Single Poem Research Articles

THE GAME AS THE WAY OF DEPICTING THE WORLD IN POETRY OF A.N. VERTINSKY

The article deals with the representation of the game beginning in the poetry of A.N. Vertinsky. The main attention is paid to the study of space-time relations in verses of different years. The combination of the past, present and future withing a single poem allows you to create an image of the hero, to characterize his personality, to show how his life will develop. Dream and reality in the poet’s work form a single world, constantly intersecting in the life and fate of the hero. Occurring and dreaming events are perceived as equivalent.

Temporalità liriche. Ripetizione e incompiutezza tra Dante e Caproni, Montale e Sanguineti

Looking at lyric poetry from the perspective of temporality, this paper intends to address a crucial and often overlooked issue for a theoretical approach to the lyric: how the crystallized moment of the single poem encapsulates iteration. One side of this issue is at the centre of Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015): the lyric poem as a script to be actualized as event in the ‘now’ of each act of reading. I want to focus instead on the other side of the issue, namely on the strategies by which the poem itself singularizes what it presents as a recurrent event. This ancient phenomenon can be traced back, for instance, to Sappho’s fragment 31 and its famous translation, Catullus’ carmen 51, but the point of departure here will be a much clearer case: Dante’s sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare”. Indeed, it is Dante himself who makes these dynamics clear in the narrative prose that precedes the poem and provides its scene of enunciation. Moving to the twentieth century, I will discuss first an evident case of retrieval of Dante’s and Cavalcanti’s poetics by focusing on one of the poems that Giorgio Caproni collects in the section “Versi livornesi” of his 1959 book Il seme del piangere. Then I will expand the analysis to other poems by poets as different as Montale and Sanguineti. The discussion will address also issues of open referentiality, the re-enactment of lyric gestures, and the trans-historical dimension of the lyric in the context of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of poetica dell’inoperosità as a potential critique of teleology.

A Political Elegy

A Political Elegy Beth McDermott (bio) Bonfire of the Sodomites: A Documentary Jim Elledge Main Street Rag Publishing Co. www.mainstreetragbookstore.com/product 80 Pages; Print, $14.00 What does it mean when a poet labels a collection of poems “a documentary”? Within the definition of “documentary,” Merriam Webster has the words “factual” and “objective” in all caps. As descendants of Socrates and the Western canon, we are predisposed to see poetry as anti-fact and therefore ill-equipped to document anything. Yet, there’s an impulse to employ documentation in poetry that desires to be read as though it has a serious grasp of the truth, especially if what is true isn’t pleasurable to hear. Think of Charles Reznikoff’s work in both Testimony (1978–1979) and Holocaust (1975). The use of documentary evidence becomes the primary material for Reznikoff, who chooses not to transform brute reality into the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker. And yet few poetry collections announce their intention to be read as a documentary with such obviousness as Bonfire of the Sodomites by Jim Elledge. A collection of poems about the UpStairs Lounge catastrophe of 1973, Elledge’s poems move chronologically through time to give the reader an understanding of the tragic loss of life that befell the gay community in 1970s America. Despite the horror of what happened that summer in the New Orleans French Quarter, little attention was paid to the case or the victims who perished at the scene. In a “Note to the Reader” prefacing the collection, Elledge writes: On June 23, 1973, someone set fire to the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in the French Quarter, killing thirty-two individuals in sixteen minutes. Considered “the largest mass-killing of gay people in the U.S.,” it was a hate crime, but a far more complicated one than the phrase might suggest. Published in 2017, Bonfire of the Sodomites sets out to explain the complicatedness of a hate crime to a society still mourning the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed forty-nine people. Yet, unlike the mass-murder that happened in 2016 Orlando, the mass-murder that occurred in 1973 New Orleans remains overlooked or unknown. In this sense, Bonfire of the Sodomites is politically motivated and unsentimentally elegiac. It’s political in the sense that it speaks out in angst over the lack of fair and just treatment for the thirty-two individuals killed by arson: people who weren’t considered significant enough to warrant effort on the part of authorities, acknowledgement by local or statewide government, or even mourning by New Orleans churches. As such, Elledge demands that we look at what happened while reticent to speak on behalf of the dead. In a New Directions Poetry Pamphlet titled Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker (2013), Susan Howe writes: “Historical or geographical accident isolated us from the cold reality of mud and hunger.” The accidental isolation of time and space is what motivates Elledge’s reticence, without which I don’t think the book would be near as successful. What saves the book from exploiting the already exploited is its documentary structure. Howe writes that film documentarist Dziga Vertov listed among his techniques “substituting the appearance of truth for truth itself.” This is one of Elledge’s techniques, since Bonfire of the Sodomites is mostly composed of “published documents, including newspaper articles, interviews, and police reports.” The author’s note and the bibliography at the back of the collection both suggest that Elledge is concerned with fidelity to the truth; a brief tour through some of his sources proves how close he’s remained to facts and direct quotation, which can be identified throughout the poems by quotation marks. Having read both the poems and some of their source material, I could give you most of the details of what happened, but that’s the point of Elledge’s book. Certainly a shorter story could be told, but it would be heretical, not unlike the way Cleanth Brooks disparages paraphrasing a single poem. What Elledge does is take back from the indifferent media the details that are synecdochically inseparable from...

