Poetry and Poetics Research Papers (original) (raw)

Re-framing the concepts of utopia and allegory in the twenty-first century.

- by David Howard
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- History, Comparative Literature, Art History, Modernism (Literature)

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a. new interpretation of Derrida's writings on the gift, Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry's most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination in genius, inspiration and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones.

- by Adam R Rosenthal
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- Philosophy, Nineteenth Century Studies, Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover at
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.

- by Steven B. Katz
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- Robotics, Robotics (Computer Science), Rhetoric, Composition and Rhetoric

In a fast-paced world, what value does poetry hold? What good is it, since as Auden famously opined, "poetry makes nothing happen." Of course, this was meant ironically in a poem celebrating W. B. Yeats upon his death. What poetry does offer is a different manner of seeing and being in the world. A slower way of apprehending our place. A stubborn way of opening to what is. This essay draws on Charles Taylor's critique of modernity, and suggests what religion and poetry have in common--and what distinguishes them. Both share a longing for a kind of transcendence that we find in the ordinary grit and rhyme of our lives, something "other" that moves us toward the world, and more deeply into our own lives. Poems offer us what George Steiner calls the "shining through" of epiphany, though one that comes to us in indirect or mediated forms. Or, as Adam Zagajewski puts it, "poetry searches for radiance." In an age of saturation, of excessive but thin 24/7 "presence," that is gift enough to warrant our attention and capture our imagination--which, finally, is the singular gift of poetry, and why religion that is too prose-bound is finally less adequate for the work of praise.

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

- by Mohamed A Eno
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- Critical Theory, American Literature, African Studies, World Literatures
- by Ximena FIGUEROA FLORES
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- Comparative Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Estética, Psicoanálisis
- by Lorenzo Cardilli
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- Critical Theory, Rhetoric, Word and Image Studies, Stylistics

“Blue Universe (flowers of symbiosis)” is a book containing
a love poem, divided into four parts in ascending progression:
from the beholding and idealisation of the Beloved Woman (I);
the approach (II); the discouragement (III); in the end, the full
expression of love happens, with an invitation to the Beloved,
unveiling the full thrill through the accomplishment of love
(IV).
This album was influenced by the “Song of Songs”.
Drawings by ANA PINTO, inspired in this light poetry,
illustrate the idyllic setting and the tension created by this
magic book.
This love poem is an english translation of the original portuguese poem "Universo azul (flores da simbiose)".

- by Ivo Miguel Barroso
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- Poetry, Poetics, Petrarch, Love
- by Michael A Istvan Jr.
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- Creative Writing, American Literature, Sociology, Cultural Studies

Rob Wilson: Interview with Galway Kinnell, American poet, on the comparative state of writing in Hawaii, USA, and the world: "To have friends who are poets is a great pleasure. It's also very useful. You can get help, criticism. It's easy to find a literary community almost anywhere, these days. When Louis Simpson was here, we two had a little literary community at least during the last month that he was here. There are people who live here with whom I can talk about literature. Rob Wilson is one. I haven't really felt deprived in that way. I have a correspondence with writers, and there have also been visiting writers have come for three or four days. I saw William Stafford and josef Brodsky more continuously during their visits here than ever before...."

- by Rob S E A N Wilson
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- American Literature, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Poetry

El poder basat en el talent, no hauria de témer la desestabilització
del seu discurs ni la pèrdua del poder, en tant que no concep el
poder com una possessió seva sinó com un reconeixement atribuït
pels altres. Però si els altres ens han atorgat poder, els altres tenen
la capacitat de deslliurar-nos-en i negar el nostre talent. Pot passar
que, per por i deliri, el poder negui l’habilitat de l’altre, i també
que sotmeti els més hàbils per tal de fer-los fer allò que serveix per
afermar-s’hi encara més. És quan diem que el poder s’ha corromput.
Per tal de romandre en el poder, aquest s’instaura com a
«seleccionador» artístic, esdevé poder literari i santifica aquells
que considera políticament correctes, és a dir, corroboratius del
seu talent.

