Reading Of Poem Research Articles

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

The Year’s Work in American Humor Studies, 2021

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...

The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

Reviewed by: The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb Langdon Hammer The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens. By Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. If a poem is like a picture, it is like an object, with the manifest presence of a thing. To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. While pictures may or may not be mimetic, music rarely is, and that lack of external reference adds to the impression of fugitivity. When we look at a picture, we stand in a frontal, focalized orientation to an object at a certain distance from us. When we listen to music, even when we are seated in a hall, we are surrounded by an ambient phenomenon with no fixed location. Music sweeps over and through us. Arguably, because sound waves physically enter the body via the ear canal, music is present as much inside as outside of the listener. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens adjusts that balance with the first monograph overview of the subject. Rather than a sustained argument, the book is structured as a series of semi-independent chapters exploring diverse topics, including music and memory, melody, birdsong and the sounds of nature, and Stevens’s relationship to modern European composers. Despite this variety of approach, a unified view of Stevens emerges. Stevens’s poetry, the co-authors write, is “an art of textual performance that invites open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences” in the service of a “musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensification” (2). This view is not entirely new: it is consistent with the American pragmatist poet represented in philosophically oriented accounts of Stevens. But the focus on music, by putting Stevens into the company of modern European composers, makes for a rich recontextualization of his aesthetic thinking and fresh reference points for the reading of individual poems. Eeckhout and Goldfarb invite us to read “Of Mere Being,” for instance, with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in mind. “Im Abendrot,” the last of the songs, concludes with a pair of flutes imitating birdcalls at dusk (an unusual moment of unmistakably mimetic music). The co-authors suggest that Stevens, a longtime admirer of Strauss, “might have been haunt[ed] . . . —in whatever manner: consciously, unconsciously, semiconsciously—” by those “warbling” flutes (117) when, in his last poem, he imagined a “gold-feathered” [End Page 114] bird singing “Without human feeling, a foreign song” (CPP 476). The link between Stevens’s poem and Strauss’s song is nicely worked out, but the conditional “might have been” raises questions about the status of the connection. When Eeckhout and Goldfarb go on to propose that Stevens might have been in the audience when Gustav Mahler conducted his First Symphony in New York, and that music might have informed his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” some readers will balk at so much speculation. But the coauthors’ aim is less to insist on direct influence than to put Stevens’s poetry into conversation with modern orchestral music. There is no doubt Stevens tried to create poetic equivalents of certain musical effects. Referring to the presentation of the silver rose in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, he wrote, “The glancing chords haunt me and sometimes I try to reproduce the effect of them in words” (L 744). Did he perhaps imagine orchestral composers as part of the audience for his poems? He did on at least one important occasion. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was commissioned for the sesquicentennial...

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy

Reviewed by: Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy Gregory Brown Jason Stacy, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 234 pp. $27.95 (paper). In Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, Jason Stacy states that he has "treated Spoon River Anthology like a historical subject" but cautions the reader that the work's "significance lies not only in its history but also in its enduring life as a book that people read" (173). Stacy's analysis of the text is sensitive to the literary aspects of Masters's work, and it is thus useful and engaging to literary critics and historians alike. Stacy begins by tracing two distinct origin myths of the American small town: the New England version and the midwestern one. The myth of the New England small town has roots that reach back before the American Revolution and defines itself as moral, industrious, and cooperative. The midwestern small town, on the other hand, is steeped in the frontier mythos popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner and emphasizes rugged individualism. These rival mythologies "both featured an established small municipality," but "the New England village served as a founding enterprise [of the nation] and thereby preserved original values" while the "Midwestern town was the result of a mythical frontier experience" (33). Both contrasted with urban centers such as New York City, which were portrayed as "dens of hypocrisy and vice" (11). Masters's family history intersected with both myths due to Illinois's patterns of settlement. On both sides of his family tree, Masters's ancestors moved into Illinois to distance themselves from slavery; however, Masters's branch of the family shifted their political sympathies to the South after the Civil War due to increases in federal power and taxation. Stacy notes that Hardin Masters, Edgar Lee's father, "sought to enlist on the side of the North" at the age of sixteen, but by the end of the conflict he [End Page 206] supported the South, and Edgar Lee was named after the famous southern general (38). Hardin Masters was haunted by his reputation as a southern sympathizer; rumors that he had been a Copperhead cost him prestige and business. This opprobrium, Stacy demonstrates, is the seed of the character of the exile, a major trope of Spoon River. In the central chapters of Spoon River America, Stacy synthesizes the familial and cultural currents that surround the creation of Edgar Lee Master's Anthology. As Masters was turning his attention away from practicing law and fully toward a literary career, he moved to Chicago, which had become an important cultural and literary center. There, Masters became acquainted with the "'Little Room,' an informal club of artists, social reformers, and philanthropists" (61). Among the members of the Little Room was Harriet Monroe, the future editor of Poetry; nevertheless, Masters was uncomfortable among this society and faulted them for what he perceived as "haughty exclusiveness" (61). Instead, cultivating an outsider status he would uphold for the rest of his life, Masters preferred the society of the more libertine "Press Club." Through close readings of several poems, Stacy identifies character types such as the moralistic fraud, the libertine, and the exile. The character of the exile fits well with Masters's conception of himself as both a Midwesterner and a populist in post-Civil War America. This character type was also key to the popular success of Spoon River Anthology. The necessity for the exile type was clear to Masters's contemporaries: Stacy quotes a review of Masters's subsequent book, Songs and Satires (1916), wherein T. S. Eliot notes that Masters requires a "personage … detached from himself in order to give his particular meditative irony its opportunity" (113). The detached, meditative tone of Spoon River Anthology, together with its popular if imitable style, allowed readers to take from the work what they wanted. Through the concluding chapters, Stacy demonstrates how the myths that led to Spoon River Anthology continued through the twentieth century. Disneyland commercialized the small town, and...

Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani

Reviewed by: Poetry in a Global Age by Jahan Ramazani Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu Poetry in a Global Age. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. If poetry has historically been seen as a provincial, local, or national genre, then Jahan Ramazani’s most recent book, Poetry in a Global Age, adds to an emergent discourse that rethinks poetry within transnational, global, and planetary scales. Readers of scholarship on poetry are likely familiar with the work of Ramazani, the University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and an Editorial Board Member of this journal, particularly his two prior books that dealt with postcolonial and transnational poetry, A Transnational Poetics, published in 2009 and winner of the Harry Levin Prize for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010, and The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, published in 2001. After more than two decades spent meditating on this constellation of topics, Poetry in a Global Age develops further attention to cross-cultural and cross-national poetics through “an approach to poetry that highlights literary confluences, commonalities, and conflicts that cross national borders” (9). The poets Ramazani highlights within this net include both writers who may be familiar and others who may be unfamiliar to readers, such as Isaac Rosenberg, Thomas Hardy, Claude McKay, Elizabeth Bishop, Karen Press, Arun Kolatkar, Daljit Nagra, Wallace Stevens, Derek Walcott, and W. B. Yeats. Along the way, he enmeshes their work alongside theorists and scholars, including Franco Moretti, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Arjun Appadurai, and Bruno Latour, who help us view poetry through the refractive and multidimensional aspects of globalization, modernity, and theories of the world in literature. Both interesting and intriguing, the title of the book and the early announcement of the book’s approach speak directly to current discourses surrounding “world literature” as a field of inquiry and an approach or method for literary study. The key difference in terminology, besides the quite evident [End Page 121] focus on poetry, is Ramazani’s use of the word “global” as opposed to “world” or “planet.” Poetry, according to Ramazani, has a “relation to globalizing processes . . . which . . . significantly precede the 1990s” (12). Poets utilize these processes to “create textures, forms, and voices that embody and reflect on the experience of living transnationally and interculturally” and what it “feels like to live in a global age” (13). For example, Ramazani notes regarding Seamus Heaney that “his extensive travels . . . generate an ever-wider range of geographic and cultural reference in his poetry,” something that Ramazani says becomes especially evident to a student of global studies (177). The term “globe,” then, begins to highlight the “interplay between the world and the ball-like maps that help us imagine it,” and the term can “help check the national ghost in the transnational paradigm” (21). Ramazani’s approach to this paradigm is exemplified well in the introduction to the book, where he anchors his argument with a reading of Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” to situate the poem on a global and planetary scale. As Ramazani will do with readings of other poems, he notes how the globality of the poem can be found in the “coalescence of money, labor, commodities, and skills” that emerges in the planetary scales of a rather ordinary writing instrument (1). The book’s arguments are frequently reinforced by inclusions of theoretical material, usually after the analysis of a poem, such as his engagement with Bruno Latour alongside his reading of “I, Pencil.” Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the book is its international scope, which still remains rare in poetry studies. Throughout the ten chapters, Ramazani makes widespread yet specific claims about the place of globalization in poetry, so the sweep of the book—its transnational scope, transhistorical archive, attentive close readings, and large steps through poetic literary history—bolsters both a reimagining and a reaffirmation of the global range of poetry, reigniting our understanding of some individual poets and poems, and resituating broader conversations of the world within a poetry-focused literary study. These claims are supported by what I see to be three distinct parts of...

Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty

Reviewed by: Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty Magdalena Kay WOMEN, POETRY AND THE VOICE OF A NATION, by Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 248 pp. $110 hardback; $105 ebook. Women, Poetry and the Voice of a Nation by Anne Varty is a ground-breaking book that engages with the work of four laureate poets of the United Kingdom and Ireland: Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Lochhead, and Paula Meehan. The book’s discussion focuses largely on the poets’ prose comments and manifesto-style pronouncements, looking at the ways they have made themselves visible in public space. Varty explores how these authors gained access to a poetry establishment dominated by men, how they critique prevailing representations of the home nation, and how they have gone from liminal positions to central ones. It also contains moments of close reading of individual poems in chapters devoted to each poet, as well as a chapter on their negotiations with William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and William Butler Yeats. Although feeling the need to seek permission to use one’s voice is, of course, not unique to female poets— even after winning the Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney speaks of feeling the need to ask permission to undertake his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (1999)—this book centers on a gendered sense of exclusion. Varty does a wonderful job of presenting the foundational energies animating female poets in the twentieth century. The desire to make space for women’s voices is perhaps a given, but the ways in which poets take energy from their re-conceptualizations of the poetic voice is a phenomenon well worth reading about. The notion of “vitality arising from resistance, subversion and opposition” is intriguing (p. 6). Indeed, the book is not unified around any orthodoxy. For example, the question of national identity has the potential to be vexing for women writers who may feel, like the Irish poet Eavan Boland, that their voices are “outside history.”1 Other authors may argue that this issue does not hinge on a dialectic of inclusion and exclusion but rather upon recognition of various modalities for expressing collective identity, which may not hew to heroic or even public models for expressing national belonging. While this book focuses on the United Kingdom and Ireland, it is alive to the fact that influence is transnational. Sylvia Plath is positioned as an enabling voice that allows British women to feel that someone is listening, while the influence of Gary Snyder upon Meehan is sensitively recounted (p. 7). Varty is also aware that some of the poets represented here have a complex relation to the United Kingdom as a multi-national entity (indeed, it is hard to think of Boland or Meehan seeing themselves as poets of the United Kingdom). The book’s interest in laureate positions focalizes these concerns but also runs the risk of attaching overmuch importance to a role that some writers view as near-anachronism. Potential readers, though, may be drawn to this book precisely for its attention to public recognition. [End Page 176] Varty views these poets in terms of their participation in the “creative culture” of their home places, simultaneously recognizing that such culture is not often unitary (p. 94). For a poet such as Lochhead, whose “alignment of Scotland with woman” is widely recognized and serves her purpose of self-assertion, this approach makes sense (p. 104). For Duffy, the approach foregrounds one aspect of her legacy yet runs the risk of scanting her own refusal to engage in identity politics—regarding the identity-driven conversation surrounding the New Generation Poets, Duffy laconically comments, “the whole thing ‘misses the point’” (p. 125). In her chapter on Duffy, Varty recognizes that “the ‘edge’ has been presented entirely in terms of content and identity politics,” yet for practicing poets, their verse-craft may well be the real point, and the poet’s consciousness may not readily ally itself with available labels (p. 126). Perhaps not all the poets Varty studies would agree with the book’s focus on community—a reading of its individual analyses tempts us with the question of whether and when they have ever...

