School Of Poetry Research Articles

“When We Replace Our World …”

The Fergana School of poetry is one of post-Soviet poetry’s most remarkable phenomena. In the early 1990s, members of this school—Shamshad Abdullaev and Khamdam Zakirov, along with Hamid Ismailov, who is close to the school—proposed a project for the recreation of Uzbek literature. This approach involves inventing a new type of subjectivity that, in terms of a number of its features, could be described as a postcolonial subjectivity. This article examines the three components of this approach: rethinking Uzbek literature as part of world literature and the related process of “self-exoticizing”; identifying the particular mode of visuality that distinguishes the work of the Fergana School; and searching for a new linguistic identity, one more cosmopolitan than that offered by Uzbek language and literature. Using materials published in the Tashkent journal Eastern Star [Zvezda Vostoka] (which was edited by Abdullaev in 1991–1996), Korchagin examines these three components.

Al bello aparecer de este lucero: Metatextualidad poética en la escritura de Fernando de Herrera y Enrique Lihn

espanolEl presente articulo busca efectuar un examen conjunto de la obra del poeta espanol Fernando de Herrera (1534-1597), maximo representante de la Escuela Sevillana y anticipador del espiritu barroco, y del poemario Al bello aparecer de este lucero (1997a [1983]) de Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), en funcion del analisis de la metatextualidad que subyace en la produccion de ambos autores y que permite la configuracion de una poetica afin, manifestada por medio de la estetica manierista-barroca y el dilema amoroso, este ultimo como clave central a traves de la cual se busca dar cuenta de una problematica metadiscursiva asociada a la comprension critica del fenomeno poetico y a la imposibilidad de su revelacion, lo que es representado por una serie de dispositivos simbolicos: el lucero, la amada, la imagen, la belleza, la escritura y la memoria. EnglishThe aim of this article is to examine the works of the Spanish poet Fernando de Herrera (15341597), leader of the Sevillian School of poetry and early advancer of the Baroque spirit, and the book of poems Al bello aparecer de este lucero (1997a [1983]) by Enrique Lihn (1929-1988), in order to analyze the underlying meta-textuality in the poetic production of both authors. This meta-textuality enables the configuration of a common form of poetry, displayed through a Mannierist Baroque aesthetic and the dilemma of love. The latter predicament becomes the key through which both authors seek to explain a meta-discourse problem associated to the critical understanding of the poetic phenomenon and the inability to reveal it, thereby representing it through a series of symbolic devices: the daystar, the loved one, the image, the beauty, the writing and the memory.

A COMPARATIVE ECO-QUEER ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED POEMS OF ALLEN GINSBERG, THOM GUNN, AND AGHA SHAHID ALI

INTRODUCTION:Ecocriticism is the emerging branch of literary criticism. It starts in the early 1990s and is continuously flourishing due to its contemporary relevance. Basically ecocriticism talks about the connection between literature and the natural environment. It starts in USA in late 1980s with William Rueckert's article Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in appeared in 1978. Rueckert is also the first to use the term ecocriticism. Another founding figure of Ecocriticism in USA is Cheryll Glotfelty, co-editor with Harold Fromm of Ecocriticism Reader: Landmark in Literary Ecology (1996). In UK ecocriticism is known as Green Studies and the founding figure of this approach is Jonathan Bate with his landmark work Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991). Before Bate, Raymond Williams has already pointed out the importance and use of nature in literature in his work Country and the City (1973).Ecocriticism is inspired by the works of nineteenth century American writers- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. In UK it is inspired by Romantic poets of early nineteenth century. All these writers put a lot of emphasis and focus on nature, natural scenes and landscapes. This tendency differentiates them from previous literary traditions like Neo-Classical school of poetry and the Age of Reason in UK and Puritinism and Enlightenment in America.The main focus of ecocriticism is to study how natural world is dealt in the literary works. Physical environment does not only mean the natural landscapes, but all that is naturally given to us like body, sex, complexion, age etc. As (Kerridge, 2006) states, Texts are evaluated in terms of their environmentally harmful or helpful effects. (2006, p. 530). Laurence Coupe, in his work, said that green theory 'debates Nature in order to defend nature' (Coupe, 2013, p. 155). (Garrard, 2012) describes the task of ecocriticism in these lines, The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which 'nature' is always in some ways culturally constructed, and the other on the fact that nature really exists, both the object and, albeit distantly, the origin of our discourse (212, p. 10).Now in these days, ecocriticism is incorporating other theoretical areas within its range as Ecofeminism, Deconstruction Ecology, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Eco-Marxism, and most recent Queer Ecology. focus of each of these sub-areas, within ecocriticsm, is the study of nature in relation to the particular issues related to their previous fields. Ecofeminism explores the relationship or affinity between nature and females. Similarly Deconstruction Ecology talks about how a focus on nature can deconstruct the anthropocentric view of humanity.The long standing debate of Queer Theory - whether the homosexuality is a cultural construction or natural? - can be discussed more comprehensively and analytically through the help of ecocriticism, by stating the fact that a lot of plants, animals, sea-creatures, birds and almost all the flowers are either homosexual, bisexual, intersexual, autosexual or hermaphrodite, Plants and animals are hermaphroditic before they are bisexual and are bisexual before they are heterosexual. (Morton, 2010, p. 276). So if all these natural beings can be homosexual then why can't human being. In this way queer ecology provides a queer way of thinking environmentally and an ecological way of thinking queerly. It is not that we have to search how environment or nature is used in queer texts, but the very construction and manipulation of queerness and nature is the issue. Sandilands and Erickson describes the task of queer ecology as, Queer, then, is both noun and verb in this project: ours is an ecology that may begin in the experiences and perceptions of non-heterosexual individuals and communities, but is even more importantly one that calls into question heteronormativity itself as part of its advocacy around issues of nature and environment-and vice versa. …