- by Anna Aguilar-Amat
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- Social Policy, Poetry, Poetry and Poetics
- by Michael A Istvan Jr.
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- Creative Writing, American Literature, Marketing, American History

“The Message” (1982), hip-hop’s first anthem, ushered in a political aspect to hip-hop that remains in the genre’s DNA. Responding to the political and social realities that eviscerated black and Latino communities in the Bronx during the 1970s, “The Message” is widely recognized for its searing poetic rendition of ghetto life. Yet, the song renders the ghetto in two distinct ways. The first part is a lyric, which displays a powerful poetic vision of the speaker’s experience “in the ghetto living second-rate”; the second part is the outro, a convention that has been used in many rap songs but rarely with such philosophical force. Dialectically opposed, the lyric presents the ghetto in a theater of sincerity; the outro re-presents it in the theater of the absurd. Taken together, this dialectical representation of the ghetto forges a trenchant ethical response to intractable social absurdities.

- by Tim Wood
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- Poetry, Poetics, Émmanuel Lévinas, Levinas

This essay accounts for various, anomalous and formally generative examples of monotony in cultural production and traces monotony as an unlikely poetic trope in critical discourse. The problem of monotony as a modern phenomenon is expressed most clearly in the fields of music and literary theory because monotony is a form of rhythm. The rhythm of monotony masquerades as a neutral surface to resist subsuming forms of capitalism and nationalism, just as it ironically resonates with superficial forms of twentieth-century communications that exceed the borders of nations. Specifically, this article offers an analysis of monotony in relation to literary texts by Wallace Stevens (“Anatomy of Monotony”) and Inger Christensen (alphabet).

- by Angela Carr
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- Comparative Literature, Theodor Adorno, Poetry, Poetics

The paper analyzes the poetry of Lydia Sigourney in order to develop an alternative model of poetics in addition to the the ego-centered poetics of Romanticism and post-Romanticism. The "sentimentist" poetic approach requires a completely different set of evaluative criteria from Romanticism; for example, it makes room for multiple voices and perspectives, assuming a permeable sense of the poetic self. It is irrational to judge or evaluate the quality of poetry written in the sentimentist tradition according to Romantic standards. Only by taking into account the model according to which the poetesses wrote can we understand, appreciate, or assess the the importance of their poetry.

- by Annie Finch
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- Feminist Theory, Nineteenth Century Studies, Poetry, Poetics
- by Başak Yurtseven
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- Architecture, Space and Place, Landscape Architecture, Metaphysics of Time

I vivaci studi italiani degli scritti di Benjamin sulla poesia di Baudelaire (editi da Solmi nel 1962) hanno spesso trascurato l’importanza di allargare la propria prospettiva all’edizione francese del 1974 (Payot), contenente tre importanti saggi noti in Germania dalla fine degli anni ’60. Poiché tali testi sono stati finalmente tradotti in italiano solo nel 2006 (Einaudi) e ripubblicati nel 2012 in un’edizione più articolata (Neri Pozza), ci proponiamo di rilanciare un nostro studio a partire dalla versione italiana, per mostrare come essi gettino le basi della sociologia materialista della letteratura di Benjamin, ancora insufficientemente esplorata. Formatasi proprio muovendo dalla pratica traduttiva dei Quadri parigini, essa ha analizzato il ruolo della bohème, del flâneur e della modernità nell’eroismo lirico di Baudelaire all’apogeo del capitalismo.

- by Andrea D'Urso
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- Epistemology, Marxism, Poetry, Poetics

In a number of his academic articles in the field of Words and Music, Eric Prieto makes a point of drawing attention to the idea that ‘the application of concepts from one art to objects from the other is an inherently metaphorical act.’ This he expounds upon in considerable detail in ‘Metaphor and Methodology in Word and Music Studies’, in which it is declared that in the further continuation of Word and Music studies practitioners must ‘Accept and embrace the inherently metaphorical status of all attempts to apply terms from one art to objects in another.’ To a certain degree I believe that Prieto is quite correct in his assertion that when we use language that is specific to one art form to talk about another, it is frequently metaphorical. If one speaks, for example, of a poetic line modulating or arpeggiating (language that is based upon tonal movements and issues of pitch) one is clearly employing an element of ‘metaphoricity’ to describe similar patterns, ideas or interpretations of the musical forms within poetry. However, I do not believe that this must apply to ‘all attempts’ as Prieto insists, for there are numerous articles within musical discourse that are not solely dependent on pitch, such as structure, rhythm, articulation and dynamic. All of these elements can be, and frequently are, used within poetry also, and thus that metaphorical layer is not an issue.
This paper discusses potential ways in which common language used in musical discourse may be applied in conversations relating to poetry, and, to further these thoughts, explores how one may use ideas relating to traditional music composition when approaching the composition of poetry.

