Recent Poetry Research Articles

This Working Title Will Be Replaced: Charles Bernstein's Forever Forthcoming

Abstract Focusing on two key themes, or vectors, of Charles Bernstein's latest book of poetry, Topsy-Turvy, that of brokenness and the various references to “God” or religious belief, this review argues that there is a new metaphysical dimension in Bernstein's recent poetry that moves beyond his poetry's earlier emphases on the purely interpersonal and material nature of language and its uses. Through a discussion of Bernstein's concept of the never-attained “virtual” in his essay “Poetics of the Americas” and philosopher Gilles Deleuze's concept of the “virtual,” I argue that we can discern something like a “transcendental” aspect in Bernstein's poetry and philosophy, but not one that points to a God, a realm of ideals, or toward a telos, but something that exists now—a very real, but not yet actual, potential. As opposed to the merely “possible,” this potentiality allows for the truly novel to appear, either in poetry or the world itself.

Bail Out Poetry

Abstract Originally written as an afterword to a book-length translation of poems by Charles Bernstein, this piece was meant to introduce his recent poetry and poetics to a French audience. It does so by pondering the twin economic and nautical senses contained in the title Bernstein suggested for the collection: Poetry Bailout (in French, Renflouer la poésie). What is the value of poetry? What are its uses? These are questions which have underpinned Bernstein's work. In an early essay, adapting a statement by Simone Weil, Bernstein posited that poetry draws its social—or antisocial—power from the fact that “it is ceaselessly creating a scale of values ‘that is not of this world.’” One way it does that is by intensifying the experience of reading. Placing his recent poetics under the aegis of Poe, Bernstein has managed to balance poetry's social and aesthetic functions by cultivating the uses of aesthetics, reconciling pragmatism with unabashed aestheticism.

Sound and Vision: Interview with Aunt Lorna

Gifts of Sound and Vision:An Interview with Poet Lorna Goodison Camille Goodison (bio) and Lorna Goodison (bio) Over the course of her writing career, Lorna Goodison has published more than fifteen collections of poetry. These include I Am Becoming My Mother, her second book, which nabbed a Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas in 1986. I Am Becoming My Mother celebrates the strength and character of women like Goodison's mother, women both ordinary and extraordinary, a strong theme found in much of her writing. Other titles that will be familiar to fans of Caribbean poetry are Guinea Woman (2000), Travelling Mercies (2001), Controlling the Silver (2005), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), and Oracabessa (2013). Oracabessa, Goodison's twelfth book of poems—recognized by the Caribbean's Bocas Prize in 2014—featured poems about the places, cities and countries that have inspired the poet on her many and various world travels. Her most recent poetry collection is Mother Muse (Carcanet Press, 2021). Other awards Lorna Goodison has received for her body of work include Yale's Windham-Campbell Literature Prize (2018); a Jamaican Order of Distinction (2013) for lifetime achievement; and Jamaica's Musgrave Gold Medal (1999). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (2019). Her Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry puts her in the company of past winners such as famed Anglo-American poet, W. H. Auden, and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. Judging from a list of past winners, from 1934 to the present, it appears Lorna Goodison may be the first black woman ever awarded that prize. As with her poetry, Goodison's books of prose have likewise received much critical acclaim, in particular, her family memoir, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People. From Harvey River earned the commendation of critics worldwide, including the National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction in 2009. [End Page 130] One could say Lorna Goodison's official writing life began in 1969 with the publishing of her poem, "New York Is a Subway Stop." She wrote it while enrolled as an art student at the Art Students League in New York. Through five decades of writing, Goodison has managed to establish a literary career that is as prolific as it is distinguished. Within those five decades, she has earned her reputation as one of the Caribbean's most prominent and respected poets. Lorna Goodison was named Poet Laureate of Jamaica from 2017 until 2020 when she relinquished the title for a more conventional retirement. She has questioned her listing as only the second person named to this position, following distinguished writer and professor, Mervyn Morris. She includes Jamaican literary legends Tom Redcam, J.E. Clare McFarlane and Claude McKay as some of the notables who may have occupied the poet laureate position officially or in a similar capacity. Goodison's work is widely anthologized and can be found in the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and Longman Masters of British Literature. For me, Lorna Goodison's poetic vision is breathtakingly wide. Her poetry displays a sincere and deep love for life; her words, a feast for the senses. In her work, she remains completely loyal to Jamaica, the island nation of her birth. Wherever in the world she finds herself, the Caribbean Sea is not far away. Certain topics and themes recur: observations about womanhood, national identity, family, geography, race and culture. She plays with what some may consider high and low brow language (let's say academic and folk), unselfconsciously mingling the two and everything else in between. With her characteristic playfulness and lyricism, her poems capture the incongruencies of Caribbean history, while the still vibrant worlds of Caribbean life and culture are felt. Whether she's describing a particular person or place in Jamaica, or elsewhere in the world, she makes skillful use of her knowledge of music, art, history, folklore, language, and popular culture. Her insightful observations reflect the curiosity of someone who is at home anywhere in the world. Even when her poetic sights are set on life in her native...

