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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]

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This paper investigates the concept of emotion and its relevance to education via character education through the medium of poetry. The objective is to demonstrate the potential implementation of character education through poetry, and to show the intrinsic link between poetry and virtue, knowledge and reasoning. It is argued that poetry serves as a bridge between emotion and character education. The philosophy of emotions is explored through the works of Aristotle, Karin Bohlin and David Carr. Character education is understood in terms of a Neo-Aristotelian approach, drawing on Kristján Kristjánsson, Bohlin and Carr. My position is that, through exercising the craft of poetry, children and young students are provided with tools for exploring emotions, and for discerning and deliberating about virtues and moral contextual nuances in the broader context of human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Siculo-Norman king, Roger II (1095–1154), created a courtly culture that used art, architecture, and literature to reflect the symbolic and cultural values of the states that ringed the Mediterranean. An essential vehicle for Roger's cosmopolitan dialogue was the performance of court poetry that was broadly inclusive of the poetic conventions of the Latin, Greek, and Arabic-speaking worlds. Poetic performance at Palermo created an integrative dialogue of cultural valuation that crossed political as well as linguistic boundaries. While such acts of statesmanship might seem quaint to modern eyes, the potential of Siculo-Norman cosmopolitanism becomes more intriguing when we reflect on the current reality of failed states (Northern Africa), continuous conflicts (Israel), and fissured unions (EU) that ring the Mediterranean today. Roger's diplomatic use of poetry offers a refreshing alternative to the broken dialogue that exists in contemporary interstate relations in the Mediterranean. This paper illustrates that diplomatic poetic exchange has the ability to create cross-cultural commensurability in ways that modern cosmopolitan practices rooted in international law cannot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception, Nigerian poetry in English has always been characterized by protest in nature. Beyond its aesthetic scope, it has been critical of socio-political and environmental problems that have bedevilled the nation. This paper is concerned with such literary instrumentalism; the use of poetry by Nigerian writers, living in Nigeria, as an instrument against abuses of human and environmental rights. The theoretical framework that is employed is drawn from the notions of protest writing in Africa and ideas of postcolonial ecocriticism. This will provide a context that brings the fate of humans and nonhumans together under the weight of a failed home government and multinational capitalism in contemporary Nigeria. This study will trace the development of literary and political events in Nigeria, followed by a textual analysis of selected poems. Attention will also be paid to the growth of environmental legislation in Nigeria since the colonial period. This article concludes by arguing that in the absence of an effective or practical legal framework, poetry remains one of the most significant instruments for highlighting the violation of human and environmental rights. As such, the study benefits contemporary scholarship by drawing attention to the social dimension of poetry – and the arts generally – as well as the role literature plays in foregrounding environmental crises in postcolonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defines the notion of dialogic local space and highlights its importance to teaching and learning. A dialogic local space values multiple local realities as it invites us to listen to, take up, and have confidence in our own local everyday and personal realities, and to listen to, consider, and respond to other local realities. This openness can deepen and widen how we know and see our own realities. We show what a dialogic local space can look like in a second grade classroom community. We employ sociocultural discourse analysis to illuminate one teacher's pedagogical choices in a month-long poetry Writing Workshop unit for seven-and-eight year olds. We present a big picture look at the unit and then take a close look at five minilessons. Findings detail ways this teacher's minilesson design, flow, and content cultivate dialogic local spaces, and how a dialogic stance, manifest in classroom talk practices, encourages students to participate in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorization of cultural and political issues of Northeast of India often creates a disengagement from the actual cultural performances produced in the region. This unique geo-cultural place is sometimes homogenized. In actuality, it is the home of diverse socio-cultural practices and performances. In the context of globalization, deforestation, Christianization, other internal clashes and external influences, material bodies, here, are continuously being rewritten in socio-cultural sphere. Non-representational theory considers poetry as an effective mode of exhibiting the virtual multiplicity of the nonrepresentational world. This paper will focus on exploring the corpus of Northeast Indian English poetry that focuses on social practices and bodily experiences to interpret the entire cultural flow of everyday life. As Non-representational Theory positions 'affect' as a central