- by Georgie V Lorimer
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- Modern Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Vowel harmony, Quintilian

At the heart of this article is a fairly straightforward assertion: that literature has a trans-verbal level at which it affects us as a work of art. Hence discussing a novel means bringing to the fore not only its overt narrative function but also its covert artistic function: a consideration of the work in light of its aesthetic intention. Following the phenomenological traditions of Roman Ingarden and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that aesthetic intention does not determine the significance of the art object, which is presumed to be dynamic within a spectrum of meanings. Rather, aesthetic intention takes into account the circumstance of the novel having been actuated into form by an " artistic gesture. " This " gesture " is not physical: it is a metaphorical motion referring to the artist's actuation of an aesthetic intention using one or another medium to give an artwork its perceivable form. In painting, this " gesture " can sometimes be traced through a work's visible brushstrokes or formal composition, but in literature such " gestures " can appear beyond the literal text and remain invisible even while they are experienced in the literary work. The conception of such a " gesture " is meant to incorporate the insights of literary and aesthetic theory, along with poststructuralism, in a critique that allows for structural analysis to also pursue a reconstituted significance. What appears below is more a program of the problem than a full treatment of its implications – a stretching of the canvas, so to speak. But I believe that the articulation of this kernel has a value in itself even if the full unraveling of the subject is yet to come.

- by David Stromberg
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- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art Theory, Plato

The controversies and discussions sparked by the Russian Formalists are important to review today because many of the same issues are still current. The most well-known exchange occurred in the early 1920s between Leon Trotsky and Victor Shklovsky, between a high government official of the Soviet regime and a leading member of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Was the discussion a harbinger of future Soviet policies? Interestingly, some of the objections voiced by government officials, at the time charged with overseeing cultural policy, are reflected in modern-day conceptions of Russian Formalism. An important question to consider is why a theory in poetics should have stirred the heated debate, about questions of ideology and art, in the first place.

- by Norbert Francis
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- Russian Literature, Art Theory, Marxism, Poetics

O gênero épico tinha por objetivo mais nobre a preservação de histórias contadas por gerações e nessas histórias, narradas por versos cantados – elemento antigo para memorização –, preservavam os nomes de heróis, pais fundadores, espaços míticos, cotidiano antigo, pensamentos arcaicos, buscava-se preservar o máximo de um contexto ao qual os ouvintes já não faziam mais parte ou, notavam resquícios de um tempo que não conheceram. Foi a escrita que eternizou, na melhor das hipóteses, todo esse elemento épico que estava por ameaça constante do esquecimento.

- by Jonatas Ferreira
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- Classics, Greek Literature, Roman History, Augustan Poetry

Illustrious is the roll of those who have made prescriptions and predictions declaring that poetry has had its day. Plato wanted to keep poets out of his ideal republic. Love Peacock, Shelley's friend, thought poetry has little place in the modern age of progress and reason. Literary critics like Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman theorize about the demise of poetry after the unsurpassable achievements of Wordsworth and Blake. Theodor Adorno declared that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, and today many hold that new poets cannot make themselves heard or read amid the cacophony arising from today's World Wide Web, popular culture and advertising trivia. Somehow poetry hangs on. Why? Ultimately this question boils down to the issue of the connection, if any, between literature, especially poetry, and life. This issue in turn cannot be extricated from a study of methods of interpreting literary texts