Talking (With) Trees: Arboreal Articulation and Poetics

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent developments in critical plant studies, this essay attempts to develop an ethological poetics of trees. I start by analysing four examples of recent fiction, poetry and non-fiction that are each about different kinds of trees – The Overstory by Richard Powers; Translations from Bark Beetle by Jody Gladding; Tree Talks by Wendy Burk; The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage – with relation to JC Ryan’s phytocritical model. In addition to their representation of botanical lives, I also consider how Powers and Gammage understand trees as constitutive of Indigenous kinship networks. Then, I combine the insights gleaned from the textual analysis with work by Michael Marder and others in order to outline key features of tree ontology and articulation, and I conclude by positing a provisional arboreal poetics.

Short of nothing: expanding horizons of ‘scarcity’ in the poetry of Peter Larkin

'Scarcity' is a key term in the poetry of Peter Larkin. It first makes its appearance in two poems from 1992, in which 'scarcity' is primarily understood either ecologically or as referring to efficiency in biological processes. In poetry written later in the 1990s 'scarcity' acquires an additional ontological, even theological, dimension, closely related to a line of thought Larkin began developing in critical essays on the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. The expanded sense of 'scarcity', as ontological 'promise', is articulated in two of Larkin's poems published in 1998, opening the path to a rich body of writing which has continued to evolve up to the present. This essay will examine the poetry of the early 1990s in which the term 'scarcity' initially appears, and then review the emergence of the much expanded concept of 'scarcity' in poems from the mid to late 1990s. Affinities between the ideas Larkin explores poetically and those he discusses in his essays of that period on Wordsworth and Coleridge will be examined. Larkin's phenomenological approach is discussed, including the influence of Merleau-Ponty, and of the theologians Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien. The manifestation in his recent poetry of a more overtly theological concept of 'scarcity' is illustrated with reference to a poem from 2007.

Mom Woke to a Coyote Staring in Her Window

Research Article| May 01 2021 Mom Woke to a Coyote Staring in Her Window Daniel Lassell Daniel Lassell Daniel Lassell is the author of Spit (forthcoming 2021), winner of the 2020 Wheelbarrow Books Emerging Poetry Prize, as well as Ad Spot, a limited-edition chapbook (forthcoming 2021). His recent poetry can be found in Southern Humanities Review, River Styx, Grist, Colorado Review, and Prairie Schooner. In his youth he raised llamas and alpacas on a farm in Kentucky. Today he lives in Colorado. To read more of his work, visit www.daniel-lassell.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google the minnesota review (2021) 2021 (96): 31–32. https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-8851282 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel Lassell; Mom Woke to a Coyote Staring in Her Window. the minnesota review 1 May 2021; 2021 (96): 31–32. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00265667-8851282 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll Journalsthe minnesota review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2021 Daniel Lassell2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

An Interview with Poet and Translator Sasha Dugdale

This interview with poet and translator Sasha Dugdale discusses her early life as a Russian language learner, and her experiences of living in Russia in the 1990s where she worked for the British Council. It also covers her six year editorship of the magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. In the interview with poet Deryn Rees-Jones she discusses her understanding of the lyric I, her exploration of female voices in her poems, the influence of Russian writing on her work, and her current thinking about Keats and Wordsworth. There is also discussion of Dugdale’s recent poetry collection Deformations (2020) which includes her long sequence ‘Welfare Handbook’, about the abused daughters of the artist Eric Gill. The interview, which took place over email in February and March 2021, is accompanied by the first publication of ‘Psalm 137’, a new poem by Dugdale and an extract from her translation of Maria Stepanova’s long poem ‘Spolia’ from War of the Beasts and the Animals (Bloodaxe, 2021).