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Reviewed by: Good Bones by Maggie Smith Hannah Warren Maggie Smith. Good Bones. Tupelo Press, 2017. Maggie Smith exploits language. She learns it, she masters it, and she manipulates it. In her new poetry compilation Good Bones, named aptly after Smith’s 2016 single poem which Public Radio International called “the official poem of 2016,” Maggie Smith explores what it means to be a mother in a world that is constantly changing. She provides brief glimpses into the everyday life of a mother, showing the successful moments alongside the unsuccessful, allowing readers to connect easily and quickly. Smith’s entire book reads with a serious, mystical tone, reminiscent of her last collection, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison. Though she does not focus on the modern fairytale or the reinvented myth in Good Bones, she maintains a note of the unlikely, the inner fears of human experience, the supernatural tugging of everyday life, and a glimpse into worlds that are not our own, but neither are they fully removed. Throughout the collection, Maggie Smith includes various small pieces of stories, leaving bread-crumbs for readers to pick up as they follow along. Most of the poems focus on the fears and struggles and fallibility of motherhood: Still I felt nothing could harm me—nothing would dare. I was essential. I was too needed in the world. Smith defines what it means for a mother to feel indestructible near children who are so irreversibly destructible in comparison. This construct of power shifts throughout the collection to represent a mother’s body as both a force, a powerful undercurrent, and a limited animation. In all this, Smith’s poems [End Page 62] praise the virtues of humanity while explaining the downfalls. She suggests comfort, kindness, and sincere empathy as methods to create a better world. Pieces of the narrative focus on a daughter who presents infinite questions to her mother over the span of the collection: “Why is the sky so tall and over everything?,” “What is the past?,” and “What is the future?” Smith uses these moments to focus on the surreal and the existential, especially with the daughter’s question, “How do leaves fall off the trees and how did God build this car?” Within this poem and others, Smith explores religious dialogue and how mothers must present beliefs or non-beliefs to their children, while also wondering where children acquire new information. Who taught the daughter about God, if not her mother? Smith writes, “Someone must have told you / what God made without telling you everything / doesn’t mean everything.” Struggling to answer her daughter’s question, the mother presents a multitude of answers, all of which either build upon or disagree with the previous answer. Part of what makes Good Bones a success is the small family that lives within the pages and within the wilderness. Poems throughout the collection depict a woman, a girl, and a man. The woman and girl stay behind in their home, while the man has “gone over the mountain.” This grouping pops up every few pages, bringing new information to the narrative, always reminding the reader that the girl is unique in that she “has an eye like a spyglass for birds. / She must be marked, the woman thinks. Wherever she walks, the shadow of a hawk / falls on her.” This storyline in verse depicts the child as she grows and the hawk that tethers to her, keeping her wild and giving her a new shadow that acts as a comfort and a reminder of who she is. Their narrative is one of change and survival, despite the wilderness that surrounds them. Here, Smith combines protection with parenthood: the hawk uses the girl’s hair for its nest, the woman watches over the girl as she grows, and the man fears that the girl will have changed before he returns from beyond the mountain. Maggie Smith intersperses these snippets with pieces of intimate and familiar learning. This book describes the narrator’s home and the good and bad things that come along with knowing a town so well that nothing is surprising, yet, at times, you’re stunned to recall what...

