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It may appear that the act of writing is fruitless in the face of the size and open-ended complexity of gathering environmental calamities including global heating, species extinction, and the appearance of plastic in everything. And yet – and yet – poets and others continue to write in ways that allow us to think about the earth's futures and, more specifically, the future of place in catastrophic times. Geo, Eco and Topo – poetics are acts of making – making earth, home, and place. Making earth as homeplace. This paper considers Juliana Spahr's book Well Then There Now as an entry point into thinking and writing about place in a relational way appropriate for a time of emergency. It focuses on the ways writing-as-making (poiesis) can help us to diagnose troubled worlds and prefigure new ones. The paper surveys the connections between geography and poetry, outlines the contributions of eco, geo and topo poetics and explores the hybrid poetics of Well Then There Now before advocating for the affordances of creative writerly approaches for geography more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nietzsche's interest in tragedy continues throughout his work. And yet scholarship on Nietzsche's account of tragedy has focused almost exclusively on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy – a work which is in many ways discontinuous with his more mature philosophical views. In this paper, I aim to illuminate Nietzsche's post-Birth of Tragedy views on tragedy by setting them in the context of a particular historical conversation. Ever since Plato banished the tragic poets from the kallipolis, various philosophers have attempted to respond to his challenge to offer a 'defense of poetry'. What Nietzsche offers, I argue, is a distinctive form of response to Plato's challenge. I show how Nietzsche takes seriously Plato's worries, and even ends up in partial agreement with him: tragedy is not (unqualifiedly) valuable; it can be spiritually dangerous. Key to Nietzsche's account is a distinction he draws between two types of tragic audience. For the 'lower types', tragedy is – as Plato feared – dangerous. For the 'higher types', however, tragedy can act as a regenerative force. Finally, I discuss a distinctive form of value that tragedy makes available to a modern audience: tragedy can act as a stimulus towards the process of the revaluation of values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch-Flemish literary project De eenzame uitvaart (The lonely funeral) consists of city-based groups of poets who write poems and perform them at funerals of fellow citizens who died lonely and often anonymously. At first sight, this project could be considered as a revival of the genre of occasional poetry and, more generally, as an exponent of the 'revenge' of the lyric in the twenty-first century. This revenge, a term borrowed from Thomas Vaessens, implies that contemporary poetry no longer functions as a marginal and elitist genre but has reconquered its popular status and societal value – in short, its heteronomous function. This paper aims to question this idea of the lyric's revenge by analysing the ambitions (as expressed by the initiators of the project) and a selection of poems of De eenzame uitvaart. It contends that the project is founded on a firm belief in the potency of the lyric and its specific language but that this belief is often contradicted by the hesitant rhetoric of the actual poems. This discrepancy between great ambitions and hesitant practice is interpreted as a symptom of the contemporary status of the lyric, which takes revenge yet only reluctantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to shed further light on the life and work of the little-known author Catalina Clara Ramírez de Guzmán (1618-c.1684) by attempting to situate her production in an as yet unexplored context, namely, the tradition of literary forums and academias in her home city of Llerena and in Extremadura generally. The task is not without difficulties due to the paucity of surviving records of such circles in the region. Although there are no actual records of her participation in academies or formal competitions, a detailed consideration of Ramírez de Guzmán's family and social background and an analysis of a broad selection of her poetry provide strong circumstantial evidence that she was familiar with, and very probably contributed to, gatherings of this nature in Llerena, which boasted a flourishing community of poets, including members of her own family. The paper contends that a sizeable portion of her poetry may have been penned for such occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates gender in Middle English Pearl through language analysis in broader literary, cultural, and philosophical contexts, focusing particularly on the portrayal of the maiden, but taking into account also the dreamer-narrator and the Lamb. It is demonstrated that, far from being a consistently feminine figure, the Pearl maiden is a queer being, invested with masculine attributes as well. The article traces the reversals of normative gender patterns and sexual roles throughout the poem and attempts their interpretation. It questions, for the first time in Pearl criticism, the assumption that the maiden was a female person, probably the poet's daughter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines what it takes to call yourself "a poet" through the lens of inclusive programming at Brooklyn Public Library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Ben Lerner's discussions of poetry and poetics in his two acclaimed novels,Leaving the Atocha Stationand10.04, have not received the serious attention they deserve. Here, I examine the novels as clear extensions of Lerner's poetic project as seen in his three volumes of ‘verse', and link them to the theoretical discussions of poetics one finds in the prose of poets like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dickinson, or Pound. This in turn opens the way to seeing Lerner as engaged in an ongoing project in which neither prose nor poetry is privileged, but each dialogues with the other in what must be considered a serial prosimetrum. Following from this, I examine how the prose writings illuminate and enact the poetics of virtuality which Lerner favours and explores in many