Rewriting Struggles as Strength: Young Adults’ Reflections on the Significance of Their High School Poetry Community

In a moment when schools are failing to meet the needs of many youth, recent research has suggested that relational and art-based pedagogies, such as spoken word poetry, offer possibilities for repurposing classrooms to meet the needs of students who have experienced marginalization in schools and other institutions. This article contributes to the literature in critical pedagogy and youth spoken word by taking a retrospective perspective to analyze what a group of urban youth who experienced failure in schools remembered as meaningful from a high school poetry class they identified as empowering. Using case study and interview methods to unpack participants’memories of their poetry class as early adults, the study identifies that the poetry community served as a turning point for many youth because it allowed them to nurture healing relationships in the context of a school community that helped them shatter institutional silence about various forms of oppression and trauma and sparked changes in the ways they saw themselves as individuals and community members. Through participation in the structures and rituals of this literacy-learning community, participants remembered developing agentive identities and transforming their struggles into sources of strength. That this class and the writing practices it engendered continued to hold meaning for this group of youth, who had otherwise held generally negative narratives about schooling, advances current perspectives on the role of nontraditional approaches to literacy instruction in schools.

From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon

Reviewed by: From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon Michael Calabrese Christopher Cannon. From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv, 297. $55.00. In this handsome volume from Oxford, Christopher Cannon works into book form material from six of his previous publications in such journals as The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, New Medieval Literature, and ELH: English Literary History, now molded together with new material and a new rhetorical framework appropriate to a monograph, convenient for those wanting a "greatest hits" compilation of Cannon's engaging work (with bonus tracks) in the field of grammar and learning. Unifying the current volume, Cannon shows throughout how the various exercises learned at school equipped the major Ricardian poets for poetic creation in English. The book will mainly appeal to scholars and advanced graduate students, but the chapters that offer concrete examples from the major poets (Chaucer, Langland, and Gower) may be useful for classroom teaching, as they illustrate how poets cleverly transformed school exercises into some of the most famous, beloved, and intriguing moments of Middle English literature in texts such as the Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's prologues, The Tale of Melibee, the Monk's portrait, the Troilus, endless episodes in Piers Plowman, and many other examples that Cannon marshals in detailed comparisons of the school texts and the poets' verses. For the schoolboys, we learn, were inherently poets in training; as Cannon writes, "if poetry is usually the culmination of literacy training, it is almost always that training's first step" (2). In reading all these chapters collectively, one certainly does get a sense of what it was like to be a medieval schoolboy, and the monograph as it now stands makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval grammar schools and their role in educating some of the major canonical poets in English medieval literature. Chapter 1's section "Fiant Latina!" (Let there be Latin!), argues that students were (despite what medieval chroniclers have said) trained in "a fundamentally Latin pedagogy" (37). And the poets later wrote major works in English because of their growing awareness that English too has a grammar that can be understood and put to use creatively. Cannon's coinage "grammaticalization" may not be elegant, but it encapsulates the processes of learning and creativity at work in the schoolboys turned poets, as Cannon takes us beyond the traditional understanding of education as training in ethics to reveal it also as "a primer in literary [End Page 316] possibility" (14). "There is a remarkably straight line," Cannon argues, from the schoolbooks that survive … through the agile understandings of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, to the techniques that made the literature these three writers produced distinctive" (15). Chapter 2, "The Ad Hoc School," reconsiders the texts and even the physical structures of the schools, arguing that the notion of a standardized curriculum and mode of instruction have been overstated, for education was much more improvisatory than previously thought, as a collection called "Cato" might not even include Cato. Cannon continues: "Whenever a medieval person had occasion to write about how he learned to read and write, in fact, he almost always described a local tutelary relationship rather than an institution" (59). In "Schoolboy Improvisation" Cannon argues that certain classic texts about writing that we usually associate with Chaucer such as the Poetria nova are works Chaucer would have studied later in life, for he would have already acquired instruction in the making of poetry in grammar school. Cannon then follows with a series of examples of school verses made in English where it's hard to tell the difference between an exercise and a poem, displaying the birth of poetic invention arising out of exercises in learning Latin. In fact many of the free-standing poems we "now value as literature" were produced in the mode of a schoolroom translation exercise, so learning Latin and creating verses in English were taught and practiced simultaneously. For this reason "the idea that he might write English verse of his own was almost impossible for such a schoolboy...

