Unpublished Poetry Research Articles

Life lines: agency and autobiography in Sarah Curran’s Poetry

ABSTRACT Sarah Curran (1782–1808) has been almost exclusively remembered as the fiancée of United Irishman Robert Emmet, executed in 1803 for treason. However, Curran merits study in her own right as part of an important but neglected circle of literary women centred around three Cork families – the Wilmots, Chetwoods, and Penroses. Supported by recent theoretical approaches to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s life writing, this article examines Curran’s previously unknown, unstudied, and unpublished poems. Preserved in Wilmot and Chetwood family papers, the poems enhance heretofore limited understandings of Curran’s rich creative life and intellectual world. Curran’s unpublished poetry and the footprints she left in the early nineteenth-century Irish arts scene are significant, from her literary memorialisation by Thomas Moore and her standing in her wider social circle as a talented harpist, to her poetic and epistolary compositions honouring her personal relationships. This article rehabilitates Curran as a person of great creative ability in her own right, who was recognised and valued as such in her own time by those who knew her best, and rediscovers the agency she exerted in recording events from her own life in poetic form.

Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler

Reviewed by: Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II by Claire Seiler Kristin Bluemel Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II. Claire Seiler. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. 304. $90.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper); $29.99 (eBook). Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II is a fiercely intelligent, beautifully argued five-chapter monograph about relations between literature and history at the middle of the twentieth century. In it, Claire Seiler shares her discovery of copious and convincing evidence of a self-consciously midcentury period and a distinctly midcentury literature. That a midcentury period and literature have never before attracted our attention represents "the problem that the midcentury still poses for twentieth-century literary studies" (4). Modernism and its aftereffects are largely to blame for this problem—the problem of obscurity, of invisibility, of documents "partially seen and selectively analyzed" (5). The new modernist studies, for example, has led to a disciplinary "creep" that "allows the assumptions and priorities of historical or institutional modernisms to preclude inquiry into the midcentury and its literary and cultural productions" (35). Seiler invites us to join her theorization of the midcentury as midcentury in part as a response to a fixation upon the word and idea of midcentury recorded in transatlantic print documents from around the year 1950. Delighting in the form of the catalog as well as the unsuspected contents of the archive, Seiler lists instance after obscure instance of midcentury "epochal stocktaking unlike anything seen in a previous era" (13): there's The Antarctic Today: A Mid-Century Survey by the New Zealand Antarctic Society and Aeronautics at Mid-Century (both published 1952); there's the "Mid-Century Register" project of the National Council of Negro Women and The Mid-Century Challenge to American Life of the American Jewish Committee [End Page 893] (1950); there's John Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets (1950), Robert Richman's The Arts at Mid-Century (1954), and Frances Frost's collection of poems titled simply Mid-Century (1946); the Philosophical Library of New York even put out a Midcentury Reference Library with over fifty volumes treating subjects as diverse as linguistics, psychoanalysis, atomic energy, and tobacco (15–17, 19). To conceive of and read through this newfound midcentury literature (or rather, literature we now will categorize as midcentury), Seiler deploys the powerful heuristic of suspension: "the sense of being between beginnings and endings, lapsed certainties and new potentialities, recent horrors and strange, often opaque futures" (5). Suspension is as elastic as it is abstract a concept; not all suspensions are midcentury ones, of course, but in Seiler's account all midcentury literature is captured by, inhabits, and circulates suspension. Seiler's elegant, extended close readings trace the innumerable ways that suspension saturated the forms of the midcentury Anglo-American imagination, the diction, metaphors, images, rhythms, rhymes, plots, characters, and settings of its key figures' published and unpublished poetry, prose, and plays. We see it in Ralph Ellison's invisible man living an underground half-life, and again in Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, waiting, always waiting. We see it in works that feature spying (Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day [1949]) or that are influenced by strategic bombing (W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue [1947]) or sonic targeting (Frank O'Hara's memoir "Lament and Chastisement: A Travelogue of War and Personality" [1948–49]). Seiler shows us how these midcentury works "[suspend] suspense" despite their debts to wartime themes and genres associated with feelings of excitement and catharsis (147). Silences, hesitations, pauses, uncertainties, inconclusiveness, irresolution, and ambiguity proliferate in a climate of anxiety that, with publication of Auden's The Age of Anxiety, is confirmed as the dominant feeling at midcentury. Chapter one of Midcentury Suspension invites us to experiment with Seiler's new way of reading the century from the middle out rather from the beginning through with analysis of Bishop's "At the Fish Houses" in which "The water seems suspended" (57); of "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" where we encounter "the specks of...