I Side with Myself. I Touch My Face

I Side with Myself. I Touch My Face Christopher Kondrich (bio) without realizing it, absently, hundreds of timeseach day. A human face I do not notice is there. When I touch it, I hardly registerthe sensation. In the film Onibaba, a woman fears abandonment, being leftto kill stray soldiers by herself, and so to scare her widowed daughter-in-law into staying,dons a mask. A horned mask, demonic, leering eternally. It is raining when she wears itand the rain makes it stick to her face. This is meant to be a punishment for her deception. She choosesto wear the mask, after all. She knows she is wearing it. This is why it disguises her.As I watch her claw at the mask, desperately trying to pry it from her face, I touch my own.Somewhat blemished and unshaven. A mask you do not know you are wearing is a mask that disguisesthe world. Tosses a sheet over it. Now could be anything under there. I will tell youthis. Fear is taught. You are taught what to be fearful of, as much as you can carryand not be paralyzed or so weighed down [End Page 176] that you cannot lash out or unlatchthe bedroom window as smoke seeps in below the door. Something does not need to shrinkfor it to grow smaller. As a room fills with smoke, it is relieved of habitable space.Fear is like that. It collects in the body and you have to crawl on the floor of yourselfto breathe. Thalassophobia billows dense and black above me. So too my fearof every bristle of hair on a tarantula, every millipede leg, every talonpiercing a hide, every fang, every dewclaw has been wafting steadily under the door,through the half inch needed for it to open properly. It isn't my fault. Nothing isever stricken from the record. What I fear is a record of who I am. [End Page 177] Christopher Kondrich Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019, and as a finalist for the Believer Book Award in Poetry, as well as the book-length poem Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). Recent poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Believer, Bennington Review, Paris Review, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches creative writing at George Washington University and is an associate editor for 32 Poems. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury College

Special Focus Introduction: Bodies, Transnationalism and Affect in Recent Hispanic Poetry

Special Focus Introduction: Bodies, Transnationalism and Affect in Recent Hispanic Poetry

A poesia-outra de Carlito Azevedo

A tradição da ruptura e as tensões dissonantes em torno da modernidade lírica instauraram a crise como elemento fundador da experiência moderna. Inovações e experimentalismos na composição poética feitas a partir de categorias negativas, anormais e obscuras se firmaram como marcas dessa poesia desde Baudelaire e em seus herdeiros. Os vestígios da crise de verso e das cisões instauradas no modo de sentir lírico da modernidade se unem às tendências da inespecificidade da arte, da desterritorialização, da desconstrução e do hibridismo sintomáticos de poéticas contemporâneas. Carlito Azevedo é um dos principais nomes da recente lírica brasileira cuja obra poética causa, simultaneamente, estranhamento e fascínio em seus leitores pelo seu caráter inespecífico. Na tentativa de investigar a obscuridade intencional presente nos experimentos do poeta fluminense, principalmente mantendo os olhos fixos nos tempos, discursos e elementos utilizados como matéria de poesia, faremos um exercício de leitura de algumas passagens do Livro das postagens, publicado em 2016, composto de dois poemas que põem em xeque a própria noção de poesia lírica.