The Brink of Continuity (on Ashbery)

The Brink of Continuity (on Ashbery) Charles Bernstein (bio) On September 5, 2017, a few days after John Ashbery died, Le Monde published an obituary for him by Olivier Brossard: “Pour le poète américain, l’écriture était ouverture, fuite ou fugue, le refus d’une identité ou d’un poème qui soient clos ou définis à jamais”: For this American poet, writing was an opening, flight or fugue, the refusal of an identity for a poem that is closed or defined forever. I appreciate that Brossard addresses the identity of the poem in this opening paragraph, something sometimes lost in America, where there is so much attention given to the identity of the poet that the identity of the poem is eclipsed. Not that a poem can ever be separated from the person who wrote it. It’s just that with a poem you start with the flight and fugue of the words, not with what the poem represents. The day Ashbery died, the New York Times posted an obituary by its official obituary writer, the talented Dinitia Smith (with “Maggie Astor and David Orr contributed reporting” appended at the end). The oddest thing about Smith’s obit (O-1) was a paragraph on Ashbery’s relation to his parents: When I was about 3 or 4 years old, [my father] said to me one day, ‘Who do you love more, me or your mother?’ and I said, ‘My mother.’” No doubt the bored masses of Times readers could find at least this something they could relate to. I might have said the same to my father when I was three, but I hope it doesn’t land in any obituaries. Smith had the historical sense to mention Barbara Guest as one of the company of poets most closely associated with Ashbery, even if she called “Frank O’Hara” John, which I am sure Ashbery and O’Hara would have found amusing: Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, John O’Hara and others as they swam in the currents of modernism, surrealism and Abstract Expressionism then coursing through the city, drawing from and befriending artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Jane Freilicher. When David Orr’s byline was added to Smith’s the next morning (O-2), “Frank” was back and the poets were no longer “swimming in the currents of modernism” but, less aptly, reveling. And alas! Guest was out and the New York School was just guys: Mr. Ashbery was originally associated with the New York school of poetry of the 1950s and ’60s, joining Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara and others as they reveled in the currents of modernism. The anecdote about the poet’s mother was also excised, making way for a bit more ideological clean-up. David Orr is most notable for his April 2, 2006, front-page Times Book Review rave for a favorite of Ashbery’s, Elizabeth Bishop. The piece begins: You are living in a world created by Elizabeth Bishop. Granted, our culture owes its shape to plenty of other forces — Hollywood, Microsoft, Rachael Ray — but nothing matches the impact of a great artist, and in the second half of the 20th century, no American artist in any medium was greater than Bishop (1911–79). This claim is so wacky that it can only be understood as a fetish for Bishop and her patron Robert Lowell, two of the central ideological icons of Cold War Official Verse Culture. And like all such fetishes, it reduces the poetry to propaganda. Ashbery and his New American Poetry comrades were the proponents of an alternative to the “cooked” (a.k.a. half-baked) poetry of Official Verse Culture – sometimes called “raw,” meaning grounded in process. (Lowell makes the deceptive distinction between open-form “raw” poems and closed-form “cooked” poems in his 1960 National Book Award acceptance speech.) So Brossard’s elegant Ashberian phrase, “clos ou définis à jamais,” is quite specific and delightfully so. O-1 mentions a key issue of Cold War aesthetic ideology – But [Ashbery’s] most significant artistic...