issue to individual and collective disposition in constituting the affective political discourse, this paper will also indicate some political imperatives by advancing a politics of hope in the realm of socio-political sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from a seven-year, ongoing relational poetics between two poets and their former secondary English teacher. Organized by the world's urgencies, the three authors have studied the force of poetry throughout incidences of violence against Black lives close to home and across the United States. This practice began in the classroom and continues beyond graduation through remote correspondence across three cities. Through it we develop the concept of study as love, engaging with Moten & Harney's concept of study as irreducibly social and in excess of institutional parameters. We also develop the concept of poetics as more than methodology, engaging with Glissant's poetics of relation. Through love and poetics, we call for literacy studies engaged with the ontogenesis of Black life, moving beyond institutionally white disciplinary methods and standard research outputs. We ask how the poetics of relation and the love of study produce new worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contradiction in how Stevie Smith saw the relationship between her poems and drawings. On the one hand, she looked at her doodles as vital to her poetry and backed with a great deal of intentionality. She painstakingly cut and pasted them into her drafts and left detailed notes to her publishers when those placements were not to her exact specifications. On the other hand, though, she talked about her doodles as if they were ephemeral and backed only by caprice. This essay argues that Smith's doodles play at the intersection of intentionality and caprice; in doing so, they become deliberately detachable objects that signify both placed with and when displaced from her poetry. Decisions, whether by Smith or by her editors, to move or remove an image have both subtle and dramatic changes for readers' experiencing of her poems. This paper relies on archival and published sources to provide readings of several of Smith's poems including 'Do Take Muriel Out,' 'The Rehearsal,' 'The After-Thought,' and 'Not Waving but Drowning.' In their continual ability to be removed and reattached to her poetry, Smith's doodles destabilize the texts that they supposedly compliment, while at the same time also revitalizing them by allowing them to remain open to new interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns young adults who came to Sweden from Afghanistan as unaccompanied refugee minors (UMs) and their engagement with poetry and other creative activities. The aim was to explore how UMs use poetic writing and other creative activities to handle resettlement challenges. Seven young men and six young women, aged 18–24, participated in semi-structured interviews. The material was analyzed using the three components of poetry therapy, developed by Mazza. Three themes were identified: (1) Encouragement; (2) Creative expressions as a "safe place"; and (3) A sense of recognition. Through creative expressions, our participants could understand and handle the emotional difficulties and the insecurity associated with resettlement. Poetic writing was a way to convey personal experiences of injustices, a source of self-understanding, and a way to establish new social networks. We discuss and present suggestions on how poetry and other creative activities can be integrated in interventions toward UMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’sArt as Experience(1934). The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing (as art) does within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a possible path to overcoming the knowledge/experience dualism that TS Eliot famously labelled the 'dissociation of sensibility' and my related desire to write what I define as an 'omnivorous lyric' - a poem in which a wide range of nonexperiential knowledge is integrated convincingly. Drawing on Lyn Hejinian's essay 'The Rejection of Closure', I explore the opportunities an open poetics presents for the convincing integration of non-experiential knowledge but argue also for a level of closure. Adapting Umberto Eco's idea of 'suggestiveness', I propose that the omnivorous lyric, initially composed in openness, should seek to achieve 'directional suggestiveness' in the later stages of composition. This movement towards closure, which remains resistant to a single or dominant sense, is realised through amplifying patterns of meaning in the work. An analysis of my omnivorous lyric, 'Moderate', demonstrates how these ideas can be practically employed in the compositional process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the methodological intervention of understanding a 'mother tongue' (matribhasha) as a gendered vernacular. It seeks to illustrate the subversive potential of the vernacular as a gendered lens though which we can understand the Dalit feminist critiques of caste hierarchies and Dalit and non-Dalit patriarchies, and the places they intersect. The essay considers the works of Anita Bharti and Meena Kandasamy, contemporary Dalit women authors who write in Hindi and English, respectively. Thus, this paper extends the definition of the vernacular beyond the confines of linguistic and regional specificity, allowing for a feminist reclamation of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of a Spoken Word Education Programme (SWEP hereafter) on young people’s engagement with poetry in a group of schools in London, UK. It does