The poetry produced in the Punjabi language by poets Avtaar Singh Sandhu “Paash” (1950-1988) and Laal Singh Dil (1943-2007) from the late sixties onwards is what we focus upon in this paper. The ‘plurality’ mentioned in the title arises out of a diverse nature of stress laid upon in their respective works, which sets the poetic tone of each of them. Avtaar Singh Sandhu “Paash”’s poetry treats the subject of an imminent revolution through imageries of a life and its not-so-ambitious dreams and hopes of fulfillment, lived in a largely agrarian background and of a passionate love affair which becomes the metaphor for the longing for a better society. The unique treatment of the personal to make it speak of the social marks the poetry of Paash, and it is quite similar in the case of Laal Singh Dil, though in a very different way due to the difference in the social ‘locations’ of these two poets. Dil uses his caste position as a ‘chamar’, an outcaste to be precise, as the point of departure in his poetry. This indeed made him able to relate to the class war waged by the Naxalite movement and resulted into his involvement in the same. His poetry turned into the channel through which the Dalits of Punjab found a voice, and into a narrative of the oppression of the upper castes as unfolded in his Naglok and other collections of poems. By comparing the relative stresses in the poetic utterances of these two faces of a revolution -- which was not only political-social but also a literary revolution in Punjabi literature -- we hope to lay the ground for creating a framework to identify the different strands in the politics and poetics of the Naxalite movement.

- by Sreejit Datta
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- Modern Poetry, Poetry and Poetics, Naxalite Movement in India

My theme is ‘life-writing’, understood as the shaping of one's life through the contemplation of values, although this activity is mostly unreflective. To become an art so that one's life can be shaped in greater accord with clearly held... more

- by Peter Cheyne
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- British Literature, Aesthetics, Ethics, Kant
- by Guilherme Chagas
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- Poetry, Poetics, Translation of Poetry, Modern Poetry

In this insightful and provocative volume, Lauri Ramey reveals spirituals and slave songs to be a crucial element in American literature. This book shows slave songs' intrinsic value as lyric poetry, sheds light on their roots and originality, and draws new conclusions on this art form that is rarely studied as part of the lyric poetry canon. This book restores the slaves' songs to their rightful place in American literature as lyric poetry and a touchstone of the American cultural imagination.

- by Lauri Scheyer
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- American Literature, Poetry, African Diaspora Studies, African American Literature

Tatamkhulu Afrika, lauded writer and South African activist, over the course of his life suffered imprisonments under the Nazis and the apartheid state; he also changed his name five times and won almost every literary award in South Africa. Afrika’s lifetime of moving among categories — whether racial, political, sexual, or religious — has garnered the majority of scholarly attention to his work. However, the form and content of Afrika’s poetry, prose, and autobiography reveal yet unchecked assumptions that govern narratives of heroism and sexuality, in post-1994 South Africa. Afrika’s private experience of queerness expresses the superabundance of desire that he refused to pin to his identity, even as he publicly moved through multiple names and political affiliations. How might we think the conjunction of nation, desire, and literary form — the contours of which have been often tied to the novel, or, in South Africa, the prison memoir? My answer arises from a triangulation of literary forms that also revises the queer erotic triangle as described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Rather than obscuring desire, triangulating Afrika’s writings — particularly Bitter Eden, Mr. Chameleon, and “War-Mate” — enables us to trace an emerging model of queer heroism that allows affection, or even love, between men.

- by Michelle Decker
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- African Studies, Queer Studies, Autobiography, Poetry and Poetics

Riche et durable est la vie de la sextine : du trobar d’Arnaut Daniel, elle se diffuse, du XIIIe siècle au XVIe siècle, dans la poésie occidentale et, après une période de silence, trouve un nouvel essor dans la modernité. Cette contribution souhaite rappeler l’extrême vitalité de la sextine dans l’histoire littéraire et se focaliser sur des compositions oulipiennes très récentes – La liseuse (2012) de Paul Fournel et Mai quai Conti (écrit en 2010, dernière publication en ligne en 2014) de Michèle Audin – qui actualisent la sextine en la proposant sous des déclinaisons inusuelles et inattendues, en mesure de témoigner d’un renouvellement de la tradition dans la contemporanéité.