Exploring Poetry as Philosophy of Communication

ABSTRACTThis article shows that philosophy of communication offers a constructive lens, and an open, invitational structure, for analyzing poetic texts as “philosophical pictures” that give expression to the depths of human reality beyond rational thought. I first offer a brief discussion on poetic knowledge as an intimate way of knowing that is prerational and prescientific. Next, I present a discussion on poetry and existential attentiveness through an examination of Rainer Maria Rilke’s prose poem “For the Sake of a Single Poem” that further illustrates the discussion on poetic knowledge. This discussion is textured through Jean Luc-Nancy’s writing about poetry and sense, and a poetic “dawning of sense” from his essay “Making Poetry.” Before the final section that analyzes a specific poem highlighting two philosophical themes (“Learning to See” and “Exposed Heart”), there is a discussion of “philosophical pictures.” Finally, I examine Rilke’s poem “Turning Point” and present a philosophical reading of the poem that guides us in our collective communicative existence, offering ways of seeing (seeing others as an object or through “being-with”) and ways of being-in-the-world (relation of self/other), as well as opening up possibilities of relating with “tact” and “love.”

Jack Clemo and the Brontë Sisters

This article examines the influence of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre on the novel, Wilding Graft (1948) by the disabled Cornish twentieth-century novelist and poet Jack Clemo (1916–94). Clemo’s life will be considered before turning to the influence on him of first Emily Brontë and then Charlotte Brontë. The importance of landscape and religion will be considered in these novels. It will be argued that these themes are central to all three novels. This article will then turn to an examination of the poems Clemo wrote about the Brontë sisters: first Clemo’s two poems about Emily Brontë and one called ‘Haworth Keys’, then his two poems about Charlotte Brontë and finally his single poem about Anne Brontë. Particular attention will be paid to Clemo’s assessments of the three Brontë sisters’ works and his attitudes to them.

Jüri Talvet maailmaluule tõlgendajana / Jüri Talvet’s Interpretations of World Poetry

Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”

Marie Bassano, Esther Dehoux, and Catherine Vincent, eds., “Le pèlerinage de l’âme” de Guillaume de Digulleville (1355–1358): Regards croisés. (Les Études du RILMA 5.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Paper. Pp. 235; 16 color and 29 black-and-white figures. €75. ISBN: 978-2-503-54604-9.

Marie Bassano, Esther Dehoux, and Catherine Vincent, eds., “Le pèlerinage de l’âme” de Guillaume de Digulleville (1355–1358): Regards croisés. (Les Études du RILMA 5.) Turnhout: Brepols, 2014. Paper. Pp. 235; 16 color and 29 black-and-white figures. €75. ISBN: 978-2-503-54604-9.

الصورة الشعرية في القصيدة الحرة الجزائرية : أشكالها ووظائفها

This article treats the structure of Algerian free poetry’s image, exposing it sartistic dimensions like metaphorical dimension, and its total character and the property of fragmentation which this poem resorts to it sometimes. Also, this article reviews the forms of poetic image, such as the simple one and the complex, the visible one and the invisible, and Its function in the structure of the text which varies between artistic effectiveness and inefficiency, due to the diversity of poetic experiences at a single poem, and the variation between a poem and another.

Jonathan Culler. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 391pp.

Jonathan Culler. <i>Theory of the Lyric</i>. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 391pp.