On Empson by Michael Wood

Reviewed by: On Empson by Michael Wood Andrew Motion (bio) Michael Wood, On Empson (Princeton University Press, 2017), 184pp. Near the beginning of this excellent short study of the criticism and poetry of William Empson, Michael Wood takes a leaf from his subject’s late book Using Biography; he reminisces about hearing Empson give the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge, England, in 1974—“waving about a piece of paper on which he had some notes, not lecturing so much as commenting on what had come up in the office hours he had held the week before in Magdalen College.” Encouraged by Wood’s example, I’ll begin in the same way. I first heard Empson’s name in the spring of 1970, when I was seventeen years old, and my high school English teacher asked us to read and talk about the poem “To an Old Lady.” This tribute to his mother, which is haunted by other writings (King Lear at the opening: “Ripeness is all…,” Paradise Lost at the close: “. . . in darkness is she visible”), and dense with riddling ingenuities (“Bees sting their need, the keeper’s queen invader”), was immediately very attractive to me. I might fairly say that I fell half in love with its un-easeful life and energy. When I won the school poetry competition a few months later, I chose Empson’s Collected Poems as my prize. And although I was very often baffled by lines I then began to linger over, I never lost my deep liking and admiration for them. They seemed astoundingly witty—and they still do today. I still feel flattered as well as entertained by the intellectual demands they make on me, and I still feel enchanted by their music: elaborately formal but also direct and no-nonsense. Tough, as well as tricky. A couple of years after leaving school, when I was a student at Oxford, Empson came to give a reading, and of course I went to listen. It was [End Page 477] disappointing. Although I still remember the thrill of actually seeing him (that owlish face, that sweeping moustache, that extraordinary beard sprouting beneath the chin but not around the mouth), I couldn’t hear most of what he said. He delivered his poems in a quick-fire mumble. Five years later, when I was teaching English at the University of Hull, I went to listen again. This time he was introduced by Philip Larkin (whom I was sitting directly behind: I saw Larkin turn up—or possibly turn off—his hearing aid as proceedings got under way), and there was amplification. But it was another disappointment. Empson swayed in front of the microphone to such an extent that his words were continually bent out of shape, in a poetic version of the Doppler effect. But never mind. As far as I was concerned, having by now read the great critical works, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of Pastoral (193), The Structure of Complex Words (1951), and Milton’s God (1961) as well as the poems—which Empson had stopped writing in the mid-1940s —I was still watching one of the twentieth century’s giants. Which meant, when I went to work as poetry editor for his publisher Chatto and Windus in 1982, and discovered that no one from the firm had been in touch with him for a long time, I made it my business to see whether he had anything new that he wanted to publish. The (also recently-arrived) managing director Carmen Callil and I were duly invited for a drink at Empson’s house in Hampstead, north London. I was thirty years old and frankly a bit awe-struck. Empson, who often spoke (not that I knew it at the time) in his letters about the value of drink as a social lubricant, noticed this and perhaps took pity on me—or perhaps simply carried on as usual. Herding together four tall glasses on a kitchen work-surface (his wife Hetta was also there) he shook an open bottle of vodka roughly in the air above them all, until they were about half full, then did the same with...

Touchstone poetry: writing as a catalyst for moments of development

Purpose Extant research has painted a clear picture of the myriad ways that schools are failing to provide a meaningful education, and meaningful literacy pedagogies, to all youth. Given this crisis shouldered disproportionately by youth of color in urban schools, this paper aims to take a retrospective approach to understanding the lasting reverberations of a high school poetry class on a group of students who experienced urban traumas including but not limited to educational injustices. In contrast to the representations of failing schools, some current research offers various portraits of urban students engaging in empowering ways in classrooms that make critical use of media arts, poetry and hip hop. The questions driving this study are based on what happens once students step out of these alternative classroom spaces. For youth who have dropped out of the traditional system, what was the nature of the writing they produced in an alternative literacy learning space and what relationship did it have to their development as young adults? Design/methodology/approach Using qualitative case study methodology, this paper explores the memorable writing produced in the context of a high school poetry class by six case study participants to understand its meaning in their lives over time. It is through a dialogic lens that this research makes sense of the relationship between the written words produced by these youth, their actions in and on the world in their early adulthood, and their moments of development as survivors of trauma and as civic actors. Findings Student discussion of what I describe as touchstone poems revealed how these poems functioned to reorganize experiences and memories for the case study participants that enabled them to feel increased agency in relation to their personal and socio-cultural struggles. Originality/value For these students who were perpetually labeled as at-risk, poetry class served as a space where they could collectively engage in positive risk-taking that held meaning in their lives after high school and catalyzed the development of agentive identities.

