Poetic Revolution Research Articles

Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

<i>Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem</i>, by Jean-Philippe Marcoux

Between Exile and Elegy, Palestine and Egypt: Mourid Barghouti’s Poetry and Memoirs

This article reads the migration of poetry and memoirs by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti (Murīd al-Barghūthī) in the context of Egypt’s January 25, 2011 Revolution. At the start of 2012, the Cairo-based Barghouti dedicated excerpts from his 2005 booklength poem Muntaṣaf al-layl (Midnight) to the Taḥrīr martyrs. The poem’s own migration, interwoven with the exilic geography of Barghouti’s life and work, plots the intersection of exile with a new form of elegy in the contemporary Arabic literary scene. This new form of elegy, I argue, develops a revolutionary poetics by advancing images of heroism, martyrdom, and life. The poet’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here illustrate the intertwined poetics of exile and elegy, tracing a transnational network of affiliations.

Infant Muse: Phillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood

Infant MusePhillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood Lucia Hodgson (bio) I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man. … America has long been tolerant of Black children, compared to its reception of independent Black men and Black women. —June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” Phillis Wheatley’s mastery of popular belletristic conventions, her deployment of Christian evangelical rhetoric, and her manipulation of the colonist-as-slave analogy have all been cited as tactics that enabled her to adopt an intelligible and therefore consumable subjectivity. The strategies outlined above certainly contributed to Wheatley’s phenomenal transatlantic success. What has been less remarked is how all three maneuvers gained additional traction from their specific and direct engagement with Enlightenment conceptions of childhood articulated by John Locke, conceptions that constituted an essential component of the genre of occasional poetry, the ideology of the Great Awakening, and the rhetoric of Revolutionary patriots. Wheatley’s writing and marketing tapped into the eighteenth-century recognition of childhood as a status distinct from adulthood with its own unique set of weaknesses and strengths. The child figure of the early 1770s was simultaneously affiliated with varied and contradictory—yet primarily positive—characteristics, including malleability, obedience, and faith in authority. This constellation of attributes enabled Wheatley’s literary child persona to speak to her social superiors about family, religion, and politics while mitigating the threat associated with her wronged and enslaved African body. The child characters in Wheatley’s poetry have been the focus of much more scholarly analysis than her child authorial persona. Analysis of child [End Page 663] characters is a prominent component of the emerging field of early American childhood studies, which encompasses literature written for children as well as representations of children in literature for adults.1 Anna Mae Duane (Suffering 144–45) and Caroline Levander (40) have both analyzed Wheatley’s verses referencing her kidnapping from Africa in early childhood to make nuanced arguments about the cultural work performed by child figures in the process of American nation building. However, it is mainly contemporary children’s literature that has situated Wheatley as a child author.2 Children’s books like Kathryn Lasky’s A Voice of Her Own: The Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet (2003) and Kathryn Kilby Borland’s Phillis Wheatley: Young Revolutionary Poet (2005) concentrate their biographies on the fact that Wheatley was not only an enslaved poet but also a child poet. She composed her first extant poem at the age of eleven.3 She published her first poem at about the age of fourteen. She was about sixteen when she achieved international fame with her elegy for the Methodist minister George Whitefield. And she was about nineteen when she traveled to England to participate in and promote the publication of her collection of occasional verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). An examination of Wheatley’s self-presentation as a juvenile poet constitutes a third, rarely addressed dimension of early American studies: the child as producer of literature and voice of political critique. Wheatley scholarship, particularly research concerned with recuperating the poet’s agency, has characterized her as an adult woman rather than a girl child. In her incisive article, Joanna Brooks debunks the assertion of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that in 1772 Wheatley underwent an oral examination conducted by eighteen elite white Bostonian men to prove her ability to author her poems. In proposing “an alternative narrative of the making of Wheatley, one that assigns her a commanding role in the early stages of her public career” (5), Brooks transforms Gates’s “young African girl” and “African adolescent” (qtd. in Brooks 1) into a “black woman” (7) and an “enslaved woman poet” (13).4 In another example of scholarly adultification, Betsy Erkkilä argues that the American Revolution furnished “women,” including Wheatley and Abigail Adams, with “the language and metaphors to ‘foment’ further rebellion in their struggle for citizenship, suffrage, and full human rights” (227). Neither Brooks nor Erkkilä considers Wheatley’s youth in relation to her rhetorical...