Bombing Cultural Heritage: Nancy Cunard, Art Humanitarianism, and Primitivist Wars in Morocco, Ethiopia, and Spain

This article examines Nancy Cunard's later writing on Spain as a direct legacy of her previous projects as a modernist poet, publisher and black rights activist. Cunard was a rare analyst of the links between total war, colonial counter-insurgency, and cultural destruction. Noting the desire of both the air power theorist and art collector to stereotype peoples, from Morocco to Ethiopia to Spain, as ‘primitive’, the article brings original archival materials from Cunard's notes into dialogue with her journalism, and published and unpublished poetry, to examine how she reclaimed and repurposed primitivism. Her poems devise a metonymic and palimpsestic literary geopolitics, juxtaposing fragments from ancient cultures atop one another to argue, simultaneously, for Spain's essential dignity as both a primitive and a civilised nation. Cunard reconciles Spain's liminal status, between Africa and Europe, to argue for Spain's art, and people, as part of a syncretic, universal human cultural heritage, anticipating the art humanitarianism of organisations such as UNESCO.

Kamau Brathwaite, a Memoir

This essay tracks Kamau Brathwaite’s life, his poetic and critical writing, and his travails and thinking, from youth and early career—in Barbados, England, Ghana, and the Caribbean, but mainly from his arrival at New York University in 1991—through his retirement in 2013 and return to Barbados, up to his death in 2020. It especially follows Kamau from his low “time of salt” of the late 1980s in Jamaica through the stunning critical and poetic burgeoning from the 1990s on, with such works as Barabajan Poems; the two-volume MR; the prize-winning Born to Slow Horses; and Elegguas and his unpublished third poetry trilogy, Missa Solemnis, Rwanda Poems, and Dead Man Witness, commemorating and trying to rise beyond what he called his “cultural lynching.” The essay looks at Brathwaite’s online/print Sycorax voice and the politico-philosophico-cultural concept of tidalectics that he developed over these years to create an ongoing Caribbean-based decolonizing of mind, spirit, and material life.

The Unpublished Poetry of Nazîm the “Composer” (Three Gazels)

Klasik Türk edebiyatında XV. yüzyılda başlayan mecmua tertip etme geleneği, XX. asrın başına kadar devam etmiştir. Altı asrın sonunda, özellikle şiir mecmuaları edebiyat araştırmacıları için önemli başvuru kaynaklarından biri hâline gelmiştir. Şiir mecmualarında, şairlerin hayatları ve edebî kişiliklerine dair bilgilere, çeşitli edebî türlerin örneklerine veya edebiyatımızda tercih edilmemiş nazım şekillerine ulaşılabilir. Bunun dışında, şairlerin divanlarında yer almayan şiirlerine, ismi tezkirelerde geçen ancak divan tertip etmemiş şairlerin şiirlerine ya da tezkirelerde yer almayan şairlere mecmualarda rastlamak mümkündür. Bu mecmualardan biri de Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Hazine Kitaplığı 1127’de kayıtlı mecmuadır. Yazmada farklı yüzyıllara ait 97 şair yer alır. XVIII. asır sanatkârlarından olan Yahyâ Nazîm de onlardan biridir. Şairin asıl adı Yahyâ’dır. Uzun zaman “Halîm” mahlasını kullanmış sonrasında kendisine Neşâtî Ahmet Dede tarafından “Nazîm” mahlası verilmiştir. Kaynaklarda doğum tarihine dair bir kayıt bulunmayan şairin ölüm tarihi Hâtimetü’l-Eş‘âr’da 1139/1727 olarak zikredilir. Bilinen tek eseri Dîvân’ıdır. Dîvân’ında birçok naatı bulunan şair, “na‘t-gû” sıfatıyla da anılmıştır. Çalışmada, Nazîm hakkında bilgi verildikten sonra Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Hazine Kitaplığı 1127’de kayıtlı mecmuaya değinilmiş ve ardından mecmuada yer alan Nazîm mahlaslı üç gazel neşredilerek araştırmacıların istifadesine sunulmuştur.