so with reference to the secondary Discourses of school-based learning and the Spoken Word community, an artistic ‘community of practice’ into which they were being inducted. It focuses on what happened when secondary students, already enculturated into school Discourses about learning (in their English lessons especially), learned about new ways of being readers, writers, listeners, and performers through the SWEP Discourse. The paper draws on qualitative data collected during the first three years of programme development to consider how an introduction to the social practices of this artistic community appeared to influence 11–18 year old students’ attitudes to poetry study, discussion, writing, and performance both in school and beyond the parameters of traditional secondary school learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Reading poetry aloud is an extremely useful teaching method for therapists and analysts, one that attunes mind and ear to both self and other. To listen to a poem, one must be open to the experience of physical sensations, affects, silent registers and unknowingness that may take some time to begin to put into words. Becoming conscious of internal resonances coinciding with those of another is the basis for the clinical skills we are hoping to help trainees develop. Being present in an embodied way to the music of what is spoken also develops a heightened sense of effective uses of language in psychoanalytic writing. This paper offers several poems in very different styles in order to think about this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the foundations of picturebook studies is that the visual- and verbal-texts together create an integrated experience of the whole text. However, for poetry in picturebooks, the designation of "poem" is traditionally applied only to the verbal-text. In this paper I argue that visual techniques can be more than simply "poetic" and can be part of the structural and technical choices that make a poem. I apply this theoretical discussion to the example of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are concluding that combined visual and verbal techniques create an integrated visual-verbal poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this research was to analyse poetry written by Israeli high-school students during or after visiting Poland within the framework of Holocaust education. I describe first the stages of shaping the discourse of Holocaust memory in Israel, and of Holocaust education; the Holocaust's place in the world of young Israelis; and the journeys to Poland as reflected in research. Following that, I present the results of the research and an analysis of the findings. The paper will discuss how Israeli adolescents cope with a cultural trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this discussion of David Shaddock's beautiful paper, I strongly agree that our patients need us to serve as witnesses for their traumatic experiences. However, my understanding of what makes the role of witness so profoundly challenging differs from Shaddock's. In contrast to Shaddock who believes that traumatized people live in a separate world, I believe that we all live in the same world, one that is wracked by trauma. I also challenge Shaddock's reference to "the third." I find it difficult to think of the act of witnessing in terms of "the third", "the cultural third," even "a living third." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new teaching method, poetry, into the geography classroom, accompanied by an out-of-class discussion on a blog, and finds that its effects are rather different from those of traditional teaching methods, as it allows new perspectives on instructional content related to migrant workers’ lives and identities in China. The method enables students to analyse content from the perspective of cultural geography, in which poetry acts as an art form that connects people’s identities and social spaces. On the basis of this, we also provide some suggestions to engage students in critical analysis of poetry, from the perspective of cultural geography, through interactive online platforms such as blogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the thinking that poetry does? In his essay, ‘The origin of the work of art’, Martin Heidegger proposes a distinction between two poetic modes –DichtungandPoesie –in which the former is an extra-linguistic framing essence which makesPoesie, the manifestation of poetry in language, possible. In another essay, ‘What are poets for?’ the philosopher claims technology creates a fissure of forgetfulness between selves and contexts, and that ‘To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods’. This ficto-critical paper – written after the experience of a week's vipassanā meditation – reads Robert Hass' poem ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ as a text that aims for chthonic reconnection between objects, experience, and language. In speculating that processes of active and non-linguistic practice are generativeandhumanising, this paper re-reads meditation as a mode of gnostic self-extinction (after Eliot) which can enable access to intuitive zones (Heidegger'sDichtung), and which situates ‘an understanding of reality that transcends ordinary comprehension’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper examines the possibilities for restorying the self through drama conventions using narrative poetry as a stimulus. Using the poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching" by Wislawa Szymborska to engage with drama conventions, we illustrate how educators might