Lyric Returns in Recent Black British Poetry

This essay considers some reasons for lyric’s return in black British poetics by first taking a broad look at the field, and then by attending to the work of several poets writing since the 1990s but publishing most visibly since the millennium – ranging from an innovative writer acclaimed even by the mainstream, Patience Agbabi, to one whose work has been so new in texture, tone and project that it still evades most poetic maps, D. S. Marriott. It argues that lyric in the general sense of being ‘the genre of personal expression’, which American lyric theorists Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins rightly critique as a twentieth-century invention, has long been interrogated in raced poetry in the UK for its tacit collation of personal and universal – a collation which ironically makes lyric the least personal of genres, in a sense (or in theory). And in fact, recent re-readings of modern aesthetics argue that the really personal was never welcome in New Criticism. So, after postmodernism’s thorough-going investigations of how language overwrites the universalized lyric subject, post-postmodern lyric investigations of subjectivities neglected in such studies are proving increasingly necessary in black British poetry. And in particularly the work of D. S. Marriott, where they point up what even the finest postmodern critiques both missed and disavowed precisely by not taking lyric’s definition at its word – i.e., by not taking lyric “personally” enough.

Individual, yet collective voices: polyphonic poetic memories in contemporary Ukrainian literature

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes polyphonic memory in recent works by Serhii Zhadan and Marianna Kiianovs'ka, two leading contemporary Ukrainian writers. Before focusing on Zhadan and Kiianovs'ka, the author analyzes some excerpts from poems by other contemporary writers in which memory is thematized at the crossroads of individual and collective remembering. In his latest collections, Zhadan has shown a tendency to shape his poetic world around a lyrical subject keen to collect human voices and memories with the aim of preserving them from oblivion. Kiianovs'ka’s 2017 collection Babyn Iar: Holosamy consists of memory fragments expressed by the various voices that constitute its collective subject, the victims of the 1941 Babyn Iar tragedy. In spite of the difference between these two models of poetic polyphony, the former conveyed through the mediation of a lyrical subject and the latter directly expressed by individual voices, the author here argues that Zhadan’s and Kiianovs'ka’s recent poetry successfully links the singularity of individual memory to the collective experience. He also argues that polyphonic poetic memory can be read as a strategy to overcome the opposition between the “populist” and “modernist” approaches to literature that has marked the self-perception of Ukrainian literature since the early twentieth century.

Manuel de FreitasUbi Sunt by Mariano Marovatto

Reviews 294 Lopes sums it all up quite well in ‘Poetisa-Fêmea, Poeta-Macho’ (cliché em papel couché): ‘Sou um poeta-macho | tenho um gabinete | sou uma poetisa fêmea | escrevo na retrete | Sou um poeta-macho | sou um badalo | sou uma poetisaf êmea | calo-me’ [I am a male-poet | I have an office | I am a female poet | I write in the toilets | I am a male poet | I am a clapper | I am a female poet | I shut up]. Manuel de Freitas, Ubi Sunt, with an afterword by Mariano Marovatto (Juiz de Fora, MG: Macondo, 2019). 92 pages. Print. Reviewed by Ida Alves (Universidade Federal Fluminense, RJ) Ubi Sunt, by the contemporary Portuguese poet Manuel de Freitas, now in a Brazilian edition, brings together forty-one poems in three sections: ‘HIC’, ‘ET NUNC’, ‘ET SEMPER’. In the prose poem ‘Comovidos a Oeste’ [Moved to the West] (p. 37), we find: ‘The fundamental usefulness of poetry is, for me, its vocation to approximate people and dilute false borders. Everything else — don’t get me wrong — is only history of literature.’ The two verbs, approximate and dilute, may indicate two significant axes in the work of this poet, critic, editor, and translator, who has been, since the end of the 1990s, one of the most interesting poetic and critical voices in Portugal. Over the years, Manuel de Freitas has published anthologies with other poets and more than four dozen poetry books, as well as literary criticism and translations. He is the editor of two valuable magazines on poetry/critique, Telhados de Vidro and Cão Celeste, and a poet with a keen perspective on current literature, on Portuguese culture and on European urban reality which, due to the forces of globalization, can be experienced anywhere. Though relatively well known in Brazil, especially in the Rio de Janeiro/ São Paulo circuit, to those who are interested in recent poetry and that follow attentively what is being done abroad, his work in that country was previously limited to two brief anthologies of his poetry: the first one published in 2007 (by Oficina Raquel, Rio de Janeiro) and the second, seven years later (in the Ciranda da Poesia Collection of the publishing house of Rio de Janeiro University — EdUERJ), both organized by Luis Maffei. Therefore, this is the first time that a complete book by Manuel de Freitas has been edited among us: Ubi Sunt, whose original edition came out in Lisbon, in 2014. Published in Brazil by a recently established contemporary poetry publisher, Macondo, based in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais state, this book is the first volume of A Colecção, a fivebook collection of contemporary Portuguese poetry. The idea defended by the editors is to invite ‘their readers to get to know new affective, political and poetic geographies. Books that are like homes. Books that grow like trees’, provoking the friction of the poetic Portuguese language (note the non-Brazilian spelling ‘colecção’). The work of this Brazilian publisher is similar to that of Manuel de Freitas’s own publishing house, Averno, which publishes mainly lesser-known poets in small format books of less than 100 pages, equally small circulation, Reviews 295 and discreet or artisanal graphic design, taking into consideration the editorial reality of poetry not having an abundant audience. At the end, the Macondo edition carries an afterword written in fragments by Mariano Marovatto (a young composer, singer, guitarist and poet) dwelling on Manuel de Freitas and the ‘feasible disenchantment of Lisbon’ (p. 83), with the appreciation of the reader as ‘dysphoric accomplice’ (p. 85). But let us go back to the verbs approximate and dilute. In Ubi Sunt, prose poems are predominant, and they approximate, by affection and by the irremediable presence of death, the people who marked the poet’s paths in the past and present, places in his life, such as Santarém, Coimbra and Lisbon, with their streets and corners, and human-sized trading: taverns, alehouses, cafes, small bookstores, record stores. With wandering eyes, the lyrical subject evokes reading friends, ordinary people like employees or tavern and café owners, his woman accomplice of so many common projects, In...