- by Francesca Pagani
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- French Literature, Poetry and Poetics, Oulipo Studies

El ángulo recto constituye la base del pensamiento arquitectónico de Le Corbusier, para quien ninguna forma está desprovista de sentido. Todas sus obras lo ponen de relieve, todos sus proyectos lo atestiguan. No sólo es una forma geométrica, sino también un símbolo. Ésta es la primera traducción de al español de Le Poeme de l'Angle Droit (1955), escrito, ilustrado y diseñado por Le Corbusier.

- by Ricardo Ibarlucía and +1
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- Aesthetics, Architecture, Poetry, Poetics
- by Menakhem Perry
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- Theory of interpretation, Poetry and Poetics, Text Theory, Norman MacCaig

This paper takes for its core subject the phenomenon of the Arabian Souq and its manifestation as an integral form of dwelling for ancient and contemporary Arabic societies alike. The paper starts with the assumption that the urban and architectural representation of the Arabian souq, conceived historically as a market street or a thoroughfare street, embodies the totality of people's social, religious and political understanding of communal space, transforming its apparent commercial activities into an orchestrated series of spatial rituals. In order to understand the relationship between the physical representation of the Arabian souq and its mental implications on the lives of Arabic societies, the paper will ground itself on the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer, arguing for its validity as an all encompassing methodology that can possibly provide us with a better understanding of the types of rituals embodied in the experience of the Arabian Souq. Such proposition hinges on Gadamer's theoretical emphasis on the role of history and language in shaping our understanding of social and architectural phenomena, where dialogical interpretation is seen as a key component in the development of a sustainable socio-urban discourse. As such, the main concern of this paper revolves around the literary productions through which we can come to a holistic understanding of the historical importance of the Arabian Souq in relation to the types of rituals embodied in the physical and formal representation of its overall urban layout.

- by Jasmine Shahin
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- Arabic Literature, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, Poetry and Poetics, Souks
- by Pete Sandberg
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- Death, Old Norse Literature, Mourning, Maurice Blanchot

This paper interprets Robert Duncan’s conception of poetic form as the rhythm of awareness of the meaning of everything. Starting with Duncan’s engagement with Ezra Pound’s concept of the tone leading of vowels, the paper progresses to Duncan’s critique of tone leading, and reconceives poetic materiality in order to propose a rapprochement of tone- and awareness-based composition techniques. The paper demonstrates Duncan’s preoccupation with the entanglement between poetry’s material and meaningful dimensions in an extended close reading of the first section of “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar.” The paper interprets Duncan’s understanding of the concepts of awareness and meaning in terms of his metaphysics of originary disresemblance.

- by Adam Katz
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- Metaphysics, Poetry, Rhythm, Poetics

This essay discusses rhyme and rhythm in syllabo-accentual verse, in which the term ‘rhythm’ refers to stress patterning within the line. Rhyme and rhythm have been investigated in isolation, yet no studies exist that provide a rigorous framework for correlating their effects. The essay shows, based on a thorough statistical analysis of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, that rhythm of individual lines can mimic rhyming structures within the stanza. In addition, we trace the evolution of the Onegin stanza in the Russian literary tradition, uncovering the ways in which covert transformations of poetic form reflect shifts in literary history from late Romanticism to Modernism.

- by Boris Maslov and +1
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- Digital Humanities, Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Poetry and Poetics

Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil? Why indulge in painting, poetry or music when lives... more

- by Roland Bleiker
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- Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Sociology

این مقاله در سال 1380 در دو نشریه ی "کارنامه" و " بررسی کتاب" منتشر شده است

- by Rosa Jamali
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- Persian Poetry, Poetry and Poetics, Graveyard Poetry, Analysis of Poetry

This article is dedicated to the analysis of one of the 20th century canonical poetic texts – “Elegy” by A.I. Vvedensky, a member of the OBERIU group. The authors investigate the scope of understanding in the text of extreme semantic complexity and ambiguity of both its plot and emotional modality. A detailed review of potential pretexts leads to the discourse on the significance of literary associations and their part in understanding of the poem.

- by Pavel Uspenskij and +1
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- Russian Literature, Semantics, Modernist poetry, Poetics
- by Shlomy Mualem
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- Philosophy, Aesthetics, Plato, Literary Criticism