support young and marginalised people to participate in the process of restorying. In doing so, we argue for the importance of using poetry and drama to create meta-narratives of discourse which empower participants to restory themselves into the dominant forms of narrative through creative exploration. Szymborska's poem has been chosen as a stimulus due to the poet's use of multiple perspectives and roles, in different times and places, which enable people to reshape and reimagine their identity and explore dominant narratives about terrorism. The authors intend to follow this conceptual piece with an empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The death of a loved one can create a tear in the fabric of meaning. Grieving involves remaking meaning. In therapy, events can be emplotted into stories, which can return some sense of coherence to the bereaved. In this paper, I present a way of narrating loss through a narrative therapy approach of retelling. This involved writing found poems, known as rescued speech poems, from the conversations of people who had lost a loved partner. The found poetry sought to bring an order to grieving and to polish the beauty of key moments following loss. For one participant, the found poetry amplified a narrative of the biography of the loved one. For another, the poems added beauty to a memory of her deceased partner. Thus, rescued speech poems—judiciously selected from speech, and sensitively arranged on the page—can provide another way to facilitate vibrant meaning-making of life after loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author, who is a single mother of a young man with mental illness, describes her son’s first psychotic break. By melding poetry, prose, dream journal entries, and medical case notes, she explores the embodied experience of witnessing her son’s decompensation. In sharing her story, she reminds other caregivers of people with mental illness that they are not alone. She makes sense of her experience with findings from the literature about posttraumatic stress among family caregivers of people with chronic illness and explores the implications for caregivers, practitioners, and scholars of mental illness, trauma, and loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses poetry as a form of data to explore a sense of ‘belonging’ for staff working in higher education. Poetic content analysis was explored as a research method and using poetry in this way has allowed for a nuanced exploration of questions of belonging in the context of individual intersectional identities. Following an analysis of eighteen poems submitted by staff working in higher education four major categories emerged: ‘Community’, ‘Exclusion’, ‘Transformation’, and ‘Self’. These emergent narratives led to several recommendations that institutions and individuals might consider implementing to create a more positive sense of belonging for all staff working in higher education. These recommendations and emergent narratives are centred around a willingness for higher education as a sector to better recognise and nurture the deep-rooted commitment that is shared by many staff to the potential of higher education both now and in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The line is arguably the most defining feature of poetic structure. Discussions of prosody are prone to the limitations of convention, though the poet may strive for more freedom in the line. This paper begins by noting an example of a radical use of page space from Mallarmé and goes on to describe recent innovations and experiments with line breaks in work by Australian and New Zealand poets, and to summarise the functions of the line breaks used. These explorations of form show that the poetic line is neither static nor redundant in contemporary practice, and suggest the need for poets to reappraise the possibilities made available to them by the work of their peers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jerome Bruner’s experiment over 30 years ago suggested that imaginative literature had greater affordances for the ‘subjunctification’ of experience by those who heard it read aloud than did transactional prose such as a news article. By ‘subjunctification’, Bruner meant the capacity to use the resource (the short story, for example) to transform one’s experience of the world, to render understanding in more complex ways and to do more than get things done as they have always been done. This paper reports on a small-scale replication of the experiment that sought to measure differences in the affordances of poetry being read aloud compared to hearing a short story or a news article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There has been little research into poetry classification and the potential to access poems by form and genre. The categories listed in the Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT), Wikipedia, Amazon.com, and the poetry-sharing platform, PoetrySoup, were compared through a systematic mapping process. It was found that LCGFT coverage is more extensive for poetry than fiction, but all four sources' coverage is limited. Beyond a small core of well-established forms and genres, poetry is classified in many less well-known ways, with many categories based on form, as well as a wide range of other characteristics, including some very specific ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dissonance created when Emily Brontë's striving to find language that equals her 'world within' is constrained by the 'world without'. The title quotation, the opening line of one of Brontë's early fragments, highlights