Poetry and Poetics

The Arabic prose poem gave rise to a profound, contentious and continuing debate about Arabic poetry: its definition, its limits and its relation to its readers. Huda J. Fakhreddine examines the history of the prose poem, its claims of autonomy and distance from its socio-political context, and the anxiety and scandal it generated.

When the modernist movement in Arabic poetry was launched in the 1940s, it threatened to blur the distinctions between poetry and everything else. The Arabic prose poem is probably the most subversive and extreme manifestation of this blurring. It is often described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle and even a conspiracy.

The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice

*Examines one of the most controversial poetic forms in Arabic: the Arabic prose poem

*Examines the ‘new genre’ of the prose poem as a poetic practice and as a critical lens.

*Adopts a case-study approach to a number of poets, including: Adonis, Muhammad al-Maghut, Salim Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish and Wadiʿ Saʿadeh

*Adopts a comparative approach across time periods, genres, identity and cultural traditions

ABSTRACT: The present study is investigating whether and to what extent university students have the competence of decoding and comprehending the language of literature, the poetic grammar of individual authors. More specifically, we are interested in Kazantzakis’ language and his talent of creating new words or using dialectic/idiomatic words in his epic poem ΟΔΥΣΕΙΑ. Our research was conducted in the Departments of Greek Philology of Universities in Greece, with 1st and 4th year university students, as they are our target group. The students of Universities had to decode twenty-four words which were different types of words (derivatives, compounds etc.) and classified based on dominant POS (verbs, nouns, adjectives). After subjects had completed their guessing about word types and parts of speech, they had to specify their degree of confidence that they had guessed correctly, on a continuum/bar [0,1] – rather than the usual Likert’s scale – and show they had understood not only the specific word they were asked to decode, but also the underlying meaning of the whole sentence. /// KEYWORDS: Reading comprehension strategies, inferencing, guessing, accuracy, confidence, fuzziness, ΟΔΥΣΕΙΑ, Kazantzakis

This paper sets out to reveal a contribution made by the fifth-century sophist Protagoras to the field of literary scholarship, as described by Aristotle. A papyrus commentary preserved in P.Oxy. II 221 shows Protagoras commenting with approval on the narrative structure of a passage in Iliad 21. I will argue that Aristotle played a role in reporting the sophist's view on literary criticism and will suggest that he may have  incorporated them in his own scholarship.

Среди заслуг выдающегося просветителя Николая Ивановича Новикова (1744–1818) есть и такая, как издание «Полного собрания всех сочинений в стихах и прозе» А.П. Сумарокова, ставшее первым опытом создания собрания сочинений русского писателя. В распоряжении Новикова была часть литературного архива Сумарокова, которая позднее оказалась утеряна. В статье рассматривается значение для новиковского собрания поэтических произведений Сумарокова, опубликованных ранее в периодике XVIII столетия. Когда это было возможно, привлекались рукописи его стихотворений, хранящиеся в петербургском филиале Архива Российской академии наук. Специальное внимание уделено издательской истории эклог Сумарокова. Также анализируются некоторые аспекты позднейших изданий поэта, подготовленных Г.А. Гуковским (1935) и П.Н. Берковым (1957).
Among other things, the outstanding enlightener Nikolai Novikov (1744 –1818) contributed to Russian culture as the editor-publisher of the Complete Works in Verse and Prose by Aleksandr Sumarokov (1781 –1782, 10 vols.; 2nd ed.: 1787, 10 vols.). It was the first attempt of publishing the complete works of a modern Russian author. A part of Sumarokov’s papers Novikov had at his disposal were lost about the time of Novikov’s arrest. The paper examines the importance of Sumarokov’s poetry published in periodicals for Novikov’s edition; in the course of the study the manuscripts of these poems (preserved in the St. Petersburg archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences) were consulted. A special attention is paid to the editorial history of Sumarokov’s eclogues. Concurrently, some aspects of later editions of Sumarokov prepared by G.A. Gukovskii (1935) and P.N. Berkov (1957) are considered.

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.

For many people the fact that Louise Glück won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature was a complete surprise.  Ian Probstein comments on the judges’ decision and reminds about the poet’s “CV” that includes National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Bollingen Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Humanities Medal, several  Guggenheim  fellowships  and  some  other  prestigious  awards.  Louise Glück was Poet-Laureate of the United States (2003–2004), the president of The Yale Younger  Poets  Prize  jury. The  essay  contains  a  brief  biographical  sketch and a careful, subtle analysis of Glück’s poetry supplemented by Ian Probstein’s translations of poetic fragments.

Designed for the English and creative writing classroom as well as for the popular market, Pandemic Poems is an anthology addressing the unusual present and the challenges we all keep facing in the coronavirus pandemic. Featuring the work of renowned contemporary poets Christian Bök, Jenna Butler, rob mclennan, Jude Neale, Nisha Patel, Lisa Shatzky, and Thomas Trofimuk, it also showcases the work of regionally famous poets and new voices published for the first time. Almost all of the poems were composed between March and June 2020 and the collection represents one of the first records of artistic responses to the pandemic.

In this essay which opens "To what extent do place and time determine a poet?/To what extent do plague and time determine a poet?" the issues of value during a period of mass loss, of motivation to write, and rituals of remembrance are explored. The text vacillates between critical prose readings of recent poets, political poetics reflections on pandemics and migrations due to attempts to escape contamination, and more poetry-like writing emerging from my Spring 2020 journals. Here, as I read others, I interrogate my own continuation and writing during this time of limbo and loss, in an ambiance of latent fear. Only one of the poets I speak of, Laura Mullen, is directly addressing Covid-19. Other works I examine were published before this illness appeared, but these poems, thoughts, and lines are resonant and pertinent to these times—and in particular to current issues of grief, absence, mourning. This explains the large reliance on my reading of Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (Omnidawn, 2018).

TITLE: Becoming Eco-fluent: Being with Nature

The once-neon reef
Bubble wrapped and bleached
Asks to be seen (Hawke forthcoming 2021)

The body of the world is articulate and uncannily thoughtful (Vicki Kirby 1997, 5).

Heidegger is not concerned about the fact that pollution for example, has destroyed all animal life in the Rhine. What does concern him is that the river has been put to man’s exclusive service (Ilya Prigogine 1984, 33)

Through two themes, this paper addresses the provocation of anthropocentric recklessness that has, at least since the Industrial Revolution, regarded nature primarily as a commodity to be exploited for human commerce. Firstly, let us consider how we became so disassociated from our source (the physical environment that sustains life), that a series of global ecological disasters has called us to attention- to wake up. The will-full damage caused by the human enterprise falls uneasily on the ledger of sustainability (both cognitively and materially) and calls for a complete re-vision of how and what we think we know. And what is it that we know? What has the past taught us? Vicky Kirby (1997), among others suggests that nature knows much, and is articulate. First Nations Indigenous pedagogy and ontology has spoken this way for thousands of years. Why then do some branches of humanity still struggle to decipher signifiers beyond their immediate world and thresholds, and divide the world according to nature and culture oppositions rather than seek confluences? There are many questions. Here I aim to gesture towards conceptual and physical meeting places, where eco-fluency might thrive through a spectrum of complex entities and relations, in which all players are recognised as intelligent, and in which ‘becoming and being with’, matter? Secondly, let us consider how, in real terms, we might we now be of service to the rivers and waters of the Blue Planet (Barlow 2007), that sustain all life. How we listen in, observe needs, and act more inclusively and conscientiously, is part of the future we are creating now, and how we educate for the future, now. This discussion is critical as we stand on the precipice of even greater shifts that are already changing the face of an earth that we have bubble-wrapped in plastic.