Lady Avengers in Jin He’s (1818–1885) Narrative Verse of Female Knight-Errantry

Jin He 金和 (1818–1885), a pioneering poet of mid-nineteenth century China, wrote in a colloquial style strongly influenced by the ballad tradition. Jin’s style was prose-like and broke all the structural limitations of earlier poetry in order to create formal innovations, while at the same time experimenting with new subject matter. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) and Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) considered Jin He and Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) to be the major poets of the nineteenth century. Jin had a major impact both on other late nineteenth-century poets and on the “Poetic Revolution” that led to the rise of modern Chinese literature. However, his verse has been largely ignored ever since. Among the most striking contributions Jin made to the literary transition in the nineteenth century was his innovation in presenting the female knight-errant 女俠 (nuxia). This invented image of the female knight-errant reflected a new tradition of women’s voices in the literary works of his time, and had a great impact on the representation of swordswomen in modern literature. This paper examines how the image of nuxia in Jin’s writing is distinct from those found in past poetry, how the female knight-errant in Jin’s works inverts conventional gender norms, and how Jin’s female knight-errant image is both connected with and distinct from those in other literary forms.

Excellence in the ordinary: the poetry of Peter Blackman

Revolutionary poet Peter Blackman has never received his due in either the Caribbean or the UK, where he made his home from 1937. The author has gathered selected poems and a speech by Blackman into a new collection, Footprints (Smokestack Books). This article discusses Blackman’s life from ‘colonised’ schoolboy and missionary to Africa to railway worker in north London and sets his writing – especially his language – in the context of twentieth-century West Indian literature. Blackman, who befriended Paul Robeson in London and dedicated works to Claudia Jones, was clearly at the vortex of progressive black cultural expression, but has hitherto been overlooked.

The repetition of the nomos of cultural memory in Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom and Mamphela Ramphele's A Life

This article points to the repetition of figures of memory in autobiography as a condition of entry into a distinct temporality of ‘worldliness’. The said entry, as the two autobiographies by Nelson Mandela and Mamphela Ramphele show, is distinctly enabled through the signifying time attending the nomadic routes of exile and banishment. As a feature of South Africa's peculiar versions of personhood, nomadic routes are here symptomatic of strategic repetitions of memoric figures of both tradition and modernity: the eternal return of S.E.K. Mqhayi, the revolutionary poet through the Scarlet Pimpernel antic, among others, in the case of Mandela. Subterfuge during Ramphele's banishment is similarly managed through the repetition in-between past rhythms of rural sojourn and the Antigone figure.