"Mistress of her own silences": The transatlantic poetry of María Acuña

In 2006, the Congress of Deputies in Spain presented a contentious bill: the Law of Historical Memory – it would be passed a year later. A long time in coming, the law sought to redress the wrongs experienced by victims of both sides of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), offering rights to the victims of the war and to victims of the close to forty-year dictatorship of General Franco. Likewise, the law condemned the Franco regime. Since then, exhumation of the repressed past, in the form of unearthing of mass graves, the granting of citizenship to those who fought on the losing side, or scholarship in fields ranging from political science to history, literature to sociology, has witnessed a burgeoning. The attempt to restore “forgotten” or “hidden” narratives that progressively become part of academic inquiry ought to include not just the notables but also the unsung voices that played a quiet yet equally relevant role in that past. Within this context of historical memory recovery, I propose a study of the unpublished poetry of María Acuña. Throughout her lifetime, Acuña would experience not only Franco’s dictatorship, but the bloodless political transition to democracy in the peninsula, as well as two violent insurgencies in Central America, where she lived for a number of years (and met an early death). First, in El Salvador during the Civil War (1979-1992), then in Nicaragua as the Sandinista Revolution unfolded from the late 1970s into the 1980s. The starkly different phases of María Acuña’s life are reflected in a poetry of great precision, passion, and, above all, a musical fluidity that merges Spanish and castúo (her regional dialect), Europe and the Americas.

Peter Larkin: Poetry, Phenomenology, and Ecology

This editorial introduces the special issue based on the proceedings of the symposium ‘Peter Larkin: Poetry, Phenomenology, and Ecology’ which took place at the University of Warwick on 26th of April 2017. It also includes the first and most up-to-date list of Larkin's published and unpublished poetry as well as his prose writings.

Cecília Meireles e a revista Távola Redonda: a busca pelo graal da poesia

A revista Távola Redonda circulou em Portugal entre 15 de janeiro de 1950 e julho de 1954, e teve David Mourão-Ferreira como um dos principais nomes à sua frente. Esboçando uma reação ao neorrealismo e ecoando dis­cursos manifestados na antecessora revista Presença, reivindicava uma literatura pautada pela subjetividade e pela expressão individual do au­tor. A publicação estabeleceu, assim, uma clara oposição aos neorrealistas que priorizavam uma poesia comprometida com seu momento histórico e social, ou seja, acima das nuances do “eu”. Nesse contexto e inserido no meio literário português, surge o nome de Cecília Meireles, que integrou esse rol de poetas “acolhidos” com simpatia e, mais do que isso, admiração pelas páginas da Távola. O fascículo número 12, de 29 de fevereiro de 1952, publicou quatro poemas que apareceram com o título de “Poesias inédi­tas”, além de um texto crítico, “Cecília Meireles, acerca da sua poesia”, de autoria de David Mourão-Ferreira. Dessa forma, destacam-se as forças motrizes da publicação e as proximidades que levaram a poeta brasileira a figurar na revista, salientando-se a importância de sua participação no periódico e o diálogo luso-brasileiro ali estabelecido.

‘A rhythm of another speech’. Pessoa’s theory and practice of poetry translation

ABSTRACT Fernando Pessoa devoted part of his prolific creative life to the practice of literary translation, mostly from his native Portuguese and English. He also wrote about this craft, as loose posthumous unfinished essays and scattered notes in his archive attest. Reading this material closely alongside a metrical analysis of selected published and unpublished poetry translations, we aim to: (1) understand the extent to which his thoughts on literary translation align with his poetry translation practice, primarily defined by his approach to poetic rhythm; (2) revisit some key ideas proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Walter Benjamin on translation, as well as Plato's concept of anamnesis, all of which, arguably, resonate with Pessoa’s poetry translation theory and practice. The article also includes critical transcriptions of unpublished material from Pessoa’s Archives held at the National Library of Portugal (Pessoa’s Papers) and the Fernando Pessoa House (Pessoa’s Private Library), both located in Lisbon.