Wounds That Kill, Wound Us All, and: Break, 2020

Wounds That Kill, Wound Us All, and: Break, 2020 Sean William Carrero (bio) Wounds That Kill, Wound Us All Morning's dry tongue receives no forgiveness.I know as much about deathas chicken gizzards know how to be eaten,or how to put the wind into boxes,pierce a dark room with my body,and make and unmake myself again. I fold what I know about death into memory,as much as little David knows, how hediscovered his mother's divorce from lifea wound in the backyard after school. Sinfulbefore heaven, she dead. Warfare never truly restores order,but transforms everything else that stays alive. There was no one else to clipthe eldest's toenails, leavered lipstick on my pale face annuallyor get excited about the Wizard of Oz. No one else to keep us, our little familyfrom sewing blank seeds in the garden.No one to fight the cotton mouth there. This poison stains us instead of your lipstick.I know as much about death as chicken gizzardsknow how to be eaten as an appetizer annually. [End Page 152] I am the size of a centimeter on a yard stick,thrash my boy fists into the rug floor foreverfeel rugged anger brush my knucklesalive without her. I foldwhat I know about death, lessthan what my cousin saw firsthand,a human body against a backyard treea bullet pierced clean through her brain.A poem reads differently when that poet has died.I read you distorted after you have died. [End Page 153] Break, 2020 In the middle of thousands dyingI learn how to come back home.The first and last time I ordercurbside pickup it's steak dinnerfor an ex, her son, and me.What is learned from the monotonyfits inside a pigeon pea: my small car,teaches me how to come back home.The UPS man came so oftenhe knew us by name back then.All performance. All pageantryfits inside a pigeon pea,all of the tragedy in Hollywood, FLteaches me how to come back homefits inside a pigeon pea.I learn from monotonyhow to pack everything insidemy small car, drive across three states.In the galley kitchen, the belly of a whale,her son begins unpacking our steakdinner alone. Typically, he' d never do that.Familiar the way eyes blink to catchthe moon, just the gistof it in the sky's mouththe sky says moon be gone.She speaks on the phone.This is a ghost signal. Callit a shell pluckedfrom the beach stuffedin your silent pocket. A dancestep out of time. Grazestoo close to the devil's tail. [End Page 154] Sean William Carrero sean william carrero holds the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree from the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. Carrero's poetry appears in Angel City Review and Ellipsis Literary Journal. He is from Hollywood, FL. Copyright © 2023 University of North Dakota

시 읽기 매개 텍스트의 교육적 의의와 한계

시 읽기 매개 텍스트의 교육적 의의와 한계

Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking ed. by Florian Grosser and Nassima Sahraoui

Reviewed by: Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking ed. by Florian Grosser and Nassima Sahraoui Elias Schwieler Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking. Edited by Florian Grosser and Nassima Sahraoui. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Pp. ix + 287. Cloth $115. ISBN 978-1538162552. Heidegger in the Literary World: Variations on Poetic Thinking sets out to explore "poetic thinking" along with, but also against, Heidegger's version of poetizing thought. [End Page 169] It is an ambitious task and the essays collected in the volume cover an impressive range of topics and authors. The book is divided up into two parts with two sections for each part. The first part is titled "In-Between Philosophy and Literature" and consists of the two sections "Text, Exegesis and Salvation" and "Displacing the House of Being"; the second part, "Literary Reception – Politics Between East and West," is made up of the sections "Hölderlin and the Poetics of the States" and "Crossing the Boundaries of the Other: History, Time and Silence." The main stance of the volume, which informs all the essays collected in the book, is to provide a critique of Heidegger's version of poetic thinking. This means that the aim is not to undermine or discard Heidegger's thinking on poetry and literature, but rather to explore new and, at times, unexpected paths along which his thinking might take us when we are confronted with selections of poetry and literature with which Heidegger did not engage himself. The variations on poetic thinking in the book are notable, spanning several linguistic and cultural registers, which is one of the main contributions of the volume, and something which the editors call the "deprovincialization" of Heidegger. We are accordingly introduced to German, French, Japanese, American, Russian, Jewish, and Latin American variations of Heidegger's philosophy. The editors argue, furthermore, that an additional aim of the volume is to deconstruct the reification of works of art (such as poetry and literature), that is, the philosophical use of art to illustrate and exemplify lines of thought, concepts, and theories. However, a critique that could be directed at some of the essays in the volume is that they inscribe themselves in the very movement they try to deconstruct. There is, in other words, a problematic of application, treatment, and bestowing of meaning on more than one level: There is the use of Heidegger's philosophy by poets and authors, as identified by the scholars represented in the volume; there is the discerning of Heideggerian topologies in poetry and literature; and there are the counter-readings of Heidegger's thinking, as performed by the different scholars of the essays in the book. What these applications, bestowing of meaning, and counter-readings amount to, in the end, is a declarative, at times normative, understanding and subsequent description of 1) a work of poetry or literature, 2) Heidegger's thinking, and 3) their inter-relationships. This quite conventional representational movement of scholarship into which the volume, at times, falls back nevertheless brings to light nuances and perspectives that otherwise might not have been highlighted in Heidegger studies. Importantly, this movement also works to hide and conceal—the work (philosophical, poetical, literary) withdraws with its explication, and it is precisely such a withdrawal of what the work of art is that the essays in the volume themselves cannot avoid. Heidegger was acutely aware of this kind of withdrawal, a fact that is evident, for example, in his reading of Stefan George's poem "Das Wort" in the essay bearing the same title. Thus, the deciphering of a word, a poem, a philosophy, or a work of literature, is the impossible possibility [End Page 170] of its being. This being said, the valuable and, indeed, necessary critique offered by the essays that constitute Heidegger in the Literary World provides new ways of reflecting on Heidegger's notion of poetic thinking. The thoroughness of reading and philosophical insight in the essays included in the volume do indeed do justice to the similarities and differences which exist between Heidegger and the individual works of poetry and literature analyzed in the book. A special mention is due to one...