The Octopus Game by Nicky Beer

Reviewed by: The Octopus Game by Nicky Beer Yasmine Kaminsky (bio) Nicky Beer, The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon, 2015), 80pp. As its title suggests, Nicky Beer’s The Octopus Game playfully explores the figure of the octopus (as well as the occasional cuttlefish and squid) in all its exotic grandeur. At times esoteric, her narrative-driven poems are largely accessible and inviting, particularly in their wide range of octopus-inspired associations. As Beer noted in a recent interview with The Rumpus, “one of the things that attracted me to the octopus was its malleability; its ability to manipulate its own form into something else, often for the sake of illusion.” Beer meditates on the octopus as a way to explore human life. The Octopus Game achieves a concentrated study of the external, fleshy self in relation to the internal, protean self. The image of the octopus over the course of the collection is kaleidoscopic. The octopus is both a “marine Prometheus” and “Disembodied / dishwasher hands.” It is a “pupil-Pandora,” a “beast,” “Medusa,” “mechanical / threat”—an apocalyptic monster. Yet, it is also a “circus tent,” a “self-tossed / parachute,” “a willow tree.” Most often, though, the octopus takes on distinctly human forms: a “proprietress” and hostess, a priest-like figure, “a drunken friend” and victim, a rambling “crackpot,” erotic lovers past and present, a “sideshow freak” and “tattooed girl,” a celebrity, a “sadist, apologist, revisionist, hypocrite (my double? my sister?), adulteress, assassin.” Beer works out the figure of the octopus through a deluge of poetic speakers, references, and languages, ranging from a documentary voiceover to an insomniac to Robert Frost to a lover to the octopus itself. [End Page 151] The various speakers embody a multiplicity of approaches: technical explanation, introspection, insult and morbid grandeur, kinky fantasy, sassy yet chilling retort, as well as snippets in a range of languages: Latin, French, Japanese, Spanish, and German. Many of the poems serve as responses to different media, including news reports, films, paintings, and art criticism. The implication of multiple individual perspectives that are not universally comprehensible is that the octopus, the self, is an entity we can, at best, understand only partially and fleetingly; we can understand compartmentalized parts of ourselves but struggle with our whole. The collection begins with a quotation from Pia Tafdrup that speaks to both humans and octopi: “You embrace me, many armed, / so hard that I grow a heart on both sides.” Two further epigraphs elsewhere in the book echo the book’s variety: “I marvel at thee, Octopus; / If I were thou, I’d call me Us,” from Ogden Nash’s poem “The Octopus,” and “Everything becomes shadow and ardent aquarium,” from Rimbaud’s more somber “Bottom.” Across the collection, we see sonnets, pastorals, prose poems, tercets, couplets, stitchic verse, nonce forms, a pantoum—as well as a poem Beer jokingly dubs a “can’toum” for a failed pantoum. The multiplicity of forms, or in the case of the “can’toum” the creation of one, creates a plethora of shapes on the page. Beer’s malleable use of forms is well suited to the malleable nature of the octopus, providing clever camouflage for the elusive creature. Of course, we see formal camouflage within single poems as well. “Black Hole Itinerary” comprises a series of self-contained couplets that begin with the anaphoric “Today.” The content varies wildly with each new stanza, creating a disorienting effect. In “Poem,” the text appears in landscape, rather than portrait, orientation, which renders the text’s meaning momentarily hidden behind its rotated lines. Although “Frost on the Octopus” is a Shakespearean sonnet, it pushes against tradition by disguising the octopus as a “sideshow freak” in the first quatrain, a murderess in the second, and “tattooed girl” in the third. In the collection’s title poem, “The Octopus Game,” the couplets, tercets, and quatrains visually chronicle a couple “becom[ing] each other’s arms” and—both literally and metaphorically—becoming one another, a functional unit. This poem is emblematic of what I admire most about The Octopus Game: it succeeds in taking on a concentrated subject and in perpetually recreating the angles at which we view it both formally and contextually...