Reflections on the Published and Unpublished Poetry of Mary Lavin

The focus of the overwhelming majority of critical commentary on Mary Lavin's work has been on her short stories. Her poetry, however, can give us insight into Lavin's development as a writer, showing early stages of experiments with themes and ideas, prefiguring their later emergence in her stories. Themes of loss, yearning, and the emotional pathology of choice recur through her lyric work, and examining in particular her unpublished poems, we can trace the biographical tensions as well as her artistic growth.

Traducción y escritura poética: dos facetas desconocidas del lingüista raizal Oakley Forbes

En este estudio se da a conocer la poesía multilingüe inédita del lingüista sanandresano Oakley Forbes y se explora su participación en la traducción de la obra de Juan Ramírez Dawkins. En ambas facetas desconocidas de Forbes, se rastrea la relación entre escritura y traducción en su doble rol de traductor alógrafo y de traductor de su propia obra. Este análisis muestra que la escritura y la traducción son dos esferas presentes tanto en su rol de traductor colaborador de Ramírez Dawkins como de autotraductor. En el trabajo translativo a dos manos con Ramírez Dawkins tuvo la libertad de reescribir y adaptar para reespacializar el texto a la otra audiencia del escritor. Lo mismo ocurrió con la traducción de su obra poética que, al estar escrita en varias lenguas refleja la riqueza y las paradojas del encuentro de culturas diversas. *** Tradução e escrita poética: duas facetas desconhecidas do linguista raizal Oakley Forbes ***Neste estudo apresentamos a poesia multilíngue inédita do linguista sanandresano Oakley Forbes e exploramos sua participação na tradução da obra de Juan Ramírez Dawkins. Em ambas as facetas desconhecidas de Forbes, rastreamos a relação entre escrita e tradução, em seu duplo papel de tradutor alógrafo e de tradutor de sua própria obra. Esta análise mostra que a escrita e a tradução são duas esferas presentes tanto em seu papel de tradutor colaborador da obra de Ramírez Dawkins como de autotradutor. No trabalho de tradução em colaboração com Ramírez Dawkins, teve a liberdade de reescrever e adaptar o texto com a finalidade de reespacializá-lo para outro público do escritor. O mesmo aconteceu com a tradução de sua obra poética que, por estar escrita em várias línguas, reflete a riqueza e os paradoxos do encontro de culturas diversas.Palavras-chave: Oakley Forbes. Tradução colaborativa. Autotradução. Poesia caribenha. Multilinguismo literário.

Поэтика автобиографического и мемуарного начал в прозе О. Волконской (на материале сборника рассказов «Фиалки и волки»)

This paper deals with the uniqueness of short stories by the Russian writer O. Volkonskaya, whose oeuvre has been poorly studied by scholars. The paper considers the book of short stories Violets and Wolves and shows the distinctive features of the author’s creative writing. The book consists of two parts: Paris Violets and Argentinean Outskirts . Some of the stories were written in Prague, Czechoslovakia at that time, and the rest were written in the Soviet Union, the author’s homeland. The stories have autobiographical features and characteristics of memoirs. Furthermore, the paper reveals the impartial and subjective features of O. Volkonskaya’s writings, as well as the author’s national and universal views presented in the stories. The paper draws a clear distinction between memoir and autobiographical features of the prose. It studies different female characters created by the writer and shows that the Argentinian cycle presents characters in more detail than the Paris one. The paper also provides a description of O. Volkonskaya’s unpublished short stories, plays, and poetry. In her book, Volkonskaya touches upon the most topical philosophical, ethical, and moral issues. Her short stories show the reality in a very individual way. She describes people and their feelings, events strongly influencing their lives. In the stories, she expresses her own feelings and reflects her personal experience concerning religion, society, politics and culture. It is concluded that the unique and distinctive prose of Volkonskaya is a literary phenomenon, creating a synthesis of documentary, autobiographical, memoir, and art of literature features. Such a unique literary genre creates a full picture of the modern society and helps to understand the life of a person and the destiny of the whole generation.