Desire and subjectivity in S. T. Coleridge’s “Frost at midnight”

The present article is an attempt to offer a fresh critical reading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight" based on the theoretical ideas of Jacques Lacan on desire and subjectivity. Coleridge's desire for a unified subjectivity lulls him into the dream of a bright future for his son, while the only ethical thing for him to do, from the psychoanalytical point of view, is to accept the split and, having traversed the fantasy and subjectified the cause of this split, to take responsibility for his unconscious mind. It is no wonder, then, that the poem begins and ends with the description of “frost’s secret ministry”; after all, the endless pursuit of desire qua the Other in search of a lost object which would complete the puzzle of one’s life is no pursuit at all; the act of moving in a circle of course means there is no actual movement or change in location.

Performing Persian poetics on Instagram: an interview with @barkhi_az_honarmandan

ABSTRACT Uncensored, unlike many other social media platforms in Iran, Instagram has become the most popular social media platform among Iranians, providing a space for creative expression including the creation of Instapoetry. Here I offer an interview with the group behind the @barkhi_az_honarmandan account, an Instagram account run by anonymous admins that produces digital poetry. Since Iran and its news form the main focus of this account, the page is actively involved in creating visual poetics as a form of digital activism. In its work, @barkhi_az_honarmandan takes on a performative presence on Instagram and combines visual and literary digital art to create digital contents that reflect. It thus prompts reflections, on news and issues related to Iranian culture and society, by creating engaging digital art with a poetic style and powerful impact. This interview, prefaced with a brief description of the impact of social media visual poetry. It shows that social media and Instapoetry have become vital tools for political dissent and creative expression in Iran, allowing individuals to connect with others and engage in dialogues or political activism in Iran. In particular, the close reading of specific posts and poems by Iranian account demonstrates some of the semiotic codes of Persian language activist online poetry.

Understanding death within eternal poetic time

ABSTRACT This article is an a/r/tographic (artist/researcher/teacher) study through autobiographical close readings of several poems as a means to understand death within what the author calls eternal poetic time. Moving beyond the author’s childhood’s static image of death, the paper suggests that the ephemeral nature of life is not something to fear, but makes living more beautiful and eternal through the making and sharing of poetry and art. This paper is the first part of a three-paper study, which includes original poetry by the author.

Dub poetry and theatre in conversation: the development of a performance-driven aesthetic

In the history of dub poetry, the relation between theatre and poetry is undeniable. The majority of the dub poets have theatrical training and have experimented with staging texts. Jean ‘Binta' Breeze, Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka, and Michael Smith, to name just a few, studied at the Jamaican School of Drama. Their training helped them to develop a style of performance that is highly expressive. Through the close reading of Micheal Smith's poem, ‘Trainer', this article argues that both the text and the performance of this text display artistic characteristics that are the result of a creative dialogue between theatre and poetry. Discussed under the coined term ‘a performance-driven aesthetic’, the article brings new light on this creative dialogue that is too often taken for granted by academic studies.