Any God Will Do by Virginia Konchan

Reviewed by: Any God Will Do by Virginia Konchan Sarah Giragosian (bio) Virginia Konchan. Any God Will Do. Carnegie Mellon Virginia Konchan is the author of the poetry collection The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018); a collection of short stories entitled Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017); and three chapbooks, Empire of Dirt (above/ground press, 2019), The New Alphabets (Anstruther, 2019) and Vox Populi (Finishing Line, 2015). She is also the coeditor (with Sarah Giragosian) of Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (U of Akron P, 2022). Her most recent poetry collection, Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2020), is perhaps most remarkable for its expansive use of the lyric, the ways in which it embraces various idioms, registers, and tones, and mediates between varied texts and voices. Any God Will Do showcases the deft discursive shifts of a poet interested in productively blurring so-called high and low culture, poetic difficulty, and accessibility. These investigations into lyric subjectivity are more concerned with the disruptive values of poetry, like aporia, ellipsis, and rupture, than with transcendence, revelation, and epiphany. Often whimsical and idiosyncratic, her poems model the swift vagaries and divagations of the mind in action as they swing from one register to another. They shape meaning out of an eclectic range of subjects: from the spiritually and psychically enervating forces of capitalism to the loneliness of living in an American imperial state to the violence of living through the environmental crisis. In the opening poem, "A Star is Born," the poet writes, "Don't mess with a woman / from Texas. No, I'm not / from Texas, but I was raised / by wolves. In saying that, though, / am I appropriating the experience / of those literally raised by wolves, / as I was only using it as a metaphor for neglect?" Here she exploits a rhetoric of self-consciousness, as she finds humor in the slippages (and limitations) of metaphor. The poem flirts with the corrosive effects of neoliberalism—with its emphasis on hyper-individualism and competition—on the self: "There is no way to describe / the sublimity of music / entering a room suffering / under a gag rule for years. / If I can learn to do that, / my God, I will have won." Unafraid to implicate her speakers, Konchan gravitates toward flawed, riveting subjectivities that oscillate between loneliness and moodiness, cheekiness and [End Page 187] candor. In their full-tilt tonal movement, they are at once playful and political, as in "Epithalamium," a poem that seeks to "decolonize" both marriage and language, each with its own complex and entangled relations to power: "I ask you to help me move / the cadaver: you demure. / I ask you to help me conjugate / French verbs: you aver." In "Empire," as in many poems throughout the collection, she inquires into the relationship between power and language. While the empire in question is never identified forthright, it is redolent of an American empire allied with media-speak and technocapitalism that has instrumentalized language and made it impotent. She writes, "We make inroads in discourse, / interventions and the like, / while in neighboring countries / body parts are auctioned / and punishment meted out / according to fallible law." She then turns to a lyric canon, including the works of T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich, William Wordsworth, and Emily Dickinson, even as she tests the aesthetic theories of these poets. For example, in the same poem, signposting William's famous dictum "No ideas but in things," Konchan writes, "So much depends upon / the right words in the right order, / not just spoken in mutiny, / but also propinquity. / This vodka, for example, / is made of bison grass / and can be applied to wounds. / Draw closer. I have distilled / the literal. You can touch it—/the idea within the thing, metaphor." In this revision of Williams's dictum, Konchan's speaker posits that metaphor is a functional and generative in the human consciousness, even while accounting for the slipperiness and subterfuge of metaphor, which can be both divisive (given its potentially essentializing logic) and beneficial, even healing, as in the vodka that can be applied to wounds. With impressive agility, Konchan revisits...