Hunter of Stories by Mark Fried

I, self I, self you, self he and she, self they, self When I say me it is he and she, self When I say he and she it is you Ruby Poltorak Other standout chapters include Arthur Sze’s commentary on a poem he calls “Returning to Fields and Gardens (I)” in his own translation, which commentators were permitted to reference in their notes, by Tao Qian (365–427 ce) and translated here by James Hightower in 1970, Stephen Owen in 1996, and David Hinton in 2008; and Alexis Levitin’s commentary on Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s 1972 poem “A Pequena Praça,” translated by Ruth Fainlight in 1988, Lisa Sapinkopf in 1993, Richard Zenith in 1997, and Levitin himself in 1983. The closest comparison to Into English, which Collins mentions in her introduction , is Eliot Weinberger’s Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which was reissued in an expanded edition this year by New Directions with additional translations of the single poem by Wang Wei that Weinberger analyzes. Into English, like that book, does an excellent job of correcting the primary fallacy of the uninformed translation critic, the literalist—something of a misnomer —who believes in the idea of “accuracy .” Such a fallacy judges translation exclusively on the basis of semantic reciprocity, as if literature were a strictly content-based art, and that, in the case of poetry, semantic meaning should be given precedence over form, meter, and even sound. As Levitin writes in his commentary, “Flaubert was wrong when he spoke of ‘le mot juste.’ The very nature of reality and language precludes such a thing. As all translators realize, we search for le mot juste, knowing we must settle for something that merely approaches it. Even at our luckiest, what we have is perhaps un mot juste, but never the Platonic le.” Into English, with its twenty-five case studies, proves him right but also demonstrates that the pursuit of un mot juste is not just worthwhile but necessary. David Shook Los Angeles Eduardo Galeano. Hunter of Stories. Trans. Mark Fried. New York. Nation Books. 2017. 272 pages. In 2015, with the death of Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, Latin America lost one of its finest literary voices and one of the staunchest critics of the exploitations of its people and resources for over five hundred years. During a life spent largely in exile, fleeing military regimes in both Uruguay and Argentina, Galeano wrote books that earned his reputation as an outstanding author of the “Boom” generation and a prominent opponent of capitalist and colonial policies. His most famous work, Open Veins of Latin America (1971), traces the story of colonization from the arrival of Europeans in the “New World” to the brink of the Uruguayan military coup whose leaders banned the book in 1973. Hunter of Stories is Galeano’s last work. It contains over two hundred pieces of writing, none of which exceed two pages, representing the final phase in a lifelong project of documenting the realities of Latin Yasutaka Tsutsui Bullseye! Twenty Short Stories Trans. Andrew Driver Kurodahan Press Yasutaka Tsutsui’s collection of short stories is an eclectic, postmodern rush that flies from comedic and satirical to grave and surreal. Tsutsui’s prose works at a rapid pace that grabs readers and takes them along for a ride through a Japan that seeks to constantly push against the established notions of what literature is. Roger Sedarat Haji as Puppet: An Orientalist Burlesque The Word Works Somewhere between Pantagruel, Candide, and the unmapped future of brainbending satire is the self-referential verse of Iranian American poet Roger Sedarat in Haji as Puppet. With moments verging on literary pastiche, the riotous journey of the perpetually unfortunate title character juggles religion and international politics as easily as pop culture and race, staging poems amid camera cues and a mounting sense of absurdity. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 93 America. Galeano does not tell new stories; instead, he unearths and retells stories from other sources, recombining them to form a collection that is readable in any order. He shares stories from Latin America’s colonial and recent history—along with many tales derived from indigenous...

Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England by Daniel R. Gibbons

Reviewed by: Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England by Daniel R. Gibbons Rhema Hokama Gibbons, Daniel R., Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017; cloth; pp. x, 332; R.R.P. US $60.00; ISBN 9780268101343. In Daniel R. Gibbons's wide-ranging study on early modern liturgy and poetics, the question of what it means to participate in a unified spiritual community emerges as a central preoccupation for both English Protestants and Catholics. Gibbons's analysis of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer liturgies for the Communion and burial rites provides the historical and cultural foundation for his readings of the poems, which he discusses in individual chapters on Spenser's elegies, Southwell's lyric verse, Donne's divine poems, Herbert's The Temple, and Crashaw's English lyrics. Gibbon's central thesis is that the Prayerbook provided a rhetoric that enabled English worshippers to demarcate the boundaries of a unified religious community in post-Reformation England. Through its ambivalent language and prayers that could be interpreted variously to satisfy both traditionalist and Reformed worshippers alike, the Prayerbook's liturgies avoided alienating parishioners who ascribed to a range of religious allegiances — all of whom saw themselves as committed members of the nascent English church. While Gibbons largely moves away from the texts of the liturgies themselves in his readings of the poems, his claim is that the Prayerbook's language of accommodation and exclusion shapes the way poets defined religious identity and sought to include a diversity of religious beliefs in their imagined lyric communities. As a poetic device, this model of rhetorical accommodation allowed the many readers of a single poem — as Gibbons writes in his reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Show me deare Christ' — to 'forge a timeless unified worshipping body' in spite of the 'multiple individual readings of a single prayer-poem' that this body of readers would likely construe (p. 162). Gibbons's study is a continuation of the kind of historicist work accomplished by recent monographs on the literary influence of the Book of Common Prayer, most prominently Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer: The Language [End Page 207] of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Timothy Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge University Press, 2007). But Gibbons's emphasis on the continuity of Catholic thought in the writing and dissemination of the Prayerbook sets his study apart from the body of recent scholarship on English state worship. Indeed, one of the strengths of Gibbon's book is its inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant poets in its treatment of liturgical poetics. Although Gibbons positions the Book of Common Prayer as the central historical text in his interpretations of the poems, his study is equally inflected by a range of Catholic sources — including Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, the Spanish mystics, and François de Sales. Gibbons's study is rewarding and worthwhile in that it serves as a reminder that the actual religious practices that we tend to label as 'Anglican' or 'Reformed', and even 'Protestant' and 'Catholic', rarely accommodate themselves to such neatly defined categories. In every chapter, Gibbons re-emphasizes the fluidity — and even self-contradictory quality — of post-Reformation English religious identity. This fluidity is what enables Gibbons to undertake parallel readings of poets who seem to write from vastly different theological commitments. For example, Gibbons makes the claim that both Spenser and Southwell respond to and challenge the cultural and psychological rifts left by the Prayerbook's Order for the Burial of the Dead — despite the fact that the former led state-directed anti-Catholic reforms in Ireland, and the latter was a Jesuit priest executed by the English state for his clandestine missionary work. Gibbons's decision to include in his study poets of diverse religious loyalties is testament to the wide-reaching cultural influence of the Book of Common Prayer, and the way that its liturgical rhetoric was appropriated and reimagined by those from opposing religious poles in Tudor and Stuart England. Rhema Hokama Singapore University of Technology and...