The Poetics of Disenchantment: José María Heredia and the Tempests of Modernity

The Poetics of Disenchantment: José María Heredia and the Tempests of Modernity Raúl Coronado (bio) The recent comparative literary study of the Americas has produced innovative literary histories that have forced us to rethink the relationship between literature and nation-formation. The brief though significant period of trans-American literary camaraderie in the early decades of the nineteenth century aimed at producing an inspiring aesthetics for the Americas. Poets, both Spanish and Anglo-American, read and translated one another’s work.1 This was a moment of great possibility, matched as well by the flourishing of scientific explorations of the Americas where Spanish and Anglo-Americans, who now simply referred to themselves all as “Americans,” shared with one another their knowledge of their vast territories. But by the 1830s [End Page 184] this spirit of brotherhood quickly gave way, on the one hand to US imperial interest and, on the other, to the fragmentation of Spanish America into competing nations. Yet the epistemological work entailed in the making of nations required, first, a vaster, far-reaching rethinking of the cosmos, one about which Spanish and British America had, from the very outset of their colonial periods, already diverged. In short, it required viewing the world not as an immutable order in which everyone and everything had its particular station but as a world that was imagined and actively produced by humans. In this, the poetry of the revolutionary Spanish American José María Heredia and his Anglo-American translator William Cullen Bryant reveals the metaphysical crisis in the making of the modern world. It’s through translation, as we’ll see, that the pathos of disenchantment is best expressed. The late-eighteenth-century Hispanic world—both Spain and Spanish America—was embroiled in a variety of struggles that sought to ameliorate the impoverished conditions of the Hispanic Atlantic. But just as it appeared that the programs of reform would perhaps transform conditions, a world-shattering event occurred that would forever alter the course of reform and revolution.2 In May 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and deposed the king. For centuries, the trinity of God, king, and language had sutured the Hispanic world, serving as the foundation for an imagined community. But now, overnight, they had lost their sovereign, a loss that forced Hispanics to rethink the nature of sovereignty. Ensconced in the tradition of Catholic political thought, a legacy now all but forgotten, Hispanics created Spain’s first modern parliament and, by 1812, its first liberal constitution. But the restoration of the king in 1814 brought an end to this brief period of creative experimentation. The king tore the constitution to shreds, disbanded parliament, and reinstated authoritarian rule. The Hispanic world would soon thereafter erupt in a global civil war. In Spanish America, the civil war would, over the course of the 1810s, become wars of independence. Historians have addressed the political history of the wars of independence. But what has been discussed less has been the existential turmoil in which Spanish Americans lived. Many were left with great uncertainty: if the king could be deposed, then what would go next— God? In effect, within a short decade, the Hispanic world was forced to confront its torturous process of disenchantment, of seeing the world not as a received order but as a produced order. The case for British America is much more familiar. In short, the process of dislodging the authority of God took more than a century, from the sixteenth-century [End Page 185] Reformation and the 1688 Glorious Revolution through the late-eighteenth-century British American struggles for sovereignty. Their histories may have diverged with the Reformation, but now, with independence, their paths had met once again. It is in this context that the trans-American revolutionary poet José María Heredia arrived in Boston in 1823. Following in the footsteps of other exiled revolutionaries from throughout the Atlantic world, Heredia fled his native Cuba when authorities discovered his participation in a planned insurrection. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1803, Heredia spent most of his life throughout the circum-Caribbean: in Santo Domingo, Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. An apparent prodigy, by the age of...

“Por un clavo se pierde un reino”: Alfonso Reyes, the Generation of 1927, and the Imperial Appropriation of Góngora

In 1921, Alfonso Reyes became widely known among hispanists as the “first of a new generation of gongoristas,” a title granted to him by none other than Raymond Foulche Delbosc, the first modern editor of Gongora’s poetry. The preeminence of Reyes’s gongorismo in the 20th century follows that of another Latin American writer: Ruben Dario, the first poet to proclaim the modernity of Gongora’s poetry, himself the origin of a poetic revolution in modern Hispanic letters rivaled only by that of Garcilaso de la Vega in the Renaissance. The purpose of this article is to explain the celebration of Gongora’s centenary by the Generation of 1927 in connection with Alfonso Reyes’s academic work on Gongora, from its Mexican beginnings ( Cuestiones esteticas , 1910) to his years of exile in Madrid ( Cuestiones gongorinas , 1927). The article shows how Alfonso Reyes was pushed to the periphery of the celebration while his ideas on Gongora remained, ironically, both central and unaccredited, becoming almost immediately the popular “tesis oficial del 27” as well as the beginning of Damaso Alonso’s lasting authority in gongorismo . With this successful cooptation and popularization of Reyes’s views on Gongora, the Generation of 1927 achieved not only the normalization of Gongora as a viable icon of Spanish national identity, but the appropriation of modernismo within the native legacy of gongorismo .

Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945

When, in the mid-1990s, the Art Institute of Chicago began a series of long-awaited renovations, staffers discovered a secret ‘trough-like space’ in a little-used storage closet; inside, reeking of solvents and decaying paper, was a forgotten hoard of 157 vibrantly coloured, outsized posters utterly unknown to curators and staff alike. The re-discovery of the Institute’s hidden trove of Second World War Soviet era TASS Windows posters reads like a fairy-tale; once found and identified, the posters were presented to the public in a show and documented in this lavish catalogue. In some ways, this magical story overshadows the real achievement here; this scholarly, well-researched tome forces us to assess not just the posters themselves, but also their changing significance over time. Drawing on the talents of established figures like painter Mikhail Cheremnykh and editor Osip Brik, TASS (the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Opinion) established a poster-making studio in 1941; the group rapidly mobilized, making large-scale posters for the studio’s centrally located windows in central Moscow and constantly updating them. But their true function and meaning was multifaceted; behind their nationalist ardour lay an almost mystical belief in the power of the poster that recalls an earlier generation of Russian artists. As the workshop issued their one thousandth poster in June 1944, they titled it ‘Our One Thousandth Blow’ [1], echoing a 1925 poem by the revolutionary poet and designer Vladimir Maiakovskii and announcing ‘I want the pen to be on a par with the bayonet.’