Barcelona, 1978–1980

Barcelona, 1978–1980 Patrick Kehoe (bio) My Barcelona is a kind of pre-lapsarian one in my own eyes, a pre-lapsarian, pre-budget flight city. In 1980 there occurred the "lapse" of sorts—or should that be the lapse "out of sorts"?—when I finally left the city after two years. Thus concluded a shiftless, insecure period of living with little money, in flats and small hotels. I was obliged to lodge too far from the city at one point early on, feeling removed from the action in the small town of Sant Cugat. Situated due northwest of the teeming city, Sant Cugat was a provincial town, about an hour's train ride from Barcelona. The place was evolving into the much bigger dormitory town it would eventually be in years to come. There was nothing there for a young Irishman, interested in craic, distraction, or finding women who might be "asked out," as the phrase of the times had it. June 1980 saw the end of the English classes I taught sometimes early in the morning, in the long stretches of the afternoon, or late at night. It had been an erratic pattern, shoehorned around people's working lives or children's afterschool hours. I still think of the underground trains that got me around, that dusty, trapped smell in the air when you stepped down the stairs in Fontana, Hospitalet, or Entenza. The carriages were not the soundless, clean-fuel trains of today. Where are the working men in the short-sleeved shirts reeking of garlic and black tobacco, hanging from the handrail, exuding decent sweat? Their places have been taken by tourists and visitors from every country you could imagine. To discount that pre-lapsarian theme a bit, one, of course, could not compare my Barcelona experience to Eden. However, memory and imagination are great mood enhancers. There was, in any case, something of Eden about the city anyway, and a sense of banishment, anguish, and strangeness when it was time to go. I was going back to Ireland; I was back where I started with what I thought at the time was little to show for it. A new poem of mine, which features in the current edition of Cyphers magazine, is simply called "Banishment." I left the city voluntarily, sure, but I sometimes feel that the city banished me for reasons that need not be gone into. Banishment or not—and the usage has featured in previous poems, like a thorn—the city has stayed in my mind, coming and going faithfully, obsessively. [End Page 151] Its presence has, for a decade or more of recent poetry writing, been like a vast net. I have been seeking memory fish that have circulated in the net of my imagination, captured in the mesh of the poems. I remember weekend nights on the town in a city that, despite its iconoclastic air of kicking against the post-Francoist traces, seemed provincial. At that period, the tourists generally came only between May and October. During the other months, the city seemed to draw in and recover its jaunty, brazen spirit. I remember in particular walking down Calle Pelayo one weekend night in spring, feeling an air of anticipation, a sense of heat in the pavement slabs, the sultry evening opening out, the prospect of company further on. Making my way down the Ramblas, to eventually cut off into a side street and meet a few friends at one of the bars, Paraguas or El Portalón. To proceed on later maybe to other nightspots, the nightclub Celeste, those evenings almost erased now, just the vaguest glimmer of being young and active and busy-minded. My poems try to celebrate where we stood, laughed, drank, sang. Or they attempt to fill the gaps and seat us few Irishmen again on empty benches or chairs. None of us were writers; I had given up poetry during that period, although I tried to learn flamenco guitar at a music school. I still have that lightweight guitar, smelling hopefully still of rosewood and cedar. I recall my teacher Luis Verdú, who came originally from Córdoba in Andalucia. Luis, a kindly...