Coventry Patmore's Corpus

This article challenges the longstanding popular and critical consensus that Coventry Patmore is an “abstract,” “idealizing” or “immaterial” poet. On the contrary, Patmore vied with Swinburne as the most cosmopolitan of Victorian poets, being a radically conservative Hegelian and heterodox Catholic, in addition to producing some of the most technically experimental verse in the English vernacular. By reading his varied corpus, I demonstrate that Patmore thinks the body in a complex and dialectical manner, which nonetheless remains significantly distinct from what became known as “the fleshly school of poetry.” This argument rests on several related readings, all of which seek to correct the standard account of Patmore’s career. I firstly consider his aphoristic writings, which demonstrate Patmore’s parallel thinking of erotic desire and theological devotion that disconcerted several putatively more “embodied” contemporaries such as Hopkins. I then seek to restore Patmore to a broader European context, which includes Paul Claudel and G. W. F., of whose work Patmore proves one of the finest English interpreters. Finally, I read The Unknown Eros (1877), to suggest a dynamic and fluid relation with what is often erroneously taken to clinch his reputation as a prosodic idealist, “The Essay on Metrical Law.”

Ancient Magreben Poetry and the problematical Issue of Imitation and Innovation A study of the Poet Iben Kadi Mila’s Madripal Poem

Iben Kadi Mila is one of the superbly gifted Magreben poets. He is theproprietor of an outstanding school of poetry. He is mostly renowned for hiscontributions in developing Arabic poetry at the linguistic and stylistic levels.Notwithstanding his scarce poetic products, which are dispersed in a few literaryand historical resources, his laudably matchless praises of Thiquat EddawlaIben Elkalbi is a prototype of well-developed Maghrebian poetry. He knewthrough it how to take full advantage of the Eastern poetic school and craftthereafter his own peculiar poetic style.

The University as the “Imagined Other”: Making Sense of Community Co-Produced Literacy Research

The University as the “Imagined Other”Making Sense of Community Co-Produced Literacy Research Kate Pahl (bio) The motivation for working together is really less to do with bringing different skills to bear on a common problem but rather, it is this immediacy of response encountered in the discussion of ideas, combined with the consummate otherness of thought which the collaborative partner brings.1 Ian Rawlinson and Nick Crowe (2012) Writing With or Without the “Other”: What Is There to Know? Collaboration can begin with a conversation. Listening Voices, Telling Stories was a project that engaged women from ethnic minority backgrounds in reading poetry from a number of different cultures; they met in a community library in Rotherham, a city located in South Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. Zanib Rasool was one of the community researchers who developed this project. Zanib is from a British South Asian background and is passionate about the need for women to recover their heritage through poetry. She suggested that together we could read Urdu women poets from Pakistan who were oft en overlooked in school poetry teaching. As an activist in the community, she was also determined to support women and work with them to create spaces for them to organize. I had a conversation with Zanib that took place in a community library, which I recorded in my fieldnotes in March of 2015: We arrived early, as I was planning to talk to Zanib about the safe spaces for women and girls project. We talked about the ways in which [End Page 129] it was important for women to do things for themselves. Zanib talked about a mother and toddler group run by women volunteers which closed when paid workers took it over. She mentioned a toy library that had been very successful. She talked about how informal ways of getting together—like her group at school—enabled different kinds of conversations to happen. Here Zanib’s focus was on the need to work informally to create safe spaces for things to happen with a focus on women and girls. She was working through her experience of community development through organizing a literary project. This made sense to me. My interest in community change processes emerged out of my own history. From 1987 to 1994 I was an outreach worker for an adult literacy scheme in Hammersmith (London) as an employee of the Council for Racial Equality. This was a neighborhood project that included a commitment to a student-led vision of what would happen within the adult literacy project, and it emphasized community writing and participation. I worked to support parents in setting up writing groups to produce poetry and life stories for publication. My main concern became constructing spaces for women where they could address their experiences. I continued working with the group outside of my role as an outreach worker because of my commitment to the goals of anti-racist practice within communities, reversing and shift ing sites of power to lever change as and when it was needed (Bird and Pahl 1994). Our shared history of community development work created a space where we could rely on collective understandings and visions. Over the years Zanib and I had planned and developed projects together: Zanib in her role as community activist, and I in my role as academic in the School of Education at a local university. Most recently our work had focused on the cultural context of civic engagement and the need to engage women in projects that were self-directed and owned by the women themselves, in community settings. This particular project was undertaken in the context of what was then known as the Imagine project, part of a national initiative called the Connected Communities program, which was funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council (esrc) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (ahrc). This was a radical new funding initiative that asked university researchers and academics to write proposals that were co-designed with community partners. The [End Page 130] program was run by the ahrc in the United Kingdom (see Facer and Enright 2016). Imagine is a unique project that sought to create research...