The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia

Reviewed by: The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia María Cristina Quintero Keywords Melancholy, Lyric Vs. Epic Poetry, Lyric Theory, Poetic Self Fashioning, Lyric Victimization Of Women, Garcilaso De La Vega, Alonso De Ercilla, La Auracauna, Fernando De Herrera, Miguel De Cervantes, La Galatea, Juan De Arguijo, Luis De Góngora, Fabula De Polifemo Y Galatea, Soledades, Felipe Valencia, María Cristina Quintero valencia, felipe. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora. U of Nebraska P, 2021, 352 pp. In this lucidly written book, Felipe Valencia examines poetic practice in early modern Spain through the prism of what we might call gender and genre trouble. He is concerned with articulating a theory of the lyric by contesting the binary view of lyric and epic as opposing practices: the first associated with effeminacy, and the second with manly pursuits. He explores the intrinsic connection of melancholy, masculinity, and the depiction of victimized women in works by Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, Juan de Ercilla, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de Arguijo, and Luis de Góngora. The extensive introduction immediately displays the author’s impressive erudition and interpretive skills, as Valencia traces the philosophical and medical views of melancholy from Classical times to the present. Other topics include the impact of the print market on the production of poetry, the prestige and availability of certain genres and traditions, and the professionalization of poetry. The better part of the introduction is dedicated to new readings of poems by Garcilaso, including “A Boscán, desde la Goleta,” “Ode ad florem Gnidi,”and the first Eclogue. He analyzes the central function of myth (especially that of Apollo and Daphne) in the depiction of physical and psychological violence against women as a prerequisite for the fashioning of a lyric self; this is the theme that will be repeated throughout the book. While not a new topic—feminist critics since Nancy Vickers have exposed the need for a subjugated woman in the construction of male lyric subjectivity— Valencia goes beyond the usual psychoanalytical approach to undertake a more ambitious project, one that traces a chronological trajectory in the development of lyric practice and theory during the “age of Góngora.” [End Page 140] Chapter One, on Alonso de Ercilla, offers an original reading of the Araucana, a work that ostensibly addresses the heroic, masculine exploits associated with the epic. Valencia demonstrates that, in fact, Ercilla is repeatedly “tempted” by the lyric. This paradigmatic epic poem, written by a man who embodied the ideal of armas y letras, contains numerous tropes associated with the lyric: the praise of the beloved, the avowal of sincerity on the part of the poet, and songs of longing and grief. The latter are voiced by the Araucanian women who mourn the absence and death of their lovers during the Spanish conquest of Chile. There is, then, a displacement of the male poetic “I” associated with amatory poetry onto female voices. This gendered ventriloquism, in Valencia’s words, “constitutes a virile mastery of the feminine and thus suppresses the specter of effeminacy that haunted the lyric poet in the Renaissance” (80). Furthermore, Valencia offers the intriguing insight that the ventriloquism of the female voice embodied by the “barbaric” Araucanian women constitutes a form of colonial violence. The second chapter builds on Leah Middlebrook’s notion that Fernando de Herrera’s work represents a poetics of masculinity. According to Valencia, Herrera wants to restore virility to lyric by composing verse that is heroic (manifested in Icharian osadía), despite depicting the “lighter” themes of love and desire. Algunas obras and the Anotaciones on Garcilaso develop a theory of the lyric in dialectic with the epic. Through allusions to both Orpheus and Apollo, Herrera fashions a forceful lyric persona that subtly subverts Garcilaso in order to place himself “at the summit of the canon” (110). After a careful overview of the Orpheus myth in Classical and Renaissance texts, Valencia maintains that Herrera accentuates the psychological violence inflicted on Euridyce in order to mitigate the association of effeminacy found in some homosexual versions of the myth. Finally, through close and...

Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber

Reviewed by: Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800 by Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber Waltraud Maierhofer Edgar Landgraf and Elliott Schreiber. Play in the Age of Goethe: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Play around 1800. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020. ix + 340 pp. Given the overwhelming presence of play in today's analog and digital entertainment market, this book is timely. It follows on a number of key studies on play such The Handbook of the Study of Play (2015) and It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan (2017), not to mention several new scholarly journals. For a collection of contributions by a range of well-known scholars, Play in the Age of Goethe is exceptional in its focus on the period from 1770 to 1830, its philosophical, literary, and pedagogical approaches to play, and their interconnections, or should I say, interplay. The subtitle aptly reflects the four parts of the volume: theories, narratives, children's play in practice, theory, and narratives and—connecting these parts—the play of language. In their engaged and engaging introduction, Landgraf and Schreiber outline the omnipresence of play and games in today's societies and the proliferation of play studies before they outline why the decades around 1800 were the "formative years" for how we understand play today, for the development of related values, and when it gained significance in aesthetics, pedagogy, even in politics and other fields. As they point out, German writers during the Age of Goethe made "a decisive contribution" to the discourse of play. The list of contributors makes an impressive who-is-who of established and up-and-coming scholars in the area of Goethe studies, most of them in literary and cultural studies. All the articles deserve to be introduced here. The first chapters discuss the "free play" of human faculties as idealist concepts that have formed the basis for discussions about play since Kant's Critique of Judgment. In the first chapter, Christian Weber presents careful readings of anacreontic poems by Gleim, Uz, Klopstock, and Goethe for their (sexual) politics of play, emphasizing the playful aspect in this subgenre of erotic poetry. He argues that Goethe invented a "free play of the human faculties" that made possible a free play between the sexes. He further finds indications "that Anacreontic poetry may have impacted Kant's reconceptualization of the aesthetic beauty." "Why bring German Idealism and poststructuralism into the study of play?" is the question that Samuel Heidepriem sets out to answer in his chapter. He argues that Paul de Man's critique of Schiller's notion of play as humanizing overlooks what Kant in his notion of free play has in common with Schiller: both "remain fundamentally humanist in the sense that humanity 'centers' their aesthetic systems." Heidepriem insists that his solution can help address gaps in contemporary theories of play. Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Goethe's Faust I, are the subjects of scholars Edgar Landgraf and Nicholas Rennie, respectively. In both dramas, games of chance are employed to reflect the human condition "in a world where a profound [End Page 197] sense of contingency has come to replace divine providence and necessity." Edgar Landgraf examines Lessing's use of wordplay as well as two key scenes. Saladin's and Sittah's game of chess is where they are "playing with the game," performing a metaplay about the expectations of the other. The second scene is the ring parable. Landgraf teases out the "hermeneutic play that Lessing invokes with his ring parable (and with the drama at large as the parable represents a play within the play that distills and simultaneously reflects on the hermeneutic approach crucial for Lessing's play for tolerance)." Thus, "false play" is at the heart of the ring parable. It is risky but necessary for the pursuit of religious tolerance and sympathy, and social reciprocity: "Lessing's ring parable suggests that we are not to learn from playing, but need to learn how to play this game and put into practice its underlying hermeneutic stance" because only the playful back-and-forth...

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha

Reviewed by: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha Richard Woffenden MOSAB ABU TOHA Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza San Francisco. City Lights. 2022. 126 pages WHEN A PERSON chooses to read poetry, it can be for a multitude of reasons, but many of them revolve around a desire to connect with how another human being experiences and understands the world we live in. Across times and places, we want to see how others navigate through love, family life, or historic change. For most people experiencing a relatively peaceful life, making the decision to pick up poetry that has been crafted in a conflict zone is a definite attempt to find out what happens when humans are placed in some of the worst situations possible. With the poets of the twentieth-century world wars, with which so many of us are familiar, these are often accounts of men leaving their ordinary lives to fight in conflicts away from home for a limited number of years. Poems from these periods shape our understanding of the world wars, but what happens if a person has only ever known life in a time of conflict—in fact, what happens if several generations have lived their daily life with violence ever present? This is the world that Mosab Abu Toha brings to English-speaking readers as a poet who was born in Gaza in 1992. On the first reading of Abu Toha's poems, the reader is struck with the accessibility of his poetry. Propelled straight into the violence and loss of the poet's existence, there is no avoiding the horror of what it was like to grow up in a world where life is so precarious: "Images on the world of buildings / a child who was shot by an Israeli sniper / or killed during an air raid en route to school. / Her picture stares at the blackboard / while the air sits in her chair." On one level, Abu Toha is a poet writing for himself as he attempts to comprehend what he is living through, but Abu Toha also writes as much for his audience. Apart from the poet's own love of the English language, the poems are composed in English so that the poet is speaking straight to a Western audience, many of whom understand little of how growing up in Gaza impacts the human residents. Abu Toha's method of communicating this experience is therefore very comprehensible with stark imagery and language. Yet while anyone without a knowledge of the situation in Gaza could pick up the book and successfully find poems that create an emotive bridge into Gaza, this is not to say that there aren't many layers to this poetry. Abu Toha is very conscious of cultural heritage—a fact that is wonderfully discussed in an interview presented at the end of the book. Abu Toha speaks of his love of the British Romantic poets and also how, at school, he was steeped in the greats of Arabic poetry like 'Antarah and Imru' al-Qays. Abu Toha, however, does not seek to emulate the poetics and language of his predecessors but focuses on the sensibility of these poets in how they used words to create emotional responses in their readers. In many poems, Abu Toha creates short, powerful stanzas of various shapes that could work as stand-alone poems, but when read together as a whole, they create powerful statements. In the excellent poem "Notebook," this approach of linking very different stanzas together creates parallels with some twentieth-century Arabic poems, most notably Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani's vital "Footnotes to the Book of the Setback." On other levels, the two poems are very different in tone and language, and this highlights how different the situations are between that of late twentieth-century poets and those of the present day. In modern-day Gaza, Abu Toha writes of how this violence has become the norm rather than the exception for those people who knew a different life. He writes in a way that horrifies that outsider who, despite media coverage, can't...