the intensity of her desire to wake the song that so moved her in the past. It is Emily Brontë's struggle to wake the 'entrancing song' coupled with the pull of the 'heavenly key' that impels her poetry. In her treatment of desire to re-enter states of past bliss, Emily Brontë is an heir of Wordsworth. Reading her poems alongside Wordsworth's 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality', I explore how Wordsworth's cry of 'Whither is fled the visionary gleam' is also Brontë's. Yet, this dissonance is for both poets, to use Emily's own words, a 'darling pain'. The longing, even with the pain, is a form of fulfilment. So, I conclude by arguing that this seeming dissonance is what gives Brontë's poetry its 'peculiar music'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne" is a playful improvisational verse epistle, widely praised for its urbanity and its display of the poet's invention. The verses turn on a catalogue of the collection of odd scientific and mechanical objects that Shelley found scattered around him in the place he composed the letter, the Livorno workshop of Gisborne's son, a young engineer who was building a new-model steamboat at the time (with Shelley's financial and intellectual backing). In the context of that space, the poem reads as a response to competing notions of invention. For Shelley, the engineer's workshop is an attractive alternative to the poet's tower—which was uncomfortably close to a Grub Street garret. Verbal and visual images of poets' and scientists' workshops, from Hogarth and Mary Robinson, to Joseph Wright of Derby and Frankenstein, illustrate the tensions embodied in the physical location and poetic performance of Shelley's celebrated "Letter." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the role of the untimely in the work of Stevie Smith. It explores motifs of belatedness in her reception history, suggesting how her own authorial persona and public presentation encodes this response. It examines the notion of the last-minute in her work, focusing on motifs such as disruption, elongation and delay. It suggests how her revision practice responded to the idea of being 'too late', with the moment of publication providing her with further prompts to revise her work. It focuses on final words and endings in her poetry and frames her interest in Christianity through ideas of temporality and form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Botanical Beehive describes and interprets an example of a relationship between belief, imagination, reading, writing, and the art of gardening in colonial Pennsylvania. The religious symbolism and poetic significance of a garden and plants in the day-to-day lives of many German and Dutch immigrants in Pennsylvania was distinct from English, Quaker, garden design. A poetic botanical language evolved from the confluence of multiple European languages, German early modern botany, and German Pietist beliefs of Germantown colonists. This language was a basis of an art of gardening that influenced the ordering and meaning of ornamental and productive garden culture in Germantown. Evidence of this art can be found in the writings and botanical illuminations of Germantown settler Francis Pastorius. His writing documents a garden of over two hundred and twenty species of exotic, ornamental, culinary, and medicinal plants that he cultivated in his garden, orchard, vineyard, and fields. This art influenced the development of the botanical fractur typography and illuminations of the monastic brothers and sisters of Ephrata Cloister. What you will find in this art is an imaginative and productive relationship with plants and language that formed a foundation of Philadelphia's 18th-century transatlantic horticultural influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine how poetry, in the case of Paul Celan, created its own language after the Shoah. The thesis is that Paul Celan intentionally uses religious language to expose the object, but at the same time he desacralises it. This shift is revolutionary. In the main part of this article I analyse an exemplum of the use of language which is given in the poem, 'In the rivers'. This analysis is meant to show the mechanisms for creating a proper language. The conclusion is that Celan's poetry is founded upon the figure of a witness. This desacralised figure is poetic and ethical (but not substantial). What is more, the way this poetry is written puts it into the position of a witness as well as that of the reader. This is a social fact, so the point of view of the author traverses the sociology of both religion and that of literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his composition, 'Hero's Lament to Leander', Nicholas Lanier sought to interweave art forms. Lanier was painter as well as a composer, an art agent for Charles I, and the Master of the King's Music. In 1625 he was sent to Northern Italy and ended up in Mantua where he likely encountered not just Domenico Fetti's and Peter Paul Rubens's paintings of the Death of Leander, but also ekphrastic poems of Giambattista Marino celebrating Rubens's painting as well as a no-longer-extant work by Bernardino Poccetti. Responding to the works of Monteverdi and Sigismondo d'India, both whom Lanier would have been familiar with and may even have met during his time in Italy, Lanier wrote both text and setting for his own recitativo cantata, 'Hero's Lament to Leander'. His composition responded to musical innovations that were happening in Italy: the recitativo form, as outlined by Vincenzo Galilei in his Dialogo della musica antica, et della moderna, favoured 'ancient monodic