Exploring Poetry with Cognitive Neuroscience: T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

Research that involves both neuroscience and art often attempts to explain the aesthetic experience of ‘beauty’ in visual art, and to define the function of art in neural terms; less has been written concerning the neural correlates of poetry reading. It is suggested that there are existing areas of study in neuroscience that may help elucidate how we enjoy literature beyond pure neuroaesthetics, such as research in creative problem-solving, knowledge-based pleasure, and music. This essay endeavours to bring together insights from both neuroscience and literature to shed light on how and why we take pleasure in interpreting T.S. Eliot's ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It is proposed that the pleasures of reading ‘Prufrock’ are ultimately associated with the ways in which the reader's expectations are confirmed or challenged. While the conclusions of this paper are intentionally constrained to a single poem, they are potentially generalisable.

The Journey from the Inferno to the Purgatory: Eliot’s Religious Odyssey

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is akin to a full term conception of spiritual faith that inevitably ushers in the birth of spiritual salvation after a long period of suffering and labour. This pattern is not perceived in one single poem or a specific collection of poems, but rather in the entire corpus of Eliot’s poetry. It is rendered tangible when we trace the process of questing for spiritual faith in his early poetry where the need for faith is the sorest after the panorama of suffering that the human beings brought upon themselves. Throughout his poetic career, Eliot attributed this suffering to mere futility, greedy materialism and loveless existence marred by lechery rather than genuine feelings. This paper tries to prove that Eliot’s poetry delineates a mental process that takes the reader from the inferno of contemporary life to the purgatory of religious faith which is potentially capable of lifting Man before falling into the abyss of loss. This being said, the paper aims at drawing the features of Eliot’s perception of salvation which seems similar to a piece of mosaic which gets clearer and clearer as every piece is put in its proper place.

Garbage Delight by D. Lee

Lee, Dennis. Garbage Delight. Illus. Sandy Nichols. Toronto: Harper Collins, 2015. Print.Should anyone doubt the power of illustration in children’s literature (no children’s literature specialist would—but should anyone) all doubt can be dispelled by a comparison of this new work illustrated by Sandy Nichols, with Lee’s earlier one of the same title: Garbage Delight, illustrated by Frank Newfeld, classic edition, Harper Collins, 1977. In the original work, Garbage Delight is the title poem of a collection as irrepressible as its intended audience. (Five and six-year-olds would be a good target.) Frank Newfeld’s illustration of the “Garbage…” eater is “Bigfoot,” a ferocious stuffed animal with a unicorn’s horn, an alligator’s teeth, and a lion’s claws—and, oh yes, a dress. Introduced to us on page 18, Bigfoot returns to preside over a table laden with a spectacular array of food—all in living color: the jelly, the “hamburgles”, ice cream, and cake that the poem promises, along with a whole lot more. Interestingly, there isn’t any real “garbage” on that overflowing table; it is just the prospect of the gluttony to follow that strikes us as obscene, hilarious, and memorable.The new edition, focusing on one single poem, and physically designed for the very young, enables illustrator Sandy Nichols to take a very different tack from that of Newfeld. Nichols has the freedom to tell a whole story: a bear cub clambers into a fenced yard where a pair of toy creatures, one reptilian (possibly a stegosaurus), one sheep-like, are picnicking. The cub, eschewing the picnic treats, tears into and devours the garbage. When it collapses from its exertions, the toy creatures wrap it lovingly in their picnic blanket and cart it out of their yard. Ultimately, the cub returns to its much relieved mother.The color palette Nichols uses is delicate, her line drawings often evocative. Her depiction of the reptile beating a pan with a spoon while the horn-tooting sheep, cub in tow, brings up the rear is particularly charming. (For reasons unknown, it connotes an illustration of the nursery rhyme “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” for this reviewer. We even see the moon come out, although no one jumps over it!) To describe in a single word her storyline, her illustrations, her evocations, and her tone, I can do no better than the publisher’s notes accompanying the text: winsome. In sum, Nichols’ work is a fresh and entirely valid interpretation of a Canadian children’s classic. Well done.Highly recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship included selection of children’s literature for school, public, special and academic libraries. She is former Curriculum Librarian for the University of Alberta.