Development of interpretational skills of Suvorovites in teaching expressive reading of poems by modern poets

Development of interpretational skills of Suvorovites in teaching expressive reading of poems by modern poets

THE ANALYSIS OF CONNOTATIVE MEANING FOUND IN PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S POEMS.

Most people find difficulties while studying and reading poems because a poem is full of meanings and symbols. Understanding a poem is not as easy as understanding texts of books whose meaning actually depend on the real text. To understand a poem is not enough only with lexical meaning. Thus, the reader should understand other meanings. One of the meaning that can be used to understand poems is connotative meaning because that meaning depends on what is referred to. In this study, the researcher is interested in analyzing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poems by using connotative meaning theory and message. The objectives of this study are (1) To describe the connotative meanings are used in Percy Bysshe Shelley poems and (2) To know the message of Percy Bysshe Shelley poems which are performed to the readers. In this research, the researcher focus on connotative theory from Geoffrey leech, (2003:24). The researcher also used figurative language theory from Tengso Tjahjonobecause the theory is more detail than others. He divided figurative language into four types in generally. Those are comparison, affirmation, satire, and contradiction. Based on the result of the analysis, the researcher found in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s selected poems used connotative meaning in each line of his poems to tell the relationship between human, nature, and love. He also used various figurative language such as metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and smile to create a purpose in this poems by equating and comparing with nature around him that has a certain relationship.

Condensation in the readings of poems seasoned poets ( An analytical study )

يُعدُّ الشعر بحد ذاته تكثيفاً يعبِّر بهِ الشاعر عن أحاسيسه ومشاعره وتجاربه، فضلاً عن تطلعات مجتمعه ورغباتهم ، وذلك عن طريق أبيات شعرية زاخرة بالمعاني والصور، فقد كان الشعر العربي في بداية رحلته مقطوعات قصيرة أو أبيات قليلة يقولها الرجل عند حاجته : (( ولم يكن لأوائل العرب من الشعر إلاّ الأبيات يقولها الرجل في حاجته وإنما قُصِّدتْ القصائد وطوّل الشعر على عهْد عبدالمطلب وهاشم بن عبد مناف))([i]) . والتكثيف لغةً : ((كثف : الكاف والثاء والفاء أصل صحيح يدلُّ على تراكب شيء على شيء وتجمّع: يقال هذا شيءٌ كثيف ، وسحاب كثيف وشجرٌ كثيف ))([ii]). ([i]) طبقات فحول الشعراء، محمد بن سلام الجمحي، تحقيق : محمود محمد شاكر : 35 . ([ii]) معجم مقاييس اللغة ، أبي الحسن احمد بن فارس (ت 395هـ) ، تح : عبدالسلام محمد هارون : مادة (كثف ) .

Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and Thomas Hardy

The interpretation of poetry is certainly an intellectually demanding, and ultimately fulfilling task, and one of the means by which the scholar can approach the work of a great poet is when he/she encounters the work of a great precursor to which the latter poem is indebted, but one must bear in mind that the latter work, must be one in which there is an authentic voice. In this paper the endeavour is to investigate one such instance: the relationship between Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ (1820) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘Shelley’s Skylark’ (1901). The conjecture here is that Hardy’s poem is not one in which the mere influence of an earlier poem is predominant, but evinces an intentional irony. Furthermore, irony is manifested in Hardy’s poem not only in statement but also in form. After an introduction on the reception of Shelley’s poetry both in criticism and among poets, a close reading of both poems, and how they interact, follows.