music to the intricate web of vocal polyphony' found in the prevailing madrigal style. Galilei, Monteverdi, and Lanier himself, sought a return to ancient poetry as verse accompanied by an instrument and perhaps even sung, and thus to the original unity of speech and song itself. Galilei's dialogue preferred the declamatory works of orators and of classical poets, and this is where Lanier drew his inspiration, as the heroic couplets of the written text are placed in syncopation with the melodic lines Hero sings. His composition is full of intertextual allusion, to the Hero and Leander poems of Marlowe and Chapman, as well as classical sources, and the recitativo style allowed him to play with the boundaries between speech and song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how creative geographies relate more to a pluriversal world outlook through self-produced poetry. Descriptions of two spoken word poems from an Akan oral tradition used in the article are presented. Topics discussed include the varying cultural formations of poems, multiple creative ontologies of different groups and individuals, and the three potentials to articulate pluriversal creative geographies in poetry which include its use in the expression of everyday world.

This article proposes that participatory museum theatre can provide a platform through which learners studying history can engage a troubled past, specifically looking at South African history, to generate a more complex understanding of it. Through the use of performance, object-work, and creative arts-based responses, such as poetry and drawing, in the museum space, learners are able to connect with the performed historical narratives, characters, and events creating a sensory learning experience. The argument is presented through the example Beer Halls, Pass Laws and Just Cause which was performed at the KwaMuhle Museum, Durban, South Africa during March 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ayesha Sitara was a patient in a military-psychiatry hospital in Azad Kashmir when we met. Her doctors considered her poetry – its uncontrollability – her primary manic symptom. Though Ayesha agreed with the doctors, poetry to her was "aafat" (divine calamity), and other times "josh" (passion). Her poetry, preoccupied with the Indian occupation of Kashmir, emphasizes Islamic militant struggle for Azadi (liberation). Here, I attempt to follow the "sense" of Ayesha's Islamopoetics, leaving to many forking paths, but not to all (Borges, Lacan). Ayesha's poetics signal a meaning-to-come for Azadi. And yet, she insists on certain articulations of freedom. I ask, how might a listening take shape in response to this poetry? Indeed, through the work of josh and aafat, without resolving one into the other, Ayesha provides a guiding frame for staying with the undecidability of her suffering. What is signaled in this restless orbiting between divine calamity and revolutionary passion? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American poet Langston Hughes worked as a press correspondent during the Spanish civil war. This experience left an imprint in his production and particularly in his poetry, giving light to significant advances in his entwinement of race, gender, and identity. The acclaimed diversity of Hughes' feminine models, and his inclusive stance find difficult accommodation in the poetic corpus about Spain. Using a critical appraisal of race, class and gender divisions, the poetic representation of female characters is discussed attending to their different forms of inclusion and exclusion. Their relationship with later developments in Hughes' poetic construction of African American female agency is assessed, and the singularity of certain characters in the Spanish corpus is explored. Finally, conclusions are drawn to demonstrate the relevant and understudied contributions of this corpus for the better understanding of Hughes' feminine universe as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944) published a limited edition of Sounds (Klänge), an illustrated book of poems that applied many of the theories discussed in his publication On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). In Sounds, Kandinsky strove to train readers to sensorially perceive images hidden in visual and verbal abstraction. In both word and image, the artist explored various realizations of boundedness, repetition, and concealment with the aim of evoking various effects in readers. Ultimately, according to Kandinsky's theories, the fluidity between the "seeable" and "unseeable" allowed the "inner sounds" of the book's words and woodcuts to resonate with readers in moments of perceptual clarity. Published on the brink of World War I, Sounds was released into a world that was about to change drastically. Although it influenced numerous avant-garde artists in the inter- and postwar periods, a newfound pessimism overshadowed Kandinsky's idealistic aspiration. His utopian belief that abstraction would facilitate the arrival of a "Great Spiritual Epoch" ceded to a view of abstract art as a means of expressing the irrationality and brokenness of things. Today, Sounds is significant because of its influential form and content, its novel multisensorial aims, and its liminal sociohistorical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contact zone between algorithms and creative writing has become an increasingly fertile ground for literary experimentation in the last decades, with more accessible digital technologies broadening the scope of potential artistic productions and allowing the exploration of new forms of creativity. Inspired