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Ethics is ever-present in all aspects of human interaction and, in any physiotherapy situation there is an inherent claim to act and care for the patient in the best possible way. The physiotherapy profession is provided with rules, guidelines and codes to support and ensure ethical professional conduct. In recent decades however, physiotherapy literature has emphasized how ethical agency is immersed in clinical reasoning in each particular situation, in the doing of physiotherapy. The Danish philosopher and theologian Knud E. Løgstrup offers a bottom-up approach to ethics, which may augment the philosophical underpinning of this development in ethical thinking. Løgstrup departs from the given pre-conditions of life; a point of departure where the ethical claim emerges from sensation in the concrete situations. This paper introduces Løgstrup's situational ethics and its ontological framing, with four foci: how we can tune in to sensation and sense the ethical claim of the other; how human interdependence can be heard in what Løgstrup calls sovereign life utterances; relational responsibility and ethical norms; and the metaphorical importance of poetic understandings of the world. In four themes we reflect on how these ethical issues are at stake in physiotherapy practice with regards to: (1) uncertainty, tuned sensation and therapeutic attitude in physiotherapy; (2) sensuous, narrative and poetic meaning-making in physiotherapy; (3) physiotherapy and coming to oneself in new embodied experiences; and (4) ethical claims and codes of conduct in physiotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western creativity is usually entrusted to the human imagination, regarded as a mental power capable of envisioning eternally original artefacts, while in the East creativity is entrusted to nature-in-the human, what Taoist philosophy calls qi, a spiritual power capable of reflecting the passing changes of nature in paintings, poems, and other forms of art. It is the intention of this paper to explore and elucidate these differences between the Western and Eastern conceptualizations of creativity, ending with a suggestion of one feature they may have in common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Heliand (Old Saxon) and Otfrid von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch (Old High German) with each other and with several Old English poems to determine the extent to which those poems partake of a common stylistic tradition as regards their handling of direct speech. Particular attention is given to the location and form of the inquit and to terms of address. Close examination of those features confirms the well-known fact that Heliand uses a style that is very close to the Old English poetic tradition, whereas the Evangelienbuch is much more innovative stylistically. However, it also reveals significant differences between Heliand and Old English poetry that go beyond matters of dialect or metre. Conversely, it shows that, for all its innovation, the Evangelienbuch is not entirely exempt from traditional features characteristic of West-Germanic alliterative poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the father absence and/or misattachment with depleting effects psychologically, personally and collectively on the daughter. The concept unfolds through a series of a woman's dreams along with the poetry and dreams of Sylvia Plath, an American poetess from the mid-twentieth century. The perspective of Jungian analytical psychology is complimented by that of French psychoanalyst Andre Green. The cross-currents of these thinkers bring forth the interweaving of poetry and analytical psychology. Both examine the lack of attention to the detrimental effects of absent fathers and how this contributes to the well-being and creative expression of daughters – or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines a number of scholarly claims about John Donne's attitudes toward the "New Science" in Ignatius His Conclave and An Anatomy of the World. Published in the same year (1611), both texts confirm Donne's intense interest in the cosmological debates of his day; yet, each poem explores a different cosmological model. Read together, the two poems, provide a more resolved picture of Donne's thoughts about the controversy. Making use of extensive archival research in early-modern medicinal semeiology (diagnosis/prognosis), this paper pays special attention to Donne's use of anatomy as a metaphysical conceit. In particular, a careful examination of the medical use of astrological anatomy in early-modern Europe extends our understanding of Donne's concerns about the controversy. Ultimately, this paper maintains that Donne's distress about the "New Science" extends well beyond contemporary debates over cosmological models and atomism, to concerns over the status of meaning itself, in a world robbed of signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of literacy in the lives of women who are recovering from substance abuse. It discusses the work and products of a one-year literacy workshop in which participants were immersed in reading, writing and sharing of different writings and works of arts. The work with the women converged around their poetry, prose and free writing during their literacy workshop and journaling. Conversations about their writing revealed four themes: (1) finding one’s voice, (2) shifting self-perceptions, (3) writing as an outlet for expression and for sharing traumatic events, and (4) talking about addiction. The overarching concept of these four themes is literacy as a healing tool. This paper discusses the role of writing as a tool for healing from traumatic events and dealing with addiction. [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 deals with the recently digitised recordings made by Tullia Magrini and Giuseppe Bellosi in Romagna in the 1970s and early 1980s during their fieldwork on lyrical and satirical songs in hendecasyllabic lines. The recordings allow us to know who were the singers that the two scholars