Characteristics of occurrence school in Divan of Meili Mashhadi

Occurrence versification is a way of speech that by building intimacy in speech and words, and stating some forms of romantic relationships, the audience believes the poetry upon hearing because the poet in this type of poetry has abandoned romantic poetry generalizations and describes a beloved that has a specific appearance. The physical presence of the beloved in the poem is the first and most obvious sign of the occurrence school. By reading an occurrence school poetry, the beloved eyes, smile, laugh, or even how she sits down with the rival is spontaneously pictured in the mind of the reader. “Meili Mashhadi” d. 983 AH is one of the poets of occurrence school. In his poems, characteristics of occurrence school such as simplicity and fluency of the language, lack of verbal and spiritual figures of speech, use of slang words and phrasings, expression of details and actual states and romantic relationships and mundanity of the beloved and … is evident and has a high frequency. In this paper, some of these features are noted while studying the divan of this poet.

Gender, Language, and the Politics of Disembodiment in Aurora Leigh

Gender, Language, and the Politics of Disembodiment in Aurora Leigh Barbara Barrow (bio) Aurora Leigh is a political poem because it is a physical poem. While feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s celebrated the work’s vividly embodied imagery, a more recent critical interest in the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry, with its focus on sensations, rhythms, and pulses, has further emphasized the central role of women’s physical experience in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic.1 Such analyses magnify Aurora’s desire to craft a poetry that will express her own “full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age.”2 And yet this same emphasis on the body also fuels the poem’s internal dismissal of women’s poetry. In Book II, the central male antagonist, Romney Leigh, points to Aurora’s body as an obstacle to political expression. Catching the young Aurora in the act of crowning herself as a poet, Romney insists that women cannot write about contemporary debates over labor or slavery because they understand everything in terms of their own experience: “All’s yours and you, / All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise / Just nothing to you” (II.196–198). In a powerfully essentializing gesture, Romney invalidates Aurora’s poetry by means of her body. His insult articulates a larger double bind that is at the heart of Aurora Leigh: namely, the tension between the work’s lively interest in political questions and its commitment to representing these questions in an expressive, physical language. Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, then, turns on the conflict between two kinds of bodies: the larger social body the poet seeks to represent and the distorting presence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility. In what follows, I argue that Aurora Leigh responds to this conflict by claiming disembodiment as a poetic and political strategy. While acknowledging the poem’s insistently physical idiom, I seek to uncover an alternative subtext of images of abstracted, vanishing, and intangible bodies, and to show how this subtext is equally central to Aurora Leigh. Through the associated figures of Aurora and Marian, Barrett Browning’s epic presents us with many examples of the body’s denial and disappearance. These negations offer a revitalized political poetics even as they disassociate women’s language from women’s physical experiences. [End Page 243] In focusing on Aurora Leigh’s transfigured poetics, I join critics such as Kirstie Blair, Jason Rudy, and Charles LaPorte who underline Barrett Browning’s alertness to language as an art of spiritual transformation. While Blair and Rudy analyze the spiritual underpinnings of Barrett Browning’s relation between poetics and the body, LaPorte has shown how Aurora Leigh “genders prophecy and poetry” in ways reminiscent of related scholarship that foregrounds Aurora’s connections to Victorian sage discourse.3 Like these works, this essay sets out from the premise that Aurora Leigh bases its poetics on a creative attachment to language’s divine potential, one that upholds an incarnational poetics to unite the material and spiritual realms.4 Embodiment and disembodiment in Aurora Leigh dialectically transform each other, at times informing Aurora’s desire for detached contemplation, at other times realizing her eager bodily longing for a Christ to descend and “straighten out / The leathery tongue turned back into the throat” (V.108–109). However, while these works have convincingly demonstrated the link between the material and the spiritual realms in Barrett Browning’s work, I wish to focus on Aurora Leigh’s extensive engagement with the subject of earthly political sovereignty. I argue that, if the poem understands a principle of incarnation to animate language, so too does it recognize these principles to be associated with a long tradition of political power. This feudal tradition, or “body politic,” underwent shifts in the nineteenth century toward a more inclusive terminology of the “social body” that was said to include the people at large or the lower classes.5 This essay demonstrates how Aurora Leigh understands this social body bear traces of its roots in an autocratic feudal hierarchy, one symbolized in the poem’s representations of the French emperor Napoleon III and of Romney’s phalanstery—a structure whose failure some critics have read as indicative...