Miguel Hernández and Lope's Poetry (1935-1936)

The publication of the sonnets included in El rayo que no cesa revealed that Miguel Hernandez had learned to build the sonnets from the classics of our Golden Age, and among them, perhaps more than anyone else, Lope de Vega, to whom Hernanez remained faithful in those same years in his plays Los hijos de la piedra and El labrador de mas aire . With El rayo que no cesa Hernandez achieved, however, a certain independence and originality, as the book revitalized a classical structure and obtained excellent results in every single poem in this collection published in 1936, after the celebrations of Lope’s centennial in 1935.

The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael C. Cohen

Reviewed by: The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America by Michael C. Cohen Mary Eyring (bio) The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America Michael C. Cohen Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015 281pp. Michael Cohen opens his study of Americans’ relationships to—and as mediated through—nineteenth-century poetry with a question: “What might a poetic history of the United States look like when it is generated from a place beyond the bounds of ‘reading’ as we typically understand it?” (1–2). In The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America, he posits an answer that comprehends both the nineteenth century and poetic genres in broad terms. His study spans a period from 1790 to 1903. The poetry he engages to map a host of social relations forged, contested, renegotiated, dissolved, and renewed during this period includes the familiar [End Page 716] as well as the forgotten or the willfully ignored—poems with “a vexed connection to literariness” such as broadside ballads, antislavery verse, and popular war poetry (2). These unfamiliar or unknown poems provide particularly fertile ground for Cohen’s project, as it complements conventional close readings with a more sustained focus on the ways American poems were not read, but rather “used.” “[N]onreading,” he argues, “can also be a productive enterprise, one that takes many forms, from ignoring, forgetting, and suppressing to copying, transcribing, reciting, memorizing, collecting, exchanging, and mimicking” (1). This reading of nonreading, particularly in the chapters directly concerned with early America, contributes much that is truly novel to studies of literary culture, racial identity, and citizenship during the post-Revolutionary and antebellum periods. Using poems provided Americans ways of relating to one another during moments of local crisis and collective tragedy and helped produce a shared sense of national memory and identity that shaped and reflected environments in flux. The term use allows Cohen critical command over both the materiality and the formal elements of a diverse group of American poems, and enables the book to chart “a history of literariness and genre from a wide array of engagements with poems, of which reading is one option among many” (9). Cohen’s impressive archival research yields evidence that registers the responses of the “ordinary reader,” often “invisible to history” (11). In analyzing, for example, the notes and illustrations with which readers bedecked their printed or handwritten copies of poems, readers’ letters to poets, authors’ personal notebooks, and performances of familiar lyrics, he argues for the function of individual poems as manifestations of social affiliations and anxieties and, in crucial instances, the means of imagining new forms of communal identification. The model of “imagined community,” as Cohen reminds us, is a formulation original to literary studies rather than political theory, and he persuasively demonstrates poetry’s role in mediating and articulating new forms of racial and national identity (7). As it traces the circulation of an array of individual poems (rather than the contours of “American poetry” as a retrospectively conceived genre), the book also brings a truly diverse cast of readers, and nonreaders, to the fore: While some readers found in poems a resource for critical interpretation, literary and aesthetic pleasure, and the enjoyment of linguistic [End Page 717] complexity, many more turned to poems for spiritual and psychic well-being; adopted popular song tunes to spread rumor, scandal, satire, and news; or used poems as a medium for personal and family memories, as well as local and national affiliations. (10) Indeed, the tenuous distinction between common and cultured readers, the difference between “varses and verses,” was more often muddied than preserved as readers across regional, socioeconomic, political, and racial identities recited, sang, copied, or manipulated the words of a single poem (21). Two threads run across chapters that encompass broadside balladry in the late eighteenth century, antislavery poems of the antebellum period, and minstrel songs and spirituals of the second half of the nineteenth century. The first is the function of all these poems as versions of “the ballad,” a poetic genre whose protean definitions chart moral and aesthetic debates about the value of ancient cultures, authenticity, popularity, and citizenship in nineteenth-century American life. The second is...