The Importance of Ernest: Poetic Vanguardism and Popular Revolution in Capel Lofft’s Forgotten Epic

In 1839 Britain teetered on the threshold of a revolution. The poet Capel Lofft aspired to trigger it by disseminating his incendiary epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, among the working classes. Ernest narrates the sanguinary triumph of a popular insurgency, and provides a blueprint for founding a democratic-communist republic. This essay seeks to recuperate Lofft and draw attention to his forgotten masterpiece of Chartist poetry. I make a case for Ernest’s literary merit and historical interest, highlighting its standing as the British nineteenth century’s most strident justification of political violence. My reading of the poem shows that Lofft uses a logic of vanguardism to synthesize two deeply antithetical convictions: radical egalitarianism, on the one hand, and belief in the inherent superiority of the poet, on the other. In his eponymous protagonist, Lofft creates a seductive image of the committed artist-revolutionary, and thereby sublimates his own conflicting ideas about the poet’s relation to the demos. Lofft proved incapable of quelling his ambivalence in life, however. He swiftly withdrew Ernest from circulation, stifling his own call to revolt—and ensuring that his poem would be neglected by posterity.

An Interview with H M Naqvi

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. An American rapper, widely regarded as one of the most influential and most skilled MCs. 2. An influential left-wing intellectual, revolutionary poet, one of the most famous Urdu language poets from Pakistan. 3. A world-renowned Pakistani musician, primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of Sufis. He was considered one of the greatest singers ever recorded. Possessing a six-octave vocal range, he could perform at a high level of intensity for several hours. 4. A combination of traditional Yoruba music, jazz, highlife, funk and chanted vocals fused with percussion and vocal styles, popularised in Africa in the 1970s. Its main creator was the Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Fela Kuti, who gave it its name. 5. Niggaz Wit Attitudes, an American hip hop group from Compton, California, widely considered one of the seminal acts of the gangsta rap sub-genre, at times even credited as the most important group in the history of hip hop. Active from 1986 to 1991, the group endured controversy due to the explicit nature of their lyrics and was subsequently banned from many mainstream US radio stations. In spite of this, the group has sold over 10 million CD units in the US alone. 6. Part of a hip hop duo with Rakim. 7. From ‘The Hour of Faithlessness’ by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. In The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Trans. Naomi Lazard. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988. 8. An American DJ from the South Bronx, New York, instrumental in the early development of hip hop throughout the 1980s. 9. Josh Malihabadi (5 Dec. 1894–22 Feb. 1982), born as Shabbir Hasan Khan, was a noted Urdu poet born in British India, who was an Indian citizen until 1958 when he emigrated to Pakistan and became a Pakistani citizen. He wrote ghazals and nazm under the takhallus (Urdu for nom de plume) Josh (literally ‘passion’ or ‘intensity’). 10. Iqbal (9 Nov. 1877–21 Apr. 1938), also known as Allama Iqbal, was a philosopher, poet and politician in British India who is widely regarded as having inspired the Pakistan Movement. He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both the Urdu and Persian languages. 11. Ice Cube is the stage name of O'Shea Jackson (born 15 June 1969), an American rapper, record producer, actor, screenwriter, film producer and director. He began his career as a member of the group CIA and later joined the rap group NWA. After leaving NWA in 1989 he built a successful solo career in music, and also as a writer, director, actor and producer in cinema. He was ranked eighth on MTV's list of the Ten Greatest MCs of All Time.