met, how the interaction between researchers and informants took place and how the singers contributed to the process of knowledge. This paper would like to suggest a special task for sound archives: the reconstruction of the relationships between the people involved in the processes of knowledge of musical diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an inquiry into the poetics of mourning and faith-based intervention in maladaptive grieving processes in Ethiopia. The paper discusses the ways that loss is signified and analyzes the meanings of ethnocultural and psychospiritual practices employed to deal with maladaptive grief processes and their psychological and emotional after-effects. Hermeneutics provided the methodological framework and informed the analysis. The thesis of the paper is that the poetics of mourning and faith-based social interventions are interactionally based meaning making processes. The paper indicates the limitations of the study and their implications for further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Library run co-curricular programs offer a powerful response to the growing demand for academic librarians to perform new roles to improve students' information literacy. Increasing in popularity, co-curricular programs are embedding information literacy skills in increasingly unique, creative, and effective ways. Initiated by the Run Run Shaw Library, CityU, the poetry recital project is a co-curricular program which connects students with historical East Asian poetry in a fun, engaging and insightful manner. This paper recounts how the poetry recital project facilitated a knowledge transfer linking students to scholars, and used historical poetry as a device to embed information literacy teachings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fairy Melusine is a fictional literary text incorporated in A. S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel Possession: A Romance, which is a retelling by the fictional poet LaMotte of Jean d'Arras's tale of the fairy, Melusina. This paper examines four of LaMotte's short poems, both texts and subtexts of the Melusina story, and explores how Paracelsus's definition of the snake-woman determines the alchemical imagery in LaMotte's literary texts. LaMotte artfully weaves narratives around both the snake-woman and alchemy out of recurrent images in Byatt's canon and uses them ingeniously to indicate the alchemical nature of Melusina as well as the nature and conditions of LaMotte's own long period of isolation and motherhood. Melusina becomes an alchemical symbol of the philosopher's stone, a symbol of LaMotte's long seclusion and an enactment of a recurrent motif in Byatt's works that isolation is a sine qua non of literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“What am I without paid work?” Some would say, “A non-person.” Others might say, “Free!” The experience of retirement is explored using creative writing for therapeutic purposes. Written from the perspective of fictional British retirees from different workplaces, the paper offers a view of how expressive and reflective writing can be both therapy and research at times of transition. Little in the literature on retirement in the UK uses the “experience near” approaches of writing as inquiry. This paper will point out some of the benefits of research methods that are “up close and personal”, culturally embedded and embodied. Encouraging the use of playful, creative writing in individual counselling and in groups is one of the aims of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In literary sources death in Roman battle was often portrayed as glorious, yet how the bodies of the war dead were treated was far removed from this ideal. This paper focuses on this dichotomy, and the seeming contradictions in attitudes and behaviours. In ancient Rome, the war dead were little remembered, respected and mourned for. After battle the bodies of dead soldiers were hastily gathered and disposed of en masse. There were no war memorials that listed the names of the dead, no military war cemeteries that acted as places of pilgrimage, little battlefield tourism and no annual commemorative rituals. This stands in stark contrast to the tombstones set up by soldiers in peacetime, to the arches and columns that celebrated victories in the city of Rome, to the triumphal processions that filled its streets and the tales of military bravery that formed literary set pieces. On the one hand to die for Rome was presented as glorious, on the other hand the reality was bloody, brutal and seemingly soon forgotten. This paper investigates how the bodies of soldiers were treated post-battle, uniting the limited archaeological evidence with a range of literary texts. Why was the basic treatment of military corpses deemed acceptable, and how were those corpses manipulated in real, and literary, games of power and politics? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explains the healing benefits, the “sweet unexpected” of the title, which results from using poetry to engage trauma, including traumatic grief. The benefits of poetry are presented alongside a discussion of a 22-year-old nonprofit called The Pongo Poetry Project. The sweet unexpected includes the ease with which trauma survivors engage their trauma narrative, the critical insights that emerge in poetry, the beneficial social context of sharing poetry, and the healing benefits of poetry for writers, care providers, and readers alike. The paper concludes by providing resources that can help people use poetry in their own work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 deals primarily with the identification of an inaccurately catalogued alchemical poem attributed to the famous Umayyad prince Khālid b. Yazīd (d. 705), edited, translated, and commented upon here for the first time. The paper also addresses the authenticity of Khālid's interest in alchemy and connects that interest to the need of the early Islamic empire to develop its own gold coinage as a sign of political independence from Byzantine coinage