books of poetry and collective avant-garde performances to his essays on poetics, Bernstein, I argue, consistently articulated with wit and precision why and how radical modernism affects what Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.”

Ten Plus Ways of Reading Charles Bernstein: Improvisations on Aphoristic Cores

Abstract Composed as a series of improvisations, this is a modular essay that examines, ponders, and responds to the radical poetics of Charles Bernstein's work from multiple perspectives, including dysraphism, aphorism, wit, and echopoetics. It also situates Bernstein in the long tradition of innovative American poetics extending from Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to Charles Olson and Susan Howe.

There’s Something about Murray: Victorian Literary Societies and Alfred Forman’s Translation of Richard Wagner’sDer Ring des Nibelungen

AbstractAlfred Forman’s translations of Richard Wagner’s operas are often derided for their weird diction and minute imitation of German poetic devices. Forman has seemed to represent a zealous and uncritical approach to Wagner that was typical of the early London Wagner Society. But London’s literary societies were important preprofessional gatherings for the appreciation and research of vernacular literature at a time when universities restricted who could study and what could be studied. Forman contributed to other London societies and organized for them dramatic readings of Wagner’s poetry featuring Forman’s wife, Alma Murray. In making Wagner legible and audible for these societies, Forman aligned Wagner with contemporary radical poets and promoted the Ring as a political allegory. Forman’s translations, far from cranky or cultish, show how Victorian society culture affected translation practices, renewed study of poetic alliteration, and inaugurated the political interpretation of Wagner’s works.

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon Kyle Dacuyan (bio) For forty-seven years, every January 1st a gathering of poets and their accomplices have greeted the passage of the year with a daylong ritual of raucous, tender, wild experiments and offerings. The New Year’s Day Marathon was originally conceived as a fundraiser for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, a touchstone of downtown culture in New York City, whose expeditions in language and performance have radiated globally across many generations of avant-garde art. The idea: a cast of radical poets, music-makers, dancers, performers, and artists would each share work a few minutes in length, unrolling over the day in a kind of unruly and exuberant fever dream, with the ticket revenue from this public performance helping to sustain the breadth of readings, events, learning programs, and publications produced each year by The Project. The Marathon, like The Project, is an improbable and enduring endeavor. By many measures (not least of which financial), poetry appears to be at the far edge of artistic and literary practice. And a spirit of iconoclastic counter-hierarchy pervades The Project: it is a home for work that resists and challenges [End Page 224] institutionalized notions of convention, value, and legibility. On top of all of this, the communities and individuals passing through The Project are passionate in their aesthetic and political difference, making for a not unquarrelsome atmosphere and lineage. Fractious and located at the margin of the margin, and still the work persists and thrives. The Marathon’s group of performers has grown from several dozen in 1974 to more than 100 in recent years, to more than 300 individuals at the turn of 2020 into 2021. Most years draw an audience of a thousand to St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in NYC’s East Village, where they sit shoulder to shoulder and on the floor for hours of oration and performance. Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Diamanda Galás, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Eileen Myles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Anne Waldman are a few of the thousands of artists who have been a part of the Marathon’s rich fabric—but what makes the assembly so special is that the usual markers of fame and recognition are each year totally atomized. The Marathon brings together poets and artists across generation and practice. There is no green room, no headliners; everyone and no one is a star. And beyond the performers, there are about 100 volunteers annually preparing and serving food, selling books, attending to the intricate logistics of such an unwieldy affair. The endurance of the Marathon affirms the vitality of dreaming, of experimental language practice, of ritual as we move through the constant vicissitudes of time—and ultimately the way these threads come together unpredictably to present new possibilities of collectivity. Every year, the Marathon demonstrates our appetite and need for new modes of listening and attention, new contexts for recognition of self and relation. And while catastrophe and uncertainty continue to roil across years and decades, the communities of The Project have always improvised to keep the Marathon alive. After a fire in 1978 left St. Mark’s unusable for several years, a number of neighborhood gathering places donated space to keep the annual event running. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 made physical gathering impossible—but the alternative online presentation opened the Marathon into a truly global celebration, with audiences and artists contributing from every continent but Antarctica. This portfolio brings together several of the poets who shared work as part of the 2021 New Year’s Day Marathon. Their poems ring with defiance, pleasure, and hope. Jan-Henry Gray’s River Capture presents polyvochal chords of suggestion and action, verbs cascading in erosion and toward new kinds of ecology. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola responds to the state’s continued erasure of paintings on public monuments in Ciudad de México, testifying in a series of poems to the necessity of ritual as an intervention against the normalized. Composed in response to a prompt for ritual by Kazim Ali...