Attributing and Dating the Manuscript Miscellany of Elizabeth Newell: Sir Matthew Hale and Beinecke Library Osborn MS b49

A late seventeenth-century commonplace book signed by Elizabeth Newell and held in the Osborne collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Library offers the promise of a collection of unpublished poetry written by an otherwise anonymous early-modern woman. However, all of the material in Newell’s commonplace book is directly attributable to other writers and furthermore that a full accounting of these sources allows us to adjust date of the book’s compilation from c . 1668 to, at the earliest, 1681. The poems derive from four sources: Sir Matthew Hale’s Contemplations Moral and Divine (1676), Gilbert Burnet’s biography, The Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (1681), Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1635) and Samuel Clarke’s Mirror . . . both for saints and sinners (1657). Furthermore, the presence of a poem that is first recorded in Burnet’s biography of Hale establishes 1681 as the earliest likely date for the manuscript.

A Selection of Unpublished Poetry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota. Dr. Henry is also a Professor in the English Department at Michigan State University, where he teaches American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process, in Integrative Arts and Humanities. He serves as Senior Editor of the American Indian Studies Series (and the series sub-imprint Mukwa Enewed ) at Michigan State University Press. Under his editorship the AISS has published research and creative work by an array of scholars, working in a variety of disciplines, related to the larger field of American Indian Studies.

“The Trumpet in the Bottom”

Oyvind Fahlstrom (1928–76) began as a surrealist at the end of the 1940s, and among others wrote the unpublished poetry collection “The Trumpet in the Bottom”. In 1953, he wrote the world’s first m ...

Windows on Writing: Susanna Rowson and the Scene of Female Authorship

Few women writers are more central to the history of the early American novel than Susanna Rowson. Her oft-cited status as the author of the first American bestseller has cemented her importance to the rise of the novel, the development of popular literature, and the emergence of authorship as a viable career for women. In an early effort to recover Rowson's significance, Jane Tompkins declared her the Father of the American (29). Recent scholarship employs more moderate terms, while still emphasizing Rowson's achievements as an author whose writing across several genres reached a wider audience than most other authors of the period, male or female, could aspire to reach. A unique textual history has also formed around Rowson's best-selling novel, Charlotte Temple, and its numerous editions across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including accounts of Rowson's efforts to market and promote her work, the ways in which readers responded to the text through marginalia and other fan-culture activities, and how the format and content of the different editions and the novel's sequel reflect changes in publishing practices and popular taste. (1) Rowson and her most famous novel have today achieved canonical status and are widely read, taught, and written about by a generation of critics attuned to the need for a recuperative account of American women's writing. Scholarly accounts of Rowson's place in early American literary history reflect largermovements in the field as women and their textual productions have gained increased legitimacy as objects of study. Rowson was initially recovered as an exceptional figure, staked out against a relatively shallow pool of fellow women writers as an unusual example of professional success. (2) Her status was closely tied to that of the novel itself as an exemplary American genre thanks to Cathy Davidson's groundbreaking Revolution and the Word and the first wave of scholarship that followed upon the modern critical edition of Charlotte Temple, edited by Davidson and published in 1987. Subsequent scholarship has moved away from these early approaches in notable ways. Ongoing recovery efforts continue to expand the literary canon and particularly to demonstrate that women found points of entry into print culture through a variety of genres other than the novel, including essays, periodicals, and pedagogical textbooks, claims persuasively outlined in works like Sari Edelstein's Between the Novel and the News, Caroline Wigginton's In the Neighborhood, and Angela Vietto's Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America. Additionally, recent scholarship emphasizes the importance of women's manuscript compositions, documenting how unpublished commonplace books, poetry, and letters allowed women to exercise a considerable degree of authorial control over their writing and its circulation. Challenging the primacy of white women within the history of early American literature, many scholars have shown that African American and Native American women made key contributions to the development of literary culture and a wide range of literacies that extend beyond the conventional concept of authorial composition. Such critical approaches have generated remarkable dividends not just for the study of early women writers generally, but for the reconsideration of Rowson herself--no longer an exceptional figure but one embedded within a heterogeneous community of women who followed many paths in their pursuit of self-expression. The most important of these critical reconsiderations is Marion Rust's Prodigal Daughters, which opens up major new lines of investigation into the gendered nature of Rowson's politics and authorial identity. Notably, by addressing Rowson's extensive oeuvre and her many creative pursuits, Rust proves that only by expanding beyond a singular focus on Charlotte Temple will Rowson's multifaceted personas, opinions, and stylistic endeavors come into view. However, these scholarly accounts of the historical conditions and varied forms of early women's writing have not been accompanied by an examination of the representation of women writers within fictional texts. …