that was up till then the currency of the lands occupied by early Muslims in the regions of modern-day Egypt and Syria. On the matter of the legendry character of Khālid which was apparently started by Ibn Khaldun and passed on after him to most nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury orientalists, the paper exposes here the inner contradictions in Ibn Khaldun's theorising on the matter, and his failure to understand why someone like the historical Prince Khālid would be interested in alchemy. [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 examines the philosophic and political potentials of lyric poetry through an archaeology of its ideological participation, situating a critical moment of the form's partial liberation in the poetry of Paul Celan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the level of poetry appreciation that can be achieved by university students with intellectual disabilities. Indeed, there are limited studies that provide knowledge of poetry pedagogy for teachers of this group of individuals. Going some way to address the paucity of research in this area, this paper advances an approach to poetry pedagogy which is built on three tenets: (1) Teacher and positioning; (2) Student and the poetic voice, and (3) Language, metalanguage and poetry writing. It is argued that these tenets have the potential to become a powerful tool for people with intellectual disabilities to explore their self and social identity, and a medium to question and challenge the ideational world that these individuals are situated in. For teachers, utilising this poetry pedagogy encourages a critical reflexive practice which has the potential to enhance the relationship between teachers' positions and identities and the way this is enacted in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The arts are increasingly recognised as important and beneficial activities for people living with dementia. However, there is little peer-reviewed published research exploring arts-based learning for dementia care staff. In response, this paper explores (a) how dementia care staff describe forms of communication in care settings, and (b) the impact on communication following four sessions of 'Creative Conversations', an arts-based intervention for skills development. Method: Fourteen care homes received the intervention, delivered as 4 × 2 hour sessions. The intervention uses a range of activities (e.g. poetry, film, music, art making). Twenty–eight care staff were opportunistically sampled (mean age = 42.29), and provided pre-post qualitative data, obtained through interviews. Transcripts were analysed thematically. Results: At baseline, the dominant 'task-focussed' nature of care work was described as a barrier to communication, challenging opportunities for developing meaningful relationships with residents. Post-intervention, three primary themes were identified regarding improving communication: (1) learning through the arts (secondary themes: simplicity and subtlety, innovation in communication, and strengthening the role of non-verbal communication), (2) Enhancing creative approaches to care (secondary themes: element of surprise, confidence to experiment and catalyst for communication) and (3) professional introspection (secondary themes: development of empathy, sharing knowledge and experiences and a new appreciation). Conclusions: The intervention validated staff skills and confidence, enabling meaningful interactions that could be creative, 'in the moment', spontaneous and improvised. This arts-based intervention, which departs from formal education and fact-based learning may be particularly useful for the development of the dementia care workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buryat shamanic poetry is a difficult genre to understand and to translate. Its lyrics can be challenging to understand even for native speakers, for it is believed that shamans' spirits speak and prefer to be spoken to in a language characterized by riddles and roundabout phrases. Attendees of shamanic rituals barely understand this highly elevated language. Therefore, an assistant, i.e. a person familiar with the spirits' language acts as an interpreter during the ritual. No wonder that when Buryat shamanic poetry is translated to another language for scholarly purposes, the result contains a considerable amount of guesswork, and lines that do not seem to fit well in the entire corpus. In the present paper based on the explanations given by a shaman's assistant, I am going to shed more light on two lines that frequently recur in shamanic incantations and are crucial to our understanding of Buryat shamanic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of empty space in haiku and its potential in education is the focus of this paper. The author examines the emptiness embodied in the practice of writing haiku through examples of Basho's life and haiku, and her own experience as a teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how reading and writing processes contribute to therapist supervision as a means of working through impasse situations and facilitating the development of the therapeutic self. Texts read and written during supervision will mediate resistance, blocked narratives and containment or attention issues, as well as difficulties in change and processing developments during therapy. Texts will serve as a platform to contain the unconscious and conscious realms and shall contain the professional intrapersonal processing of the supervisee, as well as therapist-patient transference and countertransference relations and supervision relations. For this purpose, three variations of supervision shall be presented, demonstrating the transformative power of reading and writing processes for supervision in impasse situations: (1) reading and writing the therapeutic hour's summaries as a means to gain a re-observation; (2) the text's contribution in removing the patient's identity barriers; (3) the text as a release container to expose the iceberg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