The Utilization of Instructional Resources in Teaching Kiswahili Poetry in Secondary Schools in Kenya

This study investigated the utilization of instructional resources by Kiswahili teachers in the teaching of poetry in secondary schools in Nandi North Sub - County. The objectives of the study were: to investigate the training of Kiswahili teachers and their ability to use instructional resources, to establish the types of instructional resources commonly used by Kiswahili teachers and to identify the challenges Kiswahili teachers encounter while using instructional resources in teaching. The study was guided by the operant conditioning theory which explains how language teaching and learning takes place in a classroom. Systematic sampling was used to select 20 secondary schools in Nandi North Sub - County of the Rift Valley region from which form three Kiswahili teachers were chosen to participate in the research. The research instruments that were used to collect data were questionnaire, observation and interview schedule. All these were administered by the researcher in person. The research instruments were pre tested to establish their validity and reliability. For the purpose of validation, experts were sought from the department of Curriculum Instruction and Educational Media and test re test method was used for reliability. Piloting was done in two secondary schools in Vihiga District. Data from the field was analyzed using descriptive statistics, involving percentages, frequencies, mean and mode. In view of these findings it was recommended that there is need for teachers to utilize instructional resources in teaching Kiswahili poetry to enhance the amount of information a student can learn and retain. The researcher therefore recommends that whenever the matter at hand involves learning, schools should strive to have enough Kiswahili poetry text books for both the teacher and the student and also use other instructional resources in teaching Kiswahili poetry. These findings will help curriculum planners, teachers and students of Kiswahili. Curriculum planners will find the findings beneficial in organizing Kiswahili syllabus. Kiswahili teachers will use these findings to improve performance in Kiswahili poetry.

Poetic Reflections in a Cemetery: A Comparative Study of English and Persian Graveyard School of Poetry

Abstract. The literature of eighteenth century is imbued with the combination of melancholy and religious didacticism. The Graveyard Poets, known as the founders of the Graveyard School, were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of eighteenth century who emphasized the subjects of death, temporality of life, and sorrow in their poetry. As their group name suggests, they reveled in writing while in cemeteries, and their works portray death’s physical manifestations, and consider phenomena related with death such as darkness, the tomb, death’s odors, and ghosts. While relishing in the images of death and the grave, the poets in the graveyard school sought to depict the trappings of death in a way that the reader would gain an appreciation of death as a transitional phase. The present study scrutinizes the poetic and thematic impacts of English graveyard poetry on Persian poetry, especially in the poetry of Nader Naderpour and Nosrat Rahmani. It likewise demonstrates that these two renowned Iranian poets were under the influence of the English graveyard school of poetry.

Ouyang Jianghe’s Aesthetic Principles in their Relation to the Modern Poetic Tradition in Russia

This article presents a comparative analysis of the modern Chinese and Russian poetry. Peculiar linguo-philosophical ideas of an internationally recognized Chinese poet Ouyang Jianghe are being juxtaposed with poetic views of famous Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko. The paper should be of interest to readers, because it deals with the yet unexplored topic. Recently, scholars have focused on the relationship between Chinese and Russian poetry of the classical period. According to a generally accepted opinion, the dialogue between Russian and Chinese literary traditions does not move further than the classical masterpieces by Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy. Hypothesis of research – a creative interaction between Russian and Chinese literatures still goes on after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has lead to the loosening of strong cultural ties between Russia and China. As a proof of this statement the present paper reveals striking similarities between the theories of the Acmeist Mandelstam and the leading post-Obscure poet Ouyang Jianghe. That is, both of them share the language-centered approach to the art of poetry. Secondly, this paper provides factual evidence that Heidegger’s view on language as the house of being is one the main features uniting poetry of Dragomoshchenko, Brodsky and Ouyang. In summary, Russian school of poetry has left such a deep imprint on Chinese poetry that it can still be seen in the works of Post-Obscure poets. This article helps strengthen the intercultural dialogue, enhances mutual understanding between Russia and China and encourages further research regarding modern Chinese and Russian poetic traditions. Keywords: word, vivifying power, dissection, Hellenism, Acropolis, hunger, house of being, readability

What Makes a Poem Jewish?

What Makes a Poem Jewish?