Illegible Minds: Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings and the Psychology of Moral Management in Jane Eyre and Villette

This essay situates Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette , along with her letters and unpublished poetry, within the nineteenth-century discourse of phrenology and moral management, exposing her ultimate critique of these popular theories as devices of power. Deriving from faculty psychology, both hinged upon self-regulation as a moral necessity, determined by the decipherability of the self. Brontë resisted this established relation between legibility and self-regulation, preferring a theory predicated upon her own developing concept of illegibility -- a potentially limitless imaginative space. The majority of psychologists commonly associated any state of imaginative withdrawal with a lack of inner regulation and moral weakness leading to immorality and insanity. Brontë’s work shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and becomes ultimately devastating to the self, advocating instead the moral basis of a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.

“Icthyologue”: Freshwater Biology in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

An ecocritical analysis of Ted Hughes's knowledge of freshwater biology and environmental science, especially the work of his son, Nicholas Hughes. Contains previously unpublished poetry drafts by Ted Hughes.

Editorial Introduction

Editorial Introduction Sandra K. Soto This issue of Feminist Formations represents the labor of many people, including Zahid R. Chaudhary, the guest editor of our special dossier on Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons, which I will discuss momentarily. But first, I want to express my deep gratitude to two people with whom I have worked and learned, day in and day out, since bringing the journal to the University of Arizona two years ago: Erin Durban-Albrecht and Londie Martin. During these first two years, Erin served as our managing editor, and Londie as our editorial assistant. Two years may not sound like a long time, but these particular years were filled with the steepest learning curves, highest expectations, and, no doubt, affective “political desires,” to use Wiegman’s term. Erin and Londie were wonderful collaborators. Their wit, feminist commitment, and grace under the inevitable timeline pressures of journal production helped push Feminist Formations toward new, exciting directions. They now go on to exciting new stages of their careers: Erin will finish writing her dissertation with the support of an AAUW fellowship, and Londie has taken a job as assistant professor in the School of Information Resources and Library Sciences at the University of Arizona (UA). While I will miss working with them, I am thrilled to welcome Dylan “Rocket” McCarthy Blackston as our new managing editor and Stephanie Murphy as our editorial assistant. Both Rocket and Stephanie are doctoral students in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies here at the UA. I also want to thank Erin for suggesting that we feature Favianna Rodriguez’s art on our cover, and TC Tolbert’s poetry in the Poesía section. Rodriguez is a self-described “artist, agitator, and techie working for social change.” Her colorful, edgy political art has become a staple of (im)migrant rights activism in particular, and anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminism in general. Her bold 2012 reproductive rights poster (a collaboration of artist, Gan Golan) altogether sidesteps familiar slogans and instead proclaims: “I’m a Slut. I Vote! So does everyone I sleep with. And you’re about to get more fucked than I am. Keep ur government off my pussy.” And her popular “Migration Is Beautiful” (2013) stickers, posters, and T-shirts feature monarch butterflies as a symbol of “our right to move” (qtd. in Leal 2013). The daughter of Peruvian immigrants, Rodriguez is based in Oakland, California, where she is involved in a number of activist/artist projects, including the immigrant rights organization CultureStrike, and ongoing collaborations with artist-activists Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde. In featuring Rodriguez’s art on our cover, we wanted to choose a piece that had circulated less widely than her political posters, but [End Page vii] that contained all of the transgressive fire we have come to expect from her. We selected her monotype “Spellbound III” (2010). Our featured poet is TC Tolbert, coeditor of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013) and assistant director of Casa Libre, a nonprofit writer’s community center and art space in Tucson. Of Tolbert’s chapbook, territories of folding (2011), Dean Spade writes: TC Tolbert’s reimagining and retooling of language is so evocative and suggestive, skirting towards the edges of possibility, that I can almost feel neural pathways growing inside my brain as I read and re-read the text and interact with the book’s design. I wish I could give this book as a gift to everyone I know who is dedicated to resisting narrowness and confinement—engaging with this work builds and requires a spaciousness, fluidity, and unpredictable complexity that I think many of us are trying to cultivate inside ourselves and manifest in the world.1 The five pieces that we selected to publish in this issue of Feminist Formations exemplify the “reimaging and retooling of language” named by Spade. Taken from Tolbert’s unpublished poetry manuscript The Littlest Death, these works capture the sheer repetitiveness and overwhelming saturation of epistemological, ontological, and physical violence toward trans* people. While death or the threat of death is everywhere in these poems, Tolbert’s language, imagery, and resilience are alive...