Artistic representations of disease are widespread yet largely ignored in health psychology research. In this paper we use two infectious diseases, tuberculosis and the plague, as tracers to study how infectious diseases are represented in novels, films, paintings, and songs. They were represented especially in terms of their causes and seriousness. Studying how diseases are represented in various art forms extends our understanding of how they are socially constructed. This knowledge can also be incorporated into the training of health care providers to sensitize them to issues in patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper includes research into the pervasiveness and dangerousness of intimate partner violence and the ways that poetry therapy can be used to help victims gain perspective on their situation. According to the World Health Organization, over 30 percent of women worldwide have experienced violence at the hands of a partner. The author's personal experience with poetry therapy in leaving an abusive relationship of 13 years is used as an example. [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 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]

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

The paper examines how Tennyson seeks to establish his own poetics both under the influence of Romantic poetry and against it, with special focus on Tennyson's conception of the transcendental in In Memoriam and Maud. His ambivalent attitude towards Romantic poetry, which is noticeable in his earlier works, is heightened in In Memoriam where he questions the transcendental in connection with the death of Hallam. He tries to reconcile the transcendental with the social by revealing his strong attachment to the body. In the poem, the body is represented as the medium through which the transcendental is merged with the social. He further develops this idea in such a way that gives rise to a collectivism, by which Tennyson can reconcile the absolute with the earthly or commonplace. This reconciliation is reinforced in Maud, which depicts a Romantic protagonist accepting the collective and expresses Tennyson's attitude to Romantic aspiration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the possibility of viewing TESOL teachers' identities through the metaphor of 'poet-teachers', viewing second language teachers as creative and collaborative meaning-makers. We analyzed interviews, poems and classroom discourse among 16 Chinese, Vietnamese and English L1 speakers who participated in poetry writing course as a component of their TESOL teacher preparation curriculum. We identified three qualities related to poetic habits of TESOL teacher identity. Firstly, creative (l)imitation which enhances their identities as connected to and expanding from past structures, yielding new future selves. Secondly, the practice of surprising oneself in and through an L2, shifting scripted perceptions of language learning toward improvisational play. Lastly, teaching poetry illuminated the ways in which the language classroom becomes a site for dialogic collaboration, two-way exchanges where creative meaning-making can occur for both teacher and student alike. The results suggest imitation, surprise, and collaboration can create emotionally and linguistically rewarding experiences, encouraging the TESOL educator to identify as co-learners and to grow as interactive producers of meaning, not just passive instructors and receptors of language form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on an examination of the effectiveness of a 1-h workshop designed to teach poetry as a coping tool for children and adolescents in crisis and psychiatric facilities. This study was designed to measure poetry self-efficacy, belief in the usefulness of poetry as a coping tool, and changes in feelings of isolation and loneliness. Overall, the results of this study suggest adolescents and children in crisis centers and inpatient units may both enjoy and benefit from a single exposure to poetry. [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]

This paper is a retrospective look, from a distance of thirty-five years, at the lasting influence of a poetry therapy class on one of its participants. It chronicles how words written by a classmate, never seen or heard from after the class dispersed, had a lasting influence on her life. It builds on a theory borrowed from science, the entanglement theory, which suggests that particles in the sub-atomic realm, once connected remain forever in contact with each other. Drawing from the framework of the class, it speculates on extrapolating the physical theory of entanglement to a theory of human connections. It suggests underlying patterns in which lives fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, patterns so complex as to be beyond human understanding. [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]

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]

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]

Although Stevie Smith's poetry is in many ways very close to the laconic and less-deceived tone characteristic of Philip Larkin, there is one aspect of her work in which she differs strikingly from him and from the general features of Movement poetry: that is, in her use of what Larkin, in his 1956 'statement on poetry', contemptuously called a 'common myth-kitty'. In this chapter, I attempt to examine the treasures of Stevie's myth-kitty, not merely with the aim of distancing Smith from the Movement, but of reassessing her relationship with modernism and other poets of the generation which came to prominence in the 1930s, in particular, W. H. Auden. Smith's closest connection with modernism has often been seen to be her use of a stream-of-consciousness technique, as deployed in Novel on Yellow Paper—a technique which is inevitably compared to and dismissed as inferior to that of Virginia Woolf. Instead, I will put forward the claim that Smith's relationship to modernism should also be seen in her use of intertextuality, in the classical and other mythic fragments which, despite considerable differences of tone, place her work in the same tradition as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot. I attempt to demonstrate how she draws on this 'myth-kitty', especially ın her poetry, focusing on her treatment of female mythical figures, and argue that the key figure in Smith's oeuvre—the counterpart and equivalent of Eliot's Tiresias—is the figure of Persephone on her journey to the underworld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At 18 weeks' gestation, we were told that our son was not going to live. Left to cope on my own, I turned to the paper and pen and poured out my feeling and fears on paper. For the next couple of years, I was to spend many hours dotting all the “i”s and crossing all the “t”s to make sure every detail was correct. In this short article, I share briefly an introduction followed by a poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