ways, not least of which being the displacement of poetry and poetics into novels, and the disturbing of the claims generally made for each genre. Ultimately, Lerner's opposition to ‘mere actuality’ or ‘mere positivity’ can only be understood if his novels are allowed to be disturbed by the volumes of poetry that surround them, rather than being left to stand as copious containers that might bound the poetic impulse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is written in a personal capacity and mainly takes the form of a poem - in five sections - composed as a response to some of the ideas in the article by Hannu Heikkinen and colleagues in this same issue of "Educational Action Research": 'Action research as narrative: five principles for validation'. The poem takes its title and structure from that article: its coming-into-being as a piece of work is described in the short introduction. As the introduction mentions, the author-poet has discussed, in previous papers, some of the connections and disconnections between the practices of educational research and poetry. The present paper offers actual work-in-practice that illustrates how these have been played out in one context - which was as poet-in-residence at a conference on inter-professional learning and practice in healthcare. The author is very keen to tempt others into dialogue on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a circling around the interrelations of language and trauma, identity and forgiving through the figure and poems of Paul Celan. In this context, the circle itself becomes a cipher for the trauma of the Shoah and the (im)possibility of speaking or writing poetry after Auschwitz. Via Jenny Edkins, Giorgio Agamben, and Derrida, the poetic is interrogated as an ethical response to the political and social betrayal that is trauma; the subsequent effect of trauma on speaking and listening to testimony is then considered. Finally, the paper explores the poetic as a cipher for forgiving, distinct from moral forgiveness and guilt and equally separate from legal responsibility and debt. Celan's own suicide and one of his elegies are considered as final, literal ciphers in this perpetual and imperfect circling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics have long drawn attention to the moralizing tenor of Fray Luis’s opening ode, as well as to its profound links with Horace, and in particular his secondEpode. These approaches, however, have not often been combined. This paper seeks to show that understanding the nature of the poem’s link to Horace is in fact key to revealing its moral content, by providing a reconsideration of the evidence that ties Fray Luis’s poem toEpode2, before arguing that the crux of the Spaniard’s interaction with his Roman forebear lies rather in hitherto-unremarked Horatian parallels for the central images of the garden and the sea, whose interaction underpins the development of the Spanish ode. This study therefore offers a new reading of Fray Luis’s most famous poem, while also throwing important light on his practice of poetic imitation, and in particular his much-cited relationship with Horace, thus providing support for the recent scholarly trend to view Horace as a thematic source for his Spanish successor, as well as a stylistic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ruins of classical antiquity provoke a paradoxical, antinomic response; they evoke fears of decay and death, even as they promise survival and even immortality. The paper illustrates this point by discussing a newly discovered fragment of Sappho. The author suggests that the poem's meanings, held in abeyance, echo the ways in which we encounter the ruins of antiquity as twenty-first-century readers, identifying with these bodies, desiring both the pathos of ruin, and the consolations of the material objects' relative immortality. Twenty-first century readers of Sappho's poetry read, restore and reinscribe her poems within the horizon of their own aesthetics, their conscious and unconscious desires. The fragment, with its doubled, ambiguous, ambivalent endings, juxtaposed with other recovered fragments, is emblematic of the encounter with the remnants and ruins of all of antiquity, material remains that call for identification and fantasy, the recognition of inevitable physical decay, and the utopian hope for immortality, or, failing that, survival and the persistence in ruin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fleetingness of time and the anguish it provokes is one of the most recurrent topics in modern literature. The romantic attitude of the poet tortured by thinking of the brevity of life is often adopted by Lorca, who in his writings proposes two ways of 'remaining', that is, not being forgotten by not dying: 1: having descendants, an option about which the poet will express a certain frustration in the poems; 2: simply writing and being remembered in every reading of his works. In this paper I will try to show how Lorca attempts a third way in the Suites (1920-21) by trying to insert himself into a mythical tradition which, according to Ricoeur (1974: 426), is an eternal discourse, updated throughout history and becoming an archetype into which people's experiences can be fitted, by including mythical references in his poems, which reflect the experiences and wishes of the poetic voice. Moreover, the mythical tradition that Lorca chooses to connect with is that of the deities who are able to be fertile without sexual interaction. In this light the Suites become one of the first attempts made by Lorca to become 'eternal', due to their form of intellectualized Poetry, which asserts their validity independently of when or by whom they are being read, and the references to myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old Arabic poetry is acquainted with two main types of love affairs: erotic escapades and sincere or chaste affairs. In the first, the poet-protagonist boasts of his ability to conduct sexual escapades with one woman or more. In the second, the poet-lover tells of a sincere and heart-breaking love affair. In this, the latter instance, the lover may recall some romantic encounters with his beloved; nonetheless, such encounters play only a marginal role. The main subject here is the separation between the lovers, the deep suffering of the lover, and sometimes his attempts to recover. The two kinds of affairs are well represented in the Mu'allaqa of Imru'al-Qays.1 Mentioning more than one beloved in an erotic poem is reasonable. However, it is expected that a lover with a sincere love experience deals-in a certain poem-with only one beloved. But this is not always the case. Some old Arabic poems do include a mention of two or more sincere love affairs experienced by the same lover. The present article aims to shed some light on such a phenomenon in poems composed by pre-Islamic and mukhaḍram poets. This article is a preparatory paper to a forthcoming article that discusses the same issue in the poetry of the mukhaḍram Mulayḥ b. al-Ḥakam who, in our opinion, was unique in describing this phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irisawa Yasuo (b. 1931) is one of the most theoretical and experimental poets that postwar Japan has produced. His poetry is highly individual; its themes and techniques place it firmly in the mainstream of contemporary international poetry. Like T. S. Eliot, Irisawa insists on the impersonality of the poet in creative expression. The point of his work is arrived at through implication, through the allusiveness contained in language; in language games reminiscent of James Joyce, and echoes from past time reminiscent of Eliot's work. Irisawa creates ambivalent images tied to the theme of mortality. This paper explores the variety of his narrative techniques, his creation of myths, his use of satire and even nonsense poetry. It considers the theory of the restructuring of language he expounds in Memorandum on the Structure of Poetry: if words are divorced from their daily usage, they may be joined together in new ways to create 'a meaning beyond meaning'. Irisawa does this in abstract conceptions filled with references and allusions to existing literature, as we see in My Izumo, a poem about spiritual identification with the past, which alludes to ancient Japanese works such as Izumo Fudoki and the Kojiki. This article shows how Irisawa's work exemplifies a dominant trend in modern Japanese poetry: the denial of meaning as it is ordinarily interpreted and in its place the use of language to create abstract visions which contain a 'meaning beyond meaning' - Irisawa's central thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Aubrey's Lives derive from a commitment to ‘encourage’ science and public projects which began in 1649 with his support of the inventor Francis Potter. Aubrey's life's work was the fostering of a diverse community of practitioners, humble and distinguished, occasional and highly committed. His Lives represent and maintain ‘conversation’ between such persons, forming a paper community in which ‘hints’ of tentative or half-formed ideas might be preserved for the public benefit. The valuation of brilliant insights over their laborious perfection and demonstration is a characteristic of the later seventeenth-century's understanding of the proper nature of gentlemanly participation in intellectual culture. However, this interest in recording and pursuing ‘hints’ leads Aubrey to share the fate of polymaths like Wren and Hooke, called by Samuel Butler ‘the Hint-Keeper’, the impressiveness of whose breadth of interests were eclipsed by the model-offered by Newton after the publication of Principia in 1687. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper by Barbara Pizer is discussed in terms of the analyst's use of the self. An important element in the use of the self in the psychoanalytic situation is the analyst's deeply personal, unique guiding spirit or muse. Poetry acts as a muse for Pizer. In this context, the historical romance between poetry and psychoanalysis is discussed. A successful poem can strike an immediate resonance with the known but inchoate and unarticulated experiences of the reader or listener. Like a dream, a poem can stimulate inquiry without footnotes, citations, or metapsychology. But unlike what Freud believed, poets do not have easy access to psychological insights. Pizer uses poetry in the consulting room to "construct, deconstruct, and then construct again." Her refusal to make such use a technique or method is supported with two illustrations from Orfano's own clinical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the textual transformation of noblewomen/poets such as Izumi Shikibu into yūjo or courtesans and bodhisattvas. In trying to make sense of this remarkable reconfiguration, it looks at the many contending Buddhist discourses that shaped medieval texts. It argues that while the practice of poetry, in the hands of male poets, becomes a revered michi which is seen as being concomitant with the Buddhist Way, the noblewoman's poetry is not granted the same status. Women are seen as inherently sinful and lustful and hence their poetry cannot be easily assimilated to the goal of enlightenment. It is by recasting the noblewoman as yūjo , thereby foregrounding and indeed exaggerating her sexuality, that medieval texts, drawing on tantric and other practices, are able to salvage both the noblewoman and her poetry . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a staring point of seeing a poem as a free association unto which the reader might form his/her own associations, the work of Emily Dickinson is discussed from the point of view of early development and relationship to mother. The paper is based on selected poems, letters and chosen parts from the biography of Emily Dickinson. It is argued that the poet seems to have experienced a trauma during the first months of life in the shape of erratic infant care, that caused environmental impingement. Having to react at this early age made the gradual unfolding of a secure feeling of identity precarious and had deep consequences for body-mind development, and for the relationship between inner and outer realities. The theory of Winnicott and his concepts of "going-on-being", "male and female elements" and impingements are considered. The relationship of Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, is seen as important, as the latter had a capacity for being a container of otherwise hidden parts of the poet's inner life. Emily Dickinson's life in isolation, questions of creativity born from experiences of absence and loss and from early bridges broken down, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]