by the playful collaboration between arts and sciences embodied by the experimental creations of the French literary group OuLiPo, we borrow from physics and mathematics the concept of self-avoiding random walk to create original poems. This model is adapted here to generate random poems through potentially infinite combinations of a finite set of verses distributed on a virtual two-dimensional grid. The highly versatile algorithm we designed allows to randomly generate unexpected poems and provide, for each, a unique path with the graphical representation of a random walk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Through a focus on 'Moi, Eugénie Grandet', one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist's writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois's dialogues with Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary and feminist response to a longstanding tradition of pictorial appropriations of Balzac's work—from Paul Cézanne's 'Frenhofer, c'est moi!' to Pablo Picasso's illustrations for the centenary edition of Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece—this article brings to light a literary intertext to Bourgeois's visual works and contends that it is a crucial aspect of her œuvre. Reckoning with a growing critical interest in the artist's archives and a rising number of edited volumes devoted to her writings, this article considers existing claims that identify Bourgeois as a writer and a poet. Aligning with Roland Barthes's definition of the literary text as a 'new cloth woven with old quotations' and the figure of active reader developed in Barthes's own dialogues with Balzac, this article contends that Bourgeois's literariness is found in simultaneous writing, reading and visual practices and in the ambivalence—between dependency and resistance—towards the words they rely on. Ultimately, this exploration of Bourgeois's words participates in a wider debate on the status of artists' writings, first articulated in Linda Goddard's 2012 special issue of this journal, where they are defined through their 'heightened awareness of the inescapable tensions and crossovers between practice and discourse' and the way they 'bear the trace of this consciousness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the pedagogical implications of integrating creative dance into fifth-grade students' poetry reading and writing within the context of an educational design research project. Two teaching designs were developed and implemented by a researcher, a dance teaching artist, and two primary school teachers during two research cycles (the academic year of 2018–2019). Thinking with new materialism, a diffractive analysis was used to identify performative agents that make a difference in students' meaning-making processes. When dance was integrated, it became entangled with the poetry in students' meaning-making processes. The boundaries between reading, writing, and dancing became fluid, enhancing the attention to the materiality, relationality, and embodiment of the students' reading and writing processes. These results demonstrate that dance integration has the pedagogical potential to deepen and broaden the meaning-making in poetry reading and writing. This article therefore concludes by presenting some recommendations for how to integrate creative dance into first language and literature education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This dedication was composed by Chinese poet and author Yang Lian and translated by John Minford, then head of the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland. It is inscribed upon a stone memorial hewn to resemble the geographical shape of China, dedicated to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The memorial stands outside St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church on Alten Road in Auckland, New Zealand. It was chosen by two Chinese poets, Yang Lian and Gu Cheng, who were then organizing demonstrations against the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) declaration of martial law at the time they were attending an international conference on the non-mainstream Chinese poetry at the University of Auckland. They were denied reentry into China, and their works were blacklisted. The two settled down in New Zealand, and in 1993 Gu murdered his wife and committed suicide, while Yang left his base in Auckland and started his second period of exile elsewhere in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the creativity and learning that can take place when students are given the opportunity to go beyond the GCSE set poems and create their own poetry anthologies. I argue that in the process of creating a poetry anthology, students are encouraged to engage on a deeper and more personal level with poetry. I suggest that when students are given the time, space, and autonomy to create their own anthologies, they not only develop the critical and creative writing skills required for their examinations, but are also more readily able to explore and express their lived experiences. I consider how such a project invites students to develop their writing and shape their identities through drawing on experiences, views and attitudes often overlooked in an increasingly exam-pressurised classroom. I closely examine two students' anthologies, arguing for the need to affirm and advance students' writing through a co-operative creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victorian commentators identified visitors' books with mass tourism and disparaged their contents as banal and absurd. However, a historicised approach shows that