in the period following the 1968 protests, the question arose of how a transparent music could be conceived, especially one which it would be impossible to misunderstand, and which would therefore be protected against political misuse. this was very often the object of discussion. in a paper delivered at the ‘musik und politik’ symposium held in vienna in 1991, i developed four political aspects of music: function, content, means of production, and the poetic. to explain: function:music composed for ritual and representation, etc, or music composed to increase productivity, or enable an increase of consumption, either in the workplace, the cowshed, or the shopping centre. external content/subject:music with text, plot, or programme. means of production and distribution: free art or dependent work. the methods by which the music is made, its poetry and its style (spahlinger, 1991). as a composer, i am most interested in the final point. i would like to explore this as posing the main set of problems for this paper, as well as posing the question of which processes effect meaning in a new music that can be differentiated from traditional music. i shall devote the first third of this article to this issue. i will then be in a position to question whether analogies exist with political thought. i will briefly examine the other three political aspects, in particular the means of production. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a reading, through a decolonial lens, of the debut work of two recently published South African poets, Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese and Koleka Putuma. In the work of both poets, the reader encounters contemporary South African black womxn subjects, constructed in the matrix of global coloniality. The works articulate issues of identity and belonging, with which many young South Africans are undoubtedly grappling. Both poets identify, interrogate, and resist what might be termed the realms of coloniality—namely coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being—in a process of "unlearning". A close reading of the themes and aesthetics of these two poets suggests that the site of enunciation for the speaking subjects that emerge is located at the fault lines between two or more very divergent knowledge frameworks. [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]

In this article, I analyse how a focus on cumulative violence grants us a new perspective on extractivism that discloses its link to the larger project of the construction of racialised, extractable, and disposable bodies. By engaging with Robert Nixon's call to think about new ways to represent cumulative violence and with Elizabeth A. Povinelli's assertion about how subscribing to a geological inertness can generate a different relationship to temporality, I will discuss how two distinct objects – the poem "A montanha pulverizada" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the photographs by the Brazilian artivist Júlia Pontés – can help us think about mining and extractivism by and through the textual and material forms of art. While the first allows us to discuss how the usual discussions around extractivism that are focused on on the catastrophe can obscure its inherent tie to racialised bodies, the latter can help us think of a possible approach to extractivist violence closer to the idea of the cumulative quasi-event. Finally, I argue that Pontés's photographs engage with the geological in a way that questions the very cleavage between life and nonlife and the fears evoked by the idea of an apocalyptical barren Earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens to poetry when it is reframed within a work of prose? This paper analyzes William Hazlitt's prose style, with particular attention to moments in which he reframes poetry by extracting it from the patterns of rhyme and meter and placing it within the rhythms of his essays. In doing so, Hazlitt stylistically challenged the boundaries of genre; simultaneously, the content of his essays defined prose as a hybrid form, built through a process of mining other texts for quotations. This paper also makes an argument for the crucial role material culture played in Hazlitt's writing style. It demonstrates how Hazlitt's participation in friendship albums and commonplace books informed what he called a “familiar style” of writing. Ultimately, this paper sheds light on understudied manuscripts and analyzes their role in shaping the Romantic-essay form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Neo-Confucian hermeneutic debates surrounding the interpretation of Zhu Xi's poem ‘The Boat Song of Wuyi's Nine Bends’ (1185 AD). The question of whether to regard the poem as a poetic description of landscape or as a philosophical lesson in a poetic form led to serious philosophical discussions in China and Korea in the centuries that followed its publication. This paper investigates the philosophical commentaries on the poem produced during the Yuan and Ming dynasties, and the contentious hermeneutic debates it sparked among Chosŏn Neo-Confucians which fanned the flames of factional politics. On the whole, this paper aims to reveal the divergent and unsettling interpretive traditions within Neo-Confucianism, and argues that the common division of Neo-Confucian poetry into the categories of philosophical and non-philosophical does not aptly represent the highly nuanced discussion of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]