A flare of light or ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism?’: M John Harrison’s radical poetics of worldbuilding

Over the last forty years, as Mark JP Wolf argues, worldbuilding has become central to the art of writing science fiction and fantasy books, as market conditions prioritise fictional worlds that are encyclopaedic, extendible, franchisable, consumable and which generate new forms of cultural pleasure. Following early fantasists George MacDonald and JRR Tolkien, much advice focuses on invention, completeness and internal consistency. This paper provides a counterpoint, arguing for the importance of M John Harrison in developing a poetics of scepticism toward worldbuilding, which he calls ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism’ (Harrison 2007b). The deliberate shifting depiction of his most famous fantasy world Viriconium – the Pastel City – across a sequence of novels and short stories exemplifies how he translates his radical poetics into practice. Focusing on blog posts, articles and internet comment threads in addition to literary works and my own exercises, I explore how Harrison developed a politically oriented approach to ‘the world’ in relation to the New Wave of the 60s and 70s and the New Weird of the last fifteen years, and I contrast it with contemporary approaches from China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer and Timothy Morton.

The Voices of Keti Chukhrov: Radical Poetics after the Soviet Union

Abstract The newest Russian poetic avant-garde wields highly aware appropriations and remediations in stark opposition to mainstream cultural phenomena, including nostalgia for the imperial and militant aestheticized politics of the Soviet Union. Efforts to think leftward beyond the state socialist past to a global egalitarian future challenge both Russian and “Western” narratives in our increasingly interconnected world. The Georgian-born Russian-language poet Keti Chukhrov, in particular, theorizes powerlessness in deeply local yet globally familiar ways. Despite the many voices rumbling through her work, Chukhrov’s theses are consistent: art must be communist; all desire, even faked, is political eros; and the post-Soviet subject is not even dead. Chukhrov embeds her politics in institutional critique, lends her labor to collectives and collaborations, and refracts her poetic voice into multitudes.

Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

<i>Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic</i>. Julia F. Saville. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xii+307.

Elegy’s Generation: Muriel Rukeyser, M. L. Rosenthal, and Poetry after the Left

Abstract From the late 1930s through midcentury, poets in the United States reckoned with the decline of the political Left through a practice of elegy. The debates of interwar modernism shifted toward those of a postwar culture in which Depression-era aesthetics and politics came under the pressure of anticommunism. The 1940s work of Muriel Rukeyser, turning away from an earlier documentary poetics, exemplifies her generation’s concern with the continuity between the Popular Front and World War II rather than a retreat from New Deal reform to patriotic consensus. During this understudied period in her career spanning U.S. 1 (1938) and Elegies (1949), Rukeyser enthusiastically joined the efforts of radical poets to recover the legacy of the Spanish Civil War while modifying elegy and adapting popular genres such as the soldier’s letter to the struggles of the present. In their counterintuitive figures of address, meter, and rhyme, Rukeyser’s wartime poems offer a revisionary perspective on modern elegy and, in the context of their reception by the critic M. L. Rosenthal, an alternative to the milieus and politics of late modernism in American postwar literary culture.

Three Iranian voices in the Renaissance under Akbar

If by its distinctive features in thought, art and literature, the reign of Akbar (1556–1605) deserves to be called a period of Renaissance, and one then begins to look for its major figures. Even a short list of such Renaissance men must include three Iranian immigrants, the scholar Abū’l Fatḥ Gīlānī, the scientist and administrator Fatḥullāh Shīrāzī and the radical poet ‘Urfī Shīrāzī. This article reconstructs their biographies and assesses their contributions to the ideological and cultural flowering of Akbar’s time.

Reassessing Modernisms in Light of Jerome Rothenberg’s Work

More than moments in history, the complex terms “modernism” and “modernity” need reassessing. Therefore, by using Rothenberg’s work as a point of departure for a wider reassessment of modernisms, this paper aims at revisiting not only 1914-1945 avant-garde American poetry, but also earlier and later international outputs (including performance, magic, ritual, oral, and outsider poetry). Embracing folklore and turning away from epic poetry, Rothenberg discloses some of the predecessors and successors of modernism, as well as the lesser-known acts of their canonized yet wobbly time frame. As a poet and anthologist, he militates for a dialogic representation of the multiple identities that the radical poets—witnesses, namers and tricksters—embody in their struggle against univocity and cultural hegemony. This paper first sets out to explore Rothenberg’s handling of the sources preceding the poetic avant-garde’s surfacing at the beginning of the 20th century. Then it addresses the issue of poetry and socio-political engagement, spanning the 1910-1970 era. Finally, it illustrates how Rothenberg’s anthologies map out the Pan-American and global inscriptions of modernisms on a wider historical and geographical scope. If Rothenberg’s work highlights the universal impulse of the most radical trends of international modernisms, it also defines poetic resistance as a contradictory yet necessary contextual response to the call of History.

Notes on Vallejo and Redemptive Poetry

Abstract To paraphrase the late Salvadorian radical poet Roque Dalton, at a time when the present is charged with the urgency to act no matter what, César Vallejo's poetry must be thought through, down to its last detail. No one understood better than Vallejo that to articulate the past historically means to seize a memory “as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” He hinted at the radical event that was already “tomorrow,” and the redeemable future tense that was in a permanent state of arrival. Encrypted in his poetry is the question: “¿Cómo se llama cuanto heriza nos?” (“What to call all that stands our wound on end?”). Today, like yesterday, we are grappling with the question of how to name and confront different forms of systemic violence.