The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume IX. Poems: A Variorum Edition ed. by Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume IX. Poems: A Variorum Edition ed. by Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham Elizabeth Addison (bio) Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Volume IX. Poems: A Variorum Edition. Historical Introduction, Textual Introduction, and Poem Headnotes by Albert J. von Frank. Text Established by Albert J. von Frank and Thomas Wortham. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. cxlvii + 705 pp. $95. (hardcover). For those working with poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson, this new addition to Harvard’s standard The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published as Volume IX: Poems: A Variorum Edition, is a long-awaited godsend. For those not so familiar with the poems, this volume is a revelation. It contains every poem published by Emerson in any form during his lifetime, and it omits the fragments and drafts included by his son, Edward Waldo Emerson, in the posthumous Riverside and Centenary editions, previously considered standard. The Collected Works, in process for more than forty years, has presented many challenges for its cadre of editors. For the poems, the biggest editorial challenge was not so much non-authorial changes—though these there were—as the plethora of drafts and versions of each poem. Albert von Frank, who with Thomas Wortham established the text of each poem, describes in the Textual Introduction the difficulties and their resolution. In his 1946 dissertation, Carl F. Strauch began an unfinished 40-year effort toward a variorum edition, not practical before Sir Walter Greg in 1950 published his clarifying concept of “copy-text,” the principle that has ruled modern scholarly editions by “enforcing the distinction between the private compositional history of a poem and the history of its presentation to a public” (cxxi). Quoting Joseph M. Thomas, von Frank says Strauch was “instrumental in the Emerson family’s decision to make available to scholars the original manuscripts of both the journals and the verse-books,” thus making possible the ordering of that “private compositional history.” As a result, The Poetry Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (University of Missouri Press, 1986), under the general editorship of Ralph H. Orth with a team that included von Frank, “simply presented and clearly organized the pre-copy-text forms of nearly all the poems.” That work opened a way to this long-awaited volume. In his Preface to The Poetry Notebooks (vii), Orth singles out von Frank as “the authority of last resort because of his unmatched knowledge of Emerson’s published and unpublished poetry.” We are fortunate that he brought that knowledge and what Orth called his “unflagging energy” to this edition; his sensitive readings of the poems do not over-interpret or dictate, but rather suggest avenues for interpretation or factors to be considered. In the process, he freely credits the earlier editors, Strauch and the younger Emerson, as well as Thomas and other relevant scholars. Most valuably, von Frank’s long history on other Emerson [End Page 174] projects such as the sermons and journals and his long editorship of the journal ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance give him a sureness of insight, a depth of knowledge and understanding we can trust. The very readable Historical Introduction is full of helpful and sometimes amusing details, including much about the development of Emerson as a poet and the reception of his poetry. Because he did not follow sectarian orthodoxy, his poems at first were incomprehensible to some readers and critics. In reviews of the 1847 volume, “mysticism” or “mystical” aspects of the poetry were problematic for readers, but for the 1867 volume reviewers were more “appreciative.” Von Frank postulates that America was becoming more comfortable with the “antinomianism” of Emerson’s poetry (lxxvi). Emerson’s brother William once suggested he get a musical friend to “trim your metres”; later, of course, Emerson in “The Poet” would say good poetry does not consist of meters but “a metre-making argument” (lxiv). His poetic theory receives thorough treatment. So does the interesting commercial context. Although New York was aggressive with distribution by rail and canal barge, Emerson declined to publish there because he could earn more by making...