Recurrence and Remembrance: Reading J.H. Prynne's “Reach Up” and “Morning” from <em>Al-Dente</em> (2014)

The recent poetry of the British neo-Modernist J. H. Prynne has often been characterized as an increasingly disparate and intractable body of work. Two poems from Prynne’s collection Al-Dente (2014), “Reach Up” and “Morning,” are approached here on the assumption that these are parts of a consistent poetic project. With a recourse to Wordsworthian transcendentalism and to Prynne’s own critical prose, a tracing of the poems’ embedded networks of eclectic references uncovers a potential organizing theme: the dialectic between existential continuity and corporeal mortality. In “Reach Up” the individual experience of the present moment, and its subsequent recollection within marked time, is a way of deflecting the ongoing reality of corporeal mortality. “Morning” extends this concern by questioning how self-experience and memory are communicated and absented via language, and by placing individual acts of remembrance within a wider historical ambit of human expression.

“Расщепленный субъект” в современной поэзии: Обнажение приема

Recently, the “lyric subject” has become a problematic category: it has ceased to be taken as an integral bearer of consciousness and speech and has begun to be perceived as a construct that is modelled in the text and does not exist outside the scope of the text. A notable characteristic of recent poetry is that the subject of the text becomes “split” into the “Writing Self” that generates the direct speech structure of the text and the “Other Self” that acts as a reflective instance in relation to the former. Applying Jacques Lacan’s “split subject” concept to the analysis of contemporary poetic texts, we identify a range of creative and communicative strategies through which the subject finds its reflexive origin in the text. These strategies are as follows: a metalinguistic, intertextual, or removal and dismissal strategy; a role-playing strategy; and a bodily strategy. These strategies change and alternate in a given author’s texts as well as interact and overlap with each other, creating a more complex system of dependencies within the “split” subject.

동물학대와 육식에 대한 작가들의 인식과 표현에 대한 연구 - 최근의 시를 중심으로

동물학대와 육식에 대한 작가들의 인식과 표현에 대한 연구 - 최근의 시를 중심으로

Portrait of Departure

Portrait of Departure Paul Mitchell (bio) Elderly couple (Sussex Street, Yarraville) Carried from a neatly clipped gardenlike sleeping children from a partyasleep until bodies that held themwarm new beds, nodding one last timeat their brick veneer, Greek columnscreaking plum tree, aged fruit oddly ripened. A windless autumn day at dusk, radiotalks back, but its problems are ludicrous.Lawns are watered, mown and edgedit's cuppa tea time in silence that can only beconversation. Green shade cloth screenstheir house, but they're carried to wheregreen shade cloth's not required. They laughat the memory of green shade cloth, it takesthe shape of a belly dancer, spiraling to the beatof talkback radio, her shimmied scarfdraped upon their necks makes neither blushbut drags them from directors' chairsfor a vigorous gardening session.They're carried when they're readyand not before. By a warm soft palm caressand a whisper from a cherubim statue:It's time to go where you've always been. [End Page 40] Paul Mitchell Paul Mitchell is a Melbourne-based writer who has published five books, including a novel, We. Are. Family. (MidnightSun Publishing, 2016) and three collections of poems. He has judged the Victorian Premier's Award for poetry, and his most recent poetry collection, Standard Variation (Walleah Press, 2014), was short-listed for the 2016 Adelaide Writers' Week John Bray Poetry Prize. Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Философские основания предъявления новизны в поэтическом тексте

Texts of different eras relate to varying degrees to the question of generating and present­ing novelty. Recent poetry has been undergoing visible changes in poets’ attitudes to demon­strating linguistic novelty in texts. Young poets write texts that do not use the established algorithms of presenting and perceiving the new but disguise or surreptitiously reveal appar­ent novelty. One must explore the current practices of hedging against the new in the light of the philosophy of the text and in the context of the need to reconsider methods for studying the language of poetry. The possibility to decipher a poetic text is not embedded in it as an algo­rithm. The linguistic strategy of resisting the contemporary despotism of creativity results in the growing idiomaticity of both individual fragments of a poetic text and a text as a whole.