Poetic Language, Interdiscursivity and Intertextuality in Fifth Graders’ Poetry

In spite of views that children’s writing development is in large part a linguistic complex process involved in their engagement within and across social activities in and out of school, the literature is scant on the wide range of semiotic resources that children may draw on to animate their poetry writing and performances. Drawing from a case study of poetry writing and performance in one U.S. fifth-grade classroom, this article uses interpretive methods and textual analysis to ask the following questions: (a) What, if any, poetic language do children draw on and identify in their written poems? (b) What interdiscursive and intertextual writing practices do children draw on to write poetry? and (c) How, if at all, might the act of reading an original poem influence children’s writing practices and literacy learning? Highlighted by three focal students, data suggest that children’s poems most often used features, including stanza break, varied types of rhyme, alliteration, and metaphor. Furthermore, some children’s poems could even be classified into distinct poetic structures. The data also suggest that children appropriated and recontextualized content for a single poem from a variety of semiotic resources in and out of school. Finally, children’s performances were caught up with satisfying multiple audiences, including themselves. This study suggests that elementary children can control the process of poetry writing and performance through active integration of formal poetic language taught with interdiscursive and intertextual practices.

Intonation and the Conventions of Free Verse

WHAT'S FREE ABOUT FREE-VERSE CRITICISM organization of free verse poses well-known obstacles to description: unlike metrical verse, free verse lacks rhythmic patterns that can readily be notated. Nonetheless, good free verse achieves some kind of measure, by which I mean, it imparts to language an added intensity that makes statement itself more meaningful, significant, complex, or interesting. William Carlos Williams's well-known habit of revising an entire free-verse poem without changing single letter or punctuation mark is of interest here, as are proofs given by critics' relineation or conceptual reframing of well-known free-verse texts. most famous example is Hugh Kenner's proposal that we imagine an occasion for this sentence to be said (Homemade World 66). And as Kenner insists, two versions of The Red Wheelbarrow, conjectural sentence and published poem found in Spring and All, not only fail to be identical in visual appearance, spoken contour, or expressive content, but quality of two as poems is grossly unequal. Recognizing this to be true, however, is far different from explaining either this poem's prosodic organization or prosodic organization of even small percentage of good free-verse poems in evidence, since free-verse poems not only exhibit multiplicity of measures, forms, or shaping forces but also typically engage multiplicity of measures or methods within single poem. And yet I would argue that we can discern the positive features of new in some early modernist free-verse practice and that this metric is intonational (Easthope 153; Cervenka 372-74). This argument is not new. Discussions of in language and in verse date back to Joshua Steele's An Essay Towards Establishing Melody and Measure of Sounds (1775). Nonetheless, despite wealth of remarkable materials both by linguists (e.g., David Crystal, Bruce Hayes, and Miroslav Cervenka) and by literary critics (e.g., Justin Replogle, Eleanor Berry, Richard Cureton, Alan Holder, and G. Burns Cooper), remains absent from most prosodic criticism, including fourth edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). When theories of are discussed, as they are in scholarship on Williams and Frost, dominant critical impulse is usually to dismiss possibility of creating prosody based on intonational contours. It is crucial to establish not only that is available as prosodic measure but also that (a) it has structure, and this structure informs and enriches our understanding of movement of free-verse line, and (b) that variable relationship to syntactic units (Fox 289). Without consideration of units, their function and structure, we cannot explain abiding effects of free verse, such as how changing only lineation or spacing of linguistic string affects both poem's prosody and its meaning in ways that are fundamentally tied to phonology of language and so are hard-wired so to speak in speakers or readers. usual conversations about unfolding relationship of syntax and line must expand to include awareness of relationship of line, syntax, and intonation, with goal of noting how it is often divergence of these three variables that leads to free verse's most memorable lines and effects. THE NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF INTONATION: A BRIEF OVERVIEW Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (1997) defines intonation as a distinctive pattern of tones over stretch of speech in principle longer than word. Thus there is difference in between e.g. That's 'IT ('I'm finished') and That's 'IT? ('Is that all?'). [...] example demonstrates how identical sequence of words can have two distinct meanings based on its intonation. While words do not change, intention of speaker does. …