Curricular Commons

Curricular Commons Jeremy Cohen Challenging General Education Students, and Ourselves San Francisco’s inaugural poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, first read his “Challenges to Young Poets” at the city’s Annual High School Poetry Festival on February 3, 2001. “To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen, to be a poet at forty is to be a poet,” Ferlinghetti told his youthful audience. “Be both,” he counseled. Ferlinghetti isn’t just any poet. His intellectual leadership is deeply grounded in experience and education. He was a U.S. Navy ship commander in World War II and is the recipient of an M.A. from Columbia University and a doctorate from the Sorbonne. He has influenced generations of writers, artists, academics, and citizens as the co-founder and owner of City Lights Bookstore. His own writing, and the work of others he has supported, takes it as axiomatic that the poet’s mandate finds structure and substance not only (if at all) in the university, but also in everyday questions, emotions, and knowledge drawn from life beyond the classroom. The publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl & Other Poems, Ferlinghetti was anything but timid in his commitment to the value of a public commons. He was arrested, and acquitted in 1957 in the freedom of expression precedent-setting obscenity case generated by his publication of Ginsberg’s poetry. Ferlinghetti is an internationally respected painter and playwright and a tireless mentor and public intellectual who brings the joy and the gravitas of intellectual pursuit into the forefront of wide public awareness. A Coney Island of the Mind remains among the highest selling poetry volumes ever published. At a Westwood reading in the late 1960s, a young person asked Ferlinghetti why so many poets seemed esoteric and out of reach. Could poetry be both cognizant of its structure and legacy, and accessible too? [End Page vii] The poet’s job is to communicate to his readers, Ferlinghetti said. A poet who can’t be understood is a failure. Volume 64.3 of Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences arrives on campus as students, faculty, advisers, and administrators immerse themselves in autumn semester traditions that include the offering of general education courses, and (what some may consider) A Coney Island of the Mind reconsideration of the general education curriculum by faculty senate committees, deans, and department chairs. The articles by David Aitchison, Eniko Csomay et al., Robert Zai III, Jane Venes, and Stephen Biscotte approach general education from several methodologies and perspectives. Not surprisingly, assessment (what are we teaching? Are students learning what we think we’re teaching?) and curricular reform (what should we be teaching?) are at the forefront of their inquiries. Taken together, they share in common a belief that general education can and should produce academic learning and intellectual experience beyond each student’s chosen disciplinary path in the humanities, sciences, or professions. The authors’ contributions are published here with the goal of encouraging readers to engage in what Ferlinghetti might see as a curricular poetry, the purposeful offering of a collection of courses that challenge students to immerse themselves in general education at eighteen because they are learning about what others have found to be of value, and to continue with thoughtful inquiries at forty because they have learned to explore and to question. This issue’s challenge is not to students alone. We—faculty, advisers, and administrators—need continually to develop and redevelop curriculum and pedagogy that students understand, not because it is simple or dumbed down, but because it is meaningful. Curriculum and pedagogy that, analogous to Ferlinghetti’s response to his Westwood inquisitor, succeed at communicating the joy and intellectual excitement of inquiry and exploration, because to do less is to fail as educators. [End Page viii] Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University

Southern Counterpublics: The Poetics and Politics of South Lebanon’s Ruinscapes

This article explores the commemorative poetics of Shuʿarāʾ al-Janūb, a group of South Lebanese poets who interpellated the classical Arabic tradition of ruin-gazing known as al-wūqūf ʿalā al-aṭlāl (stopping at the ruins) into their laments over Israel’s protracted occupation of South Lebanon (1978-2000) as well as their marginalized positioning within the nation’s literary landscape. I argue that Shuʿarāʾ al-Janūb can be seen as creating “counterpublics,” a new texture of memory expressive of an understudied swathe of Lebanon’s population that faced occupation and neglect on the literary, national and humanitarian front. Arḍ al-Janūb (the southern earth) stands in for the pre-Islamic ṭalal (ruined site), gripping the imaginative poetics of its memory practitioners who conceive of the land as a repository for their personal and collective memories of forced migration and war. Rather than the qaṣīdah’s amorous site of return, however, the ruined southern landscape is reconfigured as an impossible port of entry and unwelcoming host to war. South Lebanon’s recurring seasons and cycles of war and occupation place it in a blind spot of historical and cultural memory for the larger part of its occupation. By imbricating ruins and memory into their poetic meditations on the deformation of this once enchanted landscape they called home, Shuʿarāʾ al-Janūb attempt to reposition the South as not a liminal space in the nation’s cultural imaginary, but rather a deeply central one by calling into question issues of belonging, war and the art(ifice) of commemoration. By delving into this rural periphery, I examine its separate fate from the rest of the nation through its poetic landscapes of war. I argue that this new school of poetry entwines the performance of returning to and beholding ruined spaces with a critical and political form of witness. The sometimes spectral, sometimes enchanted and sometimes scarred poetic landscapes of Shuʿarāʾ al-Janūb suture together a discourse that galvanizes nature, memory, myth and pre-Islamic motifs into a counterpublic discourse that sits in uneasy tension with the historical context of war and occupation.

Poetry in School - the Old Issues and New Challenges

Poetry in School - the Old Issues and New Challenges