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This essay argues that "The lamentacion of a Gentilwoman vpon the death of her late deceased frend William Gruffith Gent." in The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions (1578), attributed to Isabella Whitney, is a witty reimagining of one of the most popular Renaissance literary genres: the epitaph. The poet's grief revolves around the personal consequences of her secret lover's death, handling stock phrases and situational irony to strangely moving effect. While the poem's first-person speaker invokes the epitaph only to repudiate it, the three quatrains framing the text (written in the third person and therefore generally attributed to the volume's editor Thomas Proctor), pins down the mourning presence with the epitaphic "here." This paper suggests single authorship of the doubled text by showing how the poem posits personal lament as the site of interment located by the spatial demonstrative "here," to fashion a poetics of closure in which the voice of the languishing female poet becomes, through linguistic and textual splitting, a living epitaph for the dead beloved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

The inclusion of excerpts from Muriel Rukeyser’s long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. However, Rukeyser’s eco-ethical concerns in her work after ‘The Book of the Dead’ have been largely neglected by literary ecocriticism. This paper proposes that The Life of Poetry (1949) deserves a foundational place in what we now, after the rise of environmental activism in the 1960s, call ecopoetics. In Rukeyser’s literary-activist essays, the rhetorical use of natural world imagery to illuminate poetry’s ability to effect social and political change reinforces an environmental context for poetic responsibility. Furthermore, Rukeyser’s argument for the treatment of poetry as a ‘resource’ anticipates contemporary environmental discourse on consumption and sustainability and situates poetry squarely within it. [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]

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]

Most poetry-generation systems apply opportunistic approaches where algorithmic procedures are applied to explore the conceptual space defined by a given knowledge resource in search of solutions that might be aesthetically valuable. Aesthetical value is assumed to arise from compliance to a given poetic form – such as rhyme or metrical regularity – or from evidence of semantic relations between the words in the resulting poems that can be interpreted as rhetorical tropes – such as similes, analogies, or metaphors. This approach tends to fix a priori the aesthetic parameters of the results, and imposes no constraints on the message to be conveyed. The present paper describes an attempt to initiate a shift in this balance, introducing means for constraining the output to certain topics and allowing a looser mechanism for constraining form. This goal arose as a result of the need to produce poems for a themed collection commissioned to be included in a book. The solution adopted explores an approach to creativity where the goals are not solely aesthetic and where the results may be surprising in their poetic form. An existing computer poet, originally developed to produce poems in a given form but with no specific constraints on their content, is put to the task of producing a set of poems with explicit restrictions on content, and allowing for an exploration of poetic form. Alternative generation methods are devised to overcome the difficulties, and the various insights arising from these new methods and the impact they have on the set of resulting poems are discussed in terms of their potential contribution to better poetry-generation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is devoted to the influence of Chodasevič’s poetic technique on Mandel′štam's poetry. We make an attempt to analyze Mandel′štam's lateNovye stichi(“Ne govori nikomu … ”, “Kuda kak strašno nam s toboj … ” and “My s toboj na kuchne posidim … ”), which are connected to each other through the theme of fear. From the point of view of the poetic technique, these texts are also connected to each other through the literary device of the unexpected twist of meaning, which was associated with Chodasevič’s lyrics in Mandel′štam's consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]