The posthumous legacy of Khlebnikov versus Mayakovsky sub specie Avant-Garde performance of scandal

The paper addresses the issue of the posthumous legacies of the two main Russian Avant-Garde revolutionary poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velemir Khlebnikov and draws largely on the memoir accounts available in this regard. The essay examines the pragmatics of operation of the post-Futurist public scandal which contributed to establishing/undermining the “symbolic value” of each poet’s debated legacy. The paper brings into discussion various methods of cultural analysis that include Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, theory of speech-acts and different apprehensions of public memory. Some inconsistencies in the strategic maneuvering of each author are brought into attention, dwelling upon the possible reasoning for their respective successes and failures. The complex issues that may be seen responsible for this process are analyzed in the essay along with additional Russian avant-garde figures who exploited the same pragmatics of performing practices.

¡Que se rinda tu madre! Leonel Rugama and Nicaragua's Changing Politics of Memory

The elucidation of collective memory takes place on continually shifting ground, leaving scholars of memory with few collective certainties of their own. One aspect appears constant: the emphasis on trauma as a way of framing memories of the past. The question of how to represent trauma is pivotal to the culture of memory in many Latin American countries. However, an exclusive focus on trauma can obscure the persistence of other memorial cultures. In Nicaragua, for example, a pantheon of revolutionary heroes still dominates the memorial landscape. Here, I examine the case of Leonel Rugama (1949–1970), a Nicaraguan revolutionary poet. Rugama's dying words, ¡que se rinda tu madre! (let your mother surrender!), are a central element in Nicaraguan collective memory. Comparing memorials to Rugama over three decades, I argue that the use of ¡que se rinda …! in the early 1980s is indicative of the iconoclastic power of a particular collective moment. In contrast, “¡que se rinda…” is absent from the 2010 memorial which marks the 40th anniversary of Leonel Rugama's death. This change reflects the present Sandinista regime's discomfort with the revolution's original radical intent, a discomfort amply justified by the recent re-appropriation of Rugama's final words by opponents of the current regime.

Impossible optimisms? Translating Turkish modernities into the Meta-terranean

This essay explores the potential for both transcultural thinking and methodological diversity in translation studies through a discussion of three twentieth-century Turkish cultural figures: national leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, revolutionary poet Nâzım Hikmet and openly gay-identified filmmaker Ferzan Özpetek. In drawing out and reexamining the possible textual points of communication that link them, as well as the divergent models of modernity, masculinity, linguistic invention and creativity that set them apart, the discussion thus reengages with the ever-present possibility for a decentered, multiple and migrant “Meta-terranean” translational culture: one that complicates present understandings of fixed territorial divisions, gender identities, and linguistic zones and renews the potential for alternative conduits for communication across space, time and cultural difference.