και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού by Maria Oikonomou

Reviewed by: και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού by Maria Oikonomou Victoria A. Reuter (bio) Maria Oikonomou (Μαρία Οικονόμου), και φτερά: Ο μύθος της Οδύσσειας στη λογοτεχνία και στον κινηματογράφο του μοντερνισμού [Oars and wings: The myth of the Odyssey in the literature and cinema of modernism]. Athens: Nefeli. 2016. Pp. 352. Paper €21.50. I spurred my comrades with this brief addressto meet the journey with such eagernessthat I could hardly, then, have held them back; and having turned our stern toward morning, wemade wings out of our oars in a wild flight —Dante, Inferno, 26: 121–125 (Mandelbaum 1980) In Maria Oikonomou's Κουπιά και φτερά, oars and wings are more than a titular reference to Dante's Ulysses; they are the central metonymic devices from which her study springs. Oars suggest the modern reader's attempt to navigate the protean slipperiness of myth and its meanings, while wings mark the lines of flight from early versions of the Odyssey. Using postmodern theories of intertextuality and semiotics, Oikonomou's book is one of few works that aims to influence the way we study the reception of classics. Indebted to Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, her rhizomatic approach structures the book into two definable segments: genealogies of Odyssean myth and their modernist remakings. Oikonomou's theoretical and methodological approaches will challenge the reader; yet scholars of myth, modernism, and postmodern theory will find it multifaceted and stimulating. The first section begins with the prelude "Oars & Wings," which broadly defines modernism as an exercise in freedom, a breaking away from contemporary and past realities. The following 50 pages meticulously survey definitions of myth by Niklas Luhmann, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hans Blumenberg, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, among others, while the latter half follows distinct genealogies of the Odysseus myth. «Το οδυσσειακό μυθικό πεδίο» (The field of Odyssey mythology) maps out the myth's many incarnations in eight subchapters from «Εικόνα πρώτη: Ανθομηρική και αντι-οδυσσειακή» (Image one: Anti-Homeric and anti-Odyssean) to «Εικόνα όγδοη: Η σχολή του Δάντε (και η αγωνία της επίδρασης)» (Image eight: The Dante school [and the anxiety of influence]). With incredible focus and brevity, Oikonomou covers the immoral Odysseus-as-liar (in the traditions of Ovid, du Bellay, and Goethe), as well as allegorical renderings, including an excellent section on Dante's φυγόκεντρη [End Page 220] (centrifugal) Odysseus, which is juxtaposed with the νόστος (homecoming) obsessed hero. The seventh subchapter nods to English translations of the Odyssey (Chapman, Pope) and their roles in shaping the hero's iconography as an exemplary, likable champion. Oikonomou also catalogues several instances of theme-clusters in other language traditions, such as Nausicaa in German (Goethe). The introduction to the book's second section, «Ρήξεις και ανατροπές» (Ruptures and reversals), contextualizes anxieties around the field of reception. It introduces her argument: these modernist renderings of the Odyssey myth (James Joyce, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick) create a radical poetics. They do not dismantle or imitate classical myth but redefine modes of expression through the creation of new forms both literary (Joyce) and cinematographic (Godard, Kubrick). In the first and longest of these three author studies, Oikonomou approaches Joyce's Ulysses as a hypertext that sends the reader elsewhere, constantly offering other lines of inquiry. Oikonomou revisits extant theories on Joyce's narrative technique, such as parallax and the subjective, often dissonant narratives of the novel's protagonists (Molly Bloom). She draws the reader's attention to the parallel constructions and dialogues between Joyce's novel and developments in theory (Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche), as well as literature and technology (Jacques Derrida and the gramophone). The chapter also offers close readings of particular episodes and symbols in Ulysses, devoting sections to Proteus, Aeolus, the Wandering Rocks, the Sirens, and Penelope. Transitioning from literature to film, Oikonomou argues that—like Joyce's Ulysses—Godard's film Le mépris (Contempt) severs the umbilical cord between myth and mimesis. For the uninitiated, Oikonomou presents an excellent overview of Godard's place as an innovator of modernist film (including montage, contradiction, interruption, synecdoche) and draws connections to theories and potential modes of interpretation: Derrida (interstitial), Foucault (heterotopia), Mikhail Bakhtin (polyglossia). She argues that Godard makes synecdotal use of myth through multiple series of images and color (reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's A Modern Olympia [1873–1874]) to create a visual poetics. The end of the film, the blank screen, is not (only) the blank page, the abyss, but...

D'Annunzio’s Il piacere: A Generational Gaze on New Values

This paper centers on the nature of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s first, and very influential novel, Il piacere, and its influence on Italian thought at the time. I argue that Il piacere is truly a breviary, to borrow Cevasco’s term, a bible—or in socio-economic terms, a manifesto—for its time. I draw from Charles Altieri’s Radical Poetics and from Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes to prove that Il piacere is indeed a social critique of its time, an attempt by D’Annunzio to bridge the gap that Italian Unification produced by projecting a mostly agricultural country—which had long lost its epic stature, dating back to the Renaissance years—into modern thought and society.