inscription conventions and commentators' expectations were influenced by the print mediation of earlier practices centred on blank books, notably poetry composed for British country house albums. This article demonstrates how album poetry published in the late eighteenth century shaped later practice in, and reception of, visitors' books. An artform which could elevate the album beyond recording fleeting encounters with places and persons, album poetry shows writers deploying literary strategies to construct a guest–host dynamic which navigates between the familiar and formal, and between hospitality and payment. Album poetry establishes a complimentary rhetoric and fantasy of hospitality and belonging that sets an unrealistic model for Victorian contributions to visitors' books in public and commercial settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great many successful poets earn their living as members of the university community. While teaching, research and administration can provide a reasonable and a reliable income, it has an impact not only on how much time is available for writing, but also what sorts of thinking emerge; on the ways in which relationships and responsibilities intertwine, and how to find ways to balance competing priorities. In this conversation between two poet academics, Jen and Katharine talk through their own experiences, grounded in scholarly thinking, and particularly address the role of language, meaning and materiality in the charting and the crafting of a life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The catalyst for this self-study research was the performance of a sequence of poems at a colloquium for South African deans of education. The poems portray my interpretation of my students' stories of physically and emotionally painful experiences at the hands of their former teachers. My intention was to show how the creative possibilities of poetic language and poetic modes could enrich teacher education practice and research. However, while reading the poems, I was conscious of a palpable sense of distress building in the room. I began to wonder if I had made an awful mistake. Later, I questioned what I could or should have done differently, and, in this article, I offer an account of my efforts to learn from this painful poetry performance. I draw on the literary arts to combine vignette, poetry, and dialogue to inquire into my lived experience. Overall, the article demonstrates how extending my reflection through conversation with others allowed me to clearly see that my task as a teacher educator and educational researcher is not to avoid communicating heartbreaking stories in an emotionally powerful poetic format. Instead, it is to try to do so in emotionally supportive and educative ways. I offer my inquiry as an exemplar of how the literary arts can enrich teacher education practice and self-study research in creative ways to engage self-critically with social responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is important to consider Leonard Cohen by looking back though his posthumous collection, The Flame Poems and Selections from Notebooks. From 1967 onward, Cohen came to be known increasingly as a songwriter and singer. In Montreal, and in Canada generally, Cohen was acknowledged as a literary figure, singer, and songwriter. Internationally, particularly in the United States, about the time of his death and after, Cohen's fame was anchored in music. This article examines two scholarly treatments of Cohen's work. It is written for Canadian and, especially, American readers, to remind them of Cohen as a poet and novelist because he was best known for his music and songs. Focusing on Cohen's literary dimension, his accomplishment as a poet, and his creativity as an artist, the article argues that poetry has lyrical origins and that there is a false dichotomy that separates music lyrics from poetry. Cohen's poetry is well crafted and beautiful and so memorable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading poetry through a metaphorical lens, we enquire into our lived experience of academic development. By reading poetry as a metaphor for practice it becomes possible to explore teaching identities within higher education, creating opportunities for learning and critical self-awareness. Comparing and contrasting our different interpretations of the same poems, we reflect on new ways of thinking about learning, teaching, and the role of the academic developer. The multiple readings and interpretations are themselves an important story for academic developers to tell: we are not seeking truth and certainty but push our colleagues to (re)search their own roles as teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In We Need To Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry (2018), Michael Theune and Bob Broad present a study that uses a version of their 'Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping' (PDCM) methodology to empirically and inductively investigate the implicit criteria in the selection of poems in creative arts journals. I employ a version of PDCM in my study. I coded and analysed 752 poems from the past three years' issues of nine creative arts journals from liberal arts institutions in the same academic conference. Two important patterns emerged: (1) the vast majority of the poems are outgrowths of confessional poetry: free verse, serious, introspective, and focused on emotion; and (2) few poems seem aligned with other values, including those espoused by avant-garde, slam, and socially and politically engaged poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]