Adumbrative Allusion in Balzac’s Illusions perdue s

Balzac was a master of allusion. He usually embedded his allusive patterns so seamlessly that, although they may work on the reader's subconscious, they only call attention to themselves with great subtlety. While in most cases, as for example when he alludes to the female novelists Mme Girardin, Mme Guizot, and others in La muse du departement, he forms simple parallels that make his adventures seem more forceful and pertinent for contemporary readers, in some cases the allusions establish antitheses. In Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes, for example, the clear references to the biblical story of Esther and Mordecai create an obvious opposition to Balzac's Esther, for the latter serves not the sovereign God of the Hebrews but the maleficent Jacques Collin or Vautrin. Occasionally, the allusions create surprising complexity, encompassing entire works. I think of Eugenie Grandet, an instance where the author's references to the Bible and church history establish dueling religions that oppose Mammon to love. In all cases, Balzac's allusions add complexity and richness to the tapestry he weaves. (1) The allusions in Illusions perdues (1837-43) serve to adumbrate Lucien's fate. In 1819, shortly before the period when Illusions perdues was set, the writer and critic Henri de Latouche had revealed Chenier to the French public. Balzac refers to the revolutionary poet a number of times and, as the Pleiade editor, Roland Chollet, notes, associated him with toute une atmosphere morale de jeunesse, d'exaltation, d'idealisme forcene (5.147n2). Certainly, for Balzac, Chenier was unquestionably one of the great poets of France. He tried early on to pastiche him, he cited his poems in his letters, he took various passages to serve as epigraphs in his pre-Comedie humaine novels by Lord R'hoone, and what Chollet terms his delicate appreciation of Latouche's preface to the 1820 edition of Chenier leaves no doubt of the novelist's appreciation: Un poete retrouve par un poete,Lucien says (5.147 and n2). As Balzac put it in one of his letters to Madame Hanska, Chenier was for him poete de l'amour, le plus grand des poetes francais (Lettres a Madame Hanska 1.71). The text of Illusions perdues refers to Chenier repeatedly in connection with the two enthusiastic young men, Lucien and David, and casts long shadows of meaning forward, in particular relationship to Lucien. Such reiterations always indicate importance in La Comedie humaine. Most obviously, Lucien resembles Chenier as a great promise that was never fulfilled, however different the reasons for this lack of success. As Latouche put it, Andre Chenier n'avait en mourant ... qu'un nom promis a la celebrite. (2) Likewise, Balzac leaves no doubt that Lucien is an eagle, although young (5.147, 173), at least until his repeated failures reveal him as at most an aiglon (e.g., 5.577). Eagles are characterized by their daring flight, speed, and close association with thunder, fire, intelligence, and action (Cirlot 87, 321; Chevalier 750). Appropriately, given his desire for gloire and his love of flashy attire, his name derives from the etymon lux or light (Hanks 212-13). The text makes it clear that the young man could have established himself as an outstanding poet had he been stronger and capable of refusing easy paths to success, first as a journalist, then as a corrupt socialite. David, on the other hand, is ce boeuf.He wonderfully characterizes ox's symbolic qualities of patience, submission, and self-sacrifice (5.147, 559; Cirlot 236, 321, 750). For some three years David and Lucien had enjoyed getting together to read great, recent works of art and science. On one day in particular, David has just received a small 18mo volume of Chenier's poems, published in 1820, and he reads several: Neere, puis celle du Jeune Malade, puis l'elegie sur le suicide, celle dans le goute ancien, et les deux derniers iambes (5.147). Unquestionably, the readings emphasize the young men's enjoyment of the poetic moment. …

The Last Quatrain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ends of Ballads

Research Article| September 01 2010 The Last Quatrain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ends of Ballads Karen Jackson Ford Karen Jackson Ford Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2010) 56 (3): 371–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-4004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Karen Jackson Ford; The Last Quatrain: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Ends of Ballads. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2010; 56 (3): 371–395. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2010-4004 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

Walt Whitman, passant moderne

This article considers the major part played by the city in Leaves of Grass. Starting from an analysis of Whitman’s departure from the Romantic poets’ approach to the urban environment it charts the poems’ progress through various cities and examines the poet’s susceptibility to the language of the working men of Manhattan as the catalyst of his poetic revolution. Elaborating on Baudelaire’s flâneur, the paper finally discusses Whitman’s concept of modernity through an evocation of Manhattan—the city of which the persona of Song of Myself” proudly calls himself the son—as the idealised territory of a textual democracy in which the reader is made the poet’s equal through an erotics of reading that owes everything to this poetry’s urban origins.

'Exchange is Creation': The Revolutionary Poetics of Muriel Rukeyser and Hugh MacDiarmid

The increased cultural authority of science in the early decades of the twentieth century called into question prior cultural assumptions regarding the status of poetry as an important discipline. The debate about the changed nature of the relations between the arts and sciences assumed particular importance for the literary left, as writers, critics and intellectuals debated the role which culture would play in political revolution. In order to broaden our understanding of the left's engagement with the problem of the relationship between the arts and sciences, this article will compare the work of the leftist American poet Muriel Rukeyser with that of the Scottish nationalist and Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid. In particular, I will explore the ways in which their understanding of the essential similarities between the arts and sciences informed their conception of the relationship between poetics and political praxis.

From Page-Poet to Recording Artist: Mutabaruka interviewed by Eric Doumerc

Mutabaruka is a dub poet who has been performing in Jamaica and all over the world since the 1970s. Over the years he has made his mark both as a page-poet and as a dynamic performer and he has reached his audience through sound recordings and books. In this interview he discusses the reasons that initially led him to write, the development of dub poetry as opposed to deejay music, the relationship between his poetry and traditional English poetry, the importance of religion in Jamaica and his work as a radio host (for his show “The Cutting Edge”) and record producer. Well-known poems by Mutabaruka, including “Revolutionary Poets”, “Dis Poem” and “The People’s Court” are also discussed, providing some insight into their composition.

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain