Search

The author examines the meta-criticism approach evident in the poetry collection "Observations" by American poet and critic Marianne Moore. Topics include comments on Moore's tendency to borrow quotations from unexpected sources such as from the diaries of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, a definition of resistance in "Observations," the manifestation of Moore's moral views on human nature, judgment and criticism in her work, and the implication of her engagement with criticism in the collection.

Known for her black-and-white miniatures embedded with Arabic writing, Laure Ghorayeb is a fascinating if understudied figure of Beirut’s cultural modernism. Her work occupied a liminal position between French and Arabic and intersected literature and visual art. This article argues that it is precisely this marginality, manifested in Ghorayeb’s multifaceted cultural identity, that allowed her to move deftly across mediums, practices, languages, and genres, resulting in a uniquely inter-semiotic oeuvre. Close reading selections from her collections of poems, Noir … les bleus (Black … the Blues), 1960 and prose, Iklīl shawk ḥawla qadamayhi (A Crown of Thorns Around His Feet), 1965, in relation to her civil war drawings Témoignages (Testimonies), 1985, this article reveals an inter-semiotic exchange on the page. It offers an interdisciplinary rereading of the modern cultural history of Beirut, revealing an interplay between literature and visual art, which allowed Ghorayeb to maneuver between aesthetic experimentation and political engagement at a time when nationalist and ideological divisions were being sown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The translation of Catalan poetry into Chinese began during the1990s, after the event known as Reform and Opening Up. Until 2023, two anthologies of Catalan poetry had been published in China: Antologia de la poesia catalana contemporània (1991), translated by Wang Yangle, and Semàntica i nutrició (2018), a work by Gemma Gorga translated by Jesús Sayols. This article focuses on the two versions and analyzes a series of issues related to them: the origins and causes of their publication, their aims and their characteristics in the selection of poems. It has been discovered that the translation activities of Catalan poetry into Chinese have been influenced by multiple factors, related both to literary systems and to sociohistorical and sociocultural circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, titled "Hydropolitical Textualities," explores the concept of the Black aquatic and its relationship to bodies of water. The author, Rinaldo Walcott, discusses the historical significance of water in the lives of Black people, particularly in relation to Atlantic slavery and its ongoing impact on Black lives. The article also includes four papers that examine water in different African contexts, including the toxic effects of colonial modernity in Zimbabwe, the use of water spirits in Mozambican literature, the plight of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, and the displacement caused by the construction of the Kariba Dam in colonial Rhodesia. The article highlights the interconnectedness of these issues and the ongoing struggles faced by Black communities. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes the significance of Khaled Mattawa's collection of poems, Mare Nostrum (2019), a lyrical documentation of illegal migration. Mattawa's poetry integrates information and poetic form to bear witness to the plight of migrants and confront the issue of indifference and forgetfulness. The article argues that poetry can serve as a powerful tool to humanize the migrant experience, raising awareness and mobilizing global consciousness. By examining the political and aesthetic dimensions of Mattawa's poetic documentation, the article demonstrates that literature has the potential to inspire free thought, challenge indifference and confront injustices surrounding migration. Overall, the article highlights the capacity of poetry to give voice to those whose epistemic agency is damaged and promote empathy and understanding among readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on research highlighting the disruptive potential of migratory (e.g. Ahmed, S., 2000. Strange Encounters. Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London: Routledge, Heimböckel, D., and Weinberg, M., 2014. Interkulturalität als Projekt. Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik, 5 (2), 119–144) and urban encounters (e.g. Closs Stephens, A., 2013. The Persistence of Nationalism. From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters. London: Taylor & Francis), this paper examines the everyday encounters in Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç's debut poetry collection Prinzenbad (2022). More specifically, the analysis focuses on the question of how the depicted encounters unsettle a nationalist imaginary characterised by homogeneity, linearity and unity. The speaker of Keskinkılıç's largely autobiographical poems navigates a distinctly transnational, intersectional identity – he is gay, Muslim, a third-generation immigrant from an Arab Turkish family and a German national. The poems detail casual discriminations at airport security checks and intimate encounters with men in urban cruising spots, like Berlin's outdoor pool Prinzenbad. While the poems highlight the ubiquity of the nationalist imaginary, e.g. in personal relationships and language, they ultimately disrupt it by exploring alternative models of community and belonging in the speaker's queer encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advocates for a reading of John Scottus Eriugena's Carmina that situates his collection of poems within the genre of devotional poetry. Although the Carmina has recently benefited from scholarship on Eriugena's theology, typologies of his poems consistently overlook the significance of their theological themes. Most instead attribute more significance to their political themes, since Charles the Bald commissioned many of Eriugena's poems for special occasions at his royal court. This paper argues that a textual analysis which compares the significance of theological and political themes in the Carmina reveals several reasons why Eriugena's poems should be read as devotional poetry. First, it explains how typologies of Eriugena's poems overlook the significance of their theological themes by overstating the significance of Charles and his royal court. Then, it offers a close reading of three poems in the Carmina to show how Eriugena uses theological themes to frame political ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Özlem Özgül Dündar's debut poetry collection gedanken zerren (2018) explores what it means to be an embodied subject. Although some of the poems express the violence of having one's identity ascribed by others, many are also vignettes of seemingly banal interactions that constitute a pre-lingual interconnectedness beyond fixed identities. The poems' innovative form and style equally encourage us to regard language not just as a carrier of meaning, but as a material force, or indeed body, that can generate affective responses in readers. gedanken zerren enables us to imagine different perspectives on the body, engendering an increased awareness of everyday gestures and bodily reactions that indicate our inherent interrelatedness to other bodies. This is not the sovereign subject or absolute individual who is master of their own destiny, but rather a relational self in a body over which they have no totalizing control or complete knowledge. The idea of the body conveyed by gedanken zerren can be theorized through the deconstructivist thinker Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on the body, which illuminates how Dündar's poetry shifts the idea of human subjectivity beyond the hierarchical dualisms that have traditionally defined it, be they gendered, racialized, or a question of subject-object, or mind-body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic heritage of the Negev Bedouin is rich and varied. Particularly captivating are their political verses, which are as old as the nomads themselves. The collection of poems recorded by Sasson Bar-Zvi, former officer of the military government, includes many political verses composed in the 20th century through which runs an unmistakable strand of protest and rebuke. This article seeks to examine the moment when a note of criticism first made an appearance in the political poetry of the Negev Bedouin. We will try to characterize the period in which this note appeared and the historical processes that led to its emergence. We will focus on the growing involvement of the Ottomans in the second half of the 19th century in the internal struggles of the Bedouin, an involvement that eventually led to the founding of a city at the border between the three major Bedouin confederations inhabiting the Negev at that time. At the centre of this study lies the poem that we identify—for now at least—as the first poem of criticism; we will analyse it and the information we have about it, then formulate hypotheses regarding the date, motivations, and circumstances of its composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the work of Isabella Whitney, a female poet from the sixteenth century. It explores her unique position as an urban, non-elite poet and her engagement with social and economic change. The article highlights the challenges Whitney's poetry poses to notions of authorship and authority, as well as her use of the miscellany format to explore female speech and social interactions. It also emphasizes the importance of Whitney's engagement with print and the marketplace, and argues for a reevaluation of her work within the context of sixteenth-century literature and culture. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on Marquette University's J.R.R. Tolkien collection, catering to both scholars and fans of the renowned author. Topics include the contents and significance of the collection, the efforts to preserve and expand it, and the opportunities it provides for research and exploration into Tolkien's life and work.

The article focuses on a selection of internet resources related to poetry, covering topics such as online collections, educational platforms, and poetry analysis tools. Topics include the diverse range of resources available for poets, educators, and enthusiasts to explore and engage with poetry in the digital age.

"Who Killed Marta Ugarte? Poems in memory of the victims of Augusto Pinochet" by Jeanne-Marie Osterman is a collection of poems that explores the role of memory in the face of brutality. The poems reconstruct the stories of the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship through fragments and verses, offering a different reading experience compared to historical accounts. The poems ask questions about the implications of injustice and allow readers to connect with the victims on a personal level. The book also reflects on the author's own role as an outsider and the importance of remembering with both knowledge and emotion. [Extracted from the article]

The article provides an overview of a forum called "Poetry in Times of War" held at the University of Lisbon in February 2023. The forum aimed to share and discuss war and peace poetry from Slavonic poets, with translations into Portuguese and English. It emphasizes the ability of poetry to console, reflect, and inspire during times of war. The article features the works of Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan, known for his vivid and powerful language, as well as Bulgarian poet Dimcho Debelyanov, who expresses sympathy for war victims. Additionally, the text explores the works of Croatian poet Vesna Parun, Russian poet Marina Bogdanova, and Slovenian poet Janez Menart, each offering unique perspectives on the impact of war on individuals and society. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a forum at the University of Lisbon called "Poetry in Times of War," where Slavonic language and Portuguese lecturers presented poems about war and peace from various Slavonic poets. The article emphasizes the power of poetry to console, reflect, and inspire during times of war, drawing on the experiences of poets in Nazi concentration camps. It also examines the works of Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan, Bulgarian poet Dimcho Debelyanov, Croatian poet Vesna Parun, Russian poet Marina Bogdanova, and Slovenian poet Janez Menart, each exploring the theme of war in their own unique way. These poets use their words to shed light on the impact of war and the need for change. [Extracted from the article]

Exile literature is saturated with the themes of rootlessness, loss of identity, and belonging. This article adopts an analytical perspective to explore Abena Busia's poetry anthology Testimonies of Exile (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990) as a prototype of exile literature. To inquire into how the selected poems project the identity of émigrés in relation to place and space, stylistic analysis of the poems was employed. The findings highlight Busia's construction of the émigré's identity, ranging from that of an enlightened, sophisticated enthusiast to that of a stricken straddler. Busia reconstructs the spaces occupied by émigrés as vociferous, since these spaces ascribe ever-mutating identities to them. Experiences, or what Busia refers to as testimonies of exile, disrupt and alter the émigré's identity. Drawing inferences from Edward Said's conceptualisation of the disposition of the émigré, it is argued that the place and space of the immigrant is not only secondary and bordering on the peripherals of foreign culture, but also contemptible. The immigrant's identity formation undergoes different stages. As his/her "arrival identity" confronts elements in the new environment, the immigrant comes to revise, adopt, and adapt what is considered an acceptable or model personality. The émigré either fully integrates into society or resists change and clings to his/her "old" self. Busia's feminist didacticism, evidenced in her exploration of pertinent feminist issues in the context of larger immigrant concerns, is obvious in her collection. The article concludes by noting that the female émigré, especially, has to grapple with a "desecrated place" where any form of sacred insistence on self-acclamation is met with disdain. The exile experience then becomes a wound which might never heal, even as the immigrant's identity is permanently altered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of six poems is based on my reflections on growing up as a gay man in a heteronormative society where same-sex indulgence was outlawed until recently. The previously present anti-sodomy statute in India, political and religious concerns, and class-based social structures that converged to form an unfavorable atmosphere for gendered minorities, serves as the backdrop for these introspective poems. The poems express issues around my sexual identity formation, the intersectional oppression I faced due to my sexuality, the challenging internal conflicts I encountered when I was in "the closet," the dread I endured for years and that I still embody, and my intense desire for freedom and an authentic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"How Dark Is My Flower: Yosano Akiko and the Invention of Romantic Love" by Leith Morton is a comprehensive examination of the evolution of romantic love in modern Japanese literature, with a focus on the poetry of Yosano Akiko and her husband Yosano Tekkan. Morton argues that Akiko's poetry and the Myōjō circle, which she was a part of, played a crucial role in the development of modernism in Japan. The book analyzes various poems, texts, articles, and works from the late 19th century to around 1918, providing valuable insights for scholars of poetry, modernity, and Japanese literature. It also includes translations of previously untranslated works, making it a valuable resource for researchers. [Extracted from the article]

Tom Pow (b. 1950) is a well-known Scottish poet and prose-writer, author of 12 poetry collections, 3 radio plays, several childrens' books, and more. Geographical themes have recurred throughout Pow's work, and he acknowledges being energised by the creative tensions between Here and Elsewhere: between the supposed (but now increasingly doubted) certainties of Here, fixed and enclosed, and the excitements, challenges and threats of Elsewhere, mobile and open. Such matters are explored in different and nuanced ways, through different prompts and sources, in the course of the essay that follows. Pow thereby exemplifies a distinctive kind of 'applied geography' that is constantly giving shape to his creative endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a collection of four poems and two translations by Matthew Zapruder. The poems explore themes of dreams, revolution, and uncertainty. The translations include works by Jean Follain and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Zapruder is an accomplished poet and editor, and his work delves into the complexities of human emotions and experiences. [Extracted from the article]

The paper examines the Assamese short story “Xomoi-Xeema” (2005) by Saurav Kumar Chaliha and the English poetry collection, Street on the Hill (2006), by Anjum Hasan to propose an expanded notion of Anglophone writing through multilingual readings of regional Indian literature and offer alternative modes of political inclusivity. It examines the role of English in Northeast Indian literary texts in articulating cosmopolitanism from a marginalized space and probing the linguistic frontiers of the postcolonial nation-state. Through this comparative reading, the essay envisions the relationships between region, nation, and world through a series of overlapping linguistic exchanges and provides an alternative understanding of world literature to current models focused on the English-language novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how M. NourbeSe Philip's 2008 poetry collection, Zong!, and Roshini Kempadoo's 2004 multimedia installation, Ghosting, draw on the poetic affordances of digital media to undermine the coloniality of official archives. Philip and Kempadoo, I demonstrate, read colonial and national archives as notational diagrams, following patterns of marks rather than of semantic meaning. They progressively distort these diagrams through the geometric operations of transposition and projection, until the fragmented speech of black women inhabiting the archives is made visible. They do not make this speech visible in the present as much as they produce an opening to a future in which it can manifest itself. I draw on Philip and Kempadoo's digital experiments to theorise the notion of a subaltern archive – an archive of the virtual, of the not yet archivable. These artists, I argue, add medium specificity to Gayatri Spivak's original thesis on the subaltern: the subaltern woman in post/colonial archives cannot be read as text. Her agency can still be figured through the geometric, visual transformation of archival fragments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author Henrika Ringbom's collection of poems entitled Händelser ur Nya Pressen 1968–1974. Prosadikter (2009) is a rare piece of Finland-Swedish literature. Rewriting news from a Finland-Swedish evening press paper during the 1960s and 1970s, it offers a view on the colonial mind-set of the Nordic countries. The poems not only depict political events from various parts of a global world, they also open up an unmarked category in Nordic literature, that of race and whiteness. An essential part of Finland-Swede's self-understanding goes back to its status as a minority. This applies even to Finland-Swedish literature. It also has a notable tradition of female feminist writing that runs through the 20th century. Finland-Swedish literature, however, belongs also to a majority when it comes to Western ideas of race and whiteness in a Nordic context. In my analysis, I show how Ringbom scrutinizes events from a phase Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström (2014) call the "white solidarity" (1968–2001), characterized by antiracism, anti-apartheid, social justice and gender equality, but also of color-blindness. I show how Ringbom contributes to the current discussions of political Nordic literature with a rich, complex, ambivalent and defamiliarizing way. The poems actively remind us how both political events and political poetry are complex and contradictory. Rather than offering a clear-cut poetic activism, Rinbom writes political poetry of the second degree, one that examines and reflects upon the conditions of politics, popular media, and political poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I investigate how Shadi Angelina Bazeghi writes about the Iran-Iraq War in her poetry collection Flowmatic (2020). Bazeghi assembles several different kinds of texts in Flowmatic, and one of these texts is a testimony by an Iranian soldier-engineer who worked as a programmer setting up at system to identify the bodies and body parts of fallen Iranian soldiers. Both the words of the soldier's testimony and the act of programming and data processing have found their way into the poem; as appropriated text and as the poem's overarching aesthetic mode. Using the soldier's witness account as a prism, I will look at three aspects of the poetry collection: 1) how the testimony is appropriated, 2) how Bazeghi is witnessing though appropriation, and 3) how she writes about war from a feminine point of view. I argue that Bazeghi through the evasive aesthetics and the heightened appropriation in Flowmatic challenges how women can witness and write about war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I came to see Malcolm for therapy several years after having trained as a therapist myself. The only conflict between Malcolm and I and the last and most painful engagement with emptiness, was Malcolm's insistence that I come to sessions more frequently. I try to describe a part of my own therapy journey with my therapist, Malcolm. [Extracted from the article]

The production and circulation of poetry on social media has gained critical attention over the past decade. Known popularly as Instapoetry, this digital literary phenomenon has been celebrated in the Global North for increased printed poetry sales and changing readership patterns. Little has been written about Instapoetry from the Global South despite its popularity amongst black women readers and sharers, especially in South Africa. By offering a Southern analysis of the poetry and Instagram profile of Malawian storyteller and instapoet Upile Chisala, grounded in decolonial theory, this paper suggests that the oft-cited criticism against Instapoetry as "not poetry" fails to acknowledge its location on "the other side of the line." Chisala's poetry is an example of post-abyssality: it draws attention to the abyssal line and seeks to overcome it. The paper argues that Chisala's call to voice and self-love is a "re-humaning" ethic that is useful for challenging coloniality of being. Her poetry therefore contributes to reimagining the being of black women and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will study the evolution of Instapoetry within the Indian digital sphere and trace its trajectory of growth and development. It will take a close look at how local and historical issues find expression in a global, digital mediascape through this emerging body of writing. The article further argues that Indian Instapoetry is characterised by a peculiar aesthetic shaped by a combination of ancient traditions of oral poetry and digital affordances of a platform like Instagram. The merger of these influences results in the formation of a digital vernacular mode of expression constituted by a set of thematic and formal poetic devices. Owing to these features, Instapoetry comes into its own as the poetry of the people which echoes their concerns, anxieties and aspirations. At the same time, the digital vernacular facilitates the creation of radical spaces where novel forms of poetic expression and affective engagement are made possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instagram started in San Francisco, yet it has been clear that its usage has spread worldwide. The influence of this global outreach is apparent not only in the platform's general use, however, but in unique content trends as well. In particular, there is Instapoetry, the movement of minimalist poetry that has taken Instagram and the rest of the world by storm since 2018. Although Instapoetry was dominated by writers based in English-speaking countries at its outset, it has now become extremely popular across multiple nations and languages, a truly transnational and translingual cultural phenomenon. As these writers emerge from a vast cultural landscape, it has become critical to examine how the various Instapoets across cultures resemble each other in some ways, yet vastly diverge in others. This series of essays seek to examine how Instapoetry as a transglobal movement evolves within its capitalistic platform, studying the manner that users may escape or re-establish digital hegemonic structures. From Malawi to Greece, India to Norway, the First Nations to Latin America, these critical pieces show how Instapoets may alternatively use social media poems as tools of weaponry, commercialisation, protest, and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by a desire-centred framework, this article explores how Tenille Campbell (Dene/Métis) uses Instagram as a space for contemporary muiltimedia artistic practice. Her poetry, photography, and other creative endeavours have presented meaningful opportunities for community-building and identity-affirmation as a force specifically for Indigenous resurgence across national, tribal, and geographical lines. The first section begins with a discussion of desire-centred research as it intersects with Indigenous new media studies and decolonial methodologies. Later sections argue that Campbell's artistic expressions nurture emotional, mental, communal, and spiritual connections to land, thereby growing a virtual landedness—especially in relation to the erotic, which best captures Campbell's project of community-building and identity-affirmation. Lastly, this article highlights the remediation of Campbell's poetry into fashionwear, which simultaneously cultivates networks of Indigenous women entrepreneurs. Her poetry, evinced as a co-creative, community-based, multidisciplinary literary arts practice, surpasses its manifestation on social media, and should be understood as a multimodal constellation that has impacts that ripple far beyond digital environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study maps the Greek Instapoetry landscape by exploring a) the central formats and themes through which Greek Instapoetry becomes communicated, the most common hashtag sequences used and the predominant types of elicited responses, as well as b) the basic perceptions and experiences of Instapoetry practitioners. Findings evidenced how multiple individual forms of labour are involved in practices of content production, rendering thereby Instapoetry as a system of "applied poetics," structured around the application of distinctive and individualised types of technological affordances for textual composition. Traditional understandings of poetry were found to be strongly upheld amongst practitioners, while the value of print was shown to be preserved as holding an additional merit. Poetic hashtags were found to be more related with visibility, in order to generate algorithmic classifications and were used mostly with strategic intent. "Ideal" instapoems were construed as short and comprehensible texts that address issues of love or point towards inspirational messages, able to elicit intense emotions in readers. Under this light, there is evidence to suggest that Instapoetry could be approached as a digitally distributed cognition ecosystem, in which affect plays a central role in understanding the cognitive processes underpinning interactions with Instapoetry-related content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The name instapoetry – or Instagram poetry – suggests a specific attachment of poetry to Instagram. But how bound is instapoetry to Instagram? This article uncovers the relationship between instapoetry and Instagram by analysing the participatory-made exhibits of Norwegian instapoet Trygve Skaug. By investigating the various media instantiations of Skaug's poetry, the article discusses how instapoetry is platform-dependent and shows how the poetry binds to many different contexts and materialities by existing in multiple media ecologies. Based on this, the paper introduces the post-digital circulation process of poetry as constituting instapoetry's medial constitution. This process focuses on the emergence of "new media"-cultural approaches to poetry as a post-digital, but still platformed, state of cultural production, interlocking with "old media" ways, as well as creating a setting for the dominance of a platformed lyric poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a DIY chapbook of poems crafted between 2018 and 2021. I write found poems and centos drawing from newspaper coverage of fires and flowers in California. If the land exerts agential influence on epistemologies and ontologies, and as climate change affects changes to the land, I ask what new epistemologies and ontologies must necessarily emerge. I see in the California superbloom a utopian performative (Dolan) that potentially points toward reciprocal relationships with the land. Performative poetic inquiry offers a practise of attention that allows me to explore ethical and reciprocal futurities that include fire, flowers, and humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the dynamic equilibrium between music and language within art songs, as exemplified in Zhao Yuanren's New Poetry Collection. Zhao Yuanren, a modern musician with a strong background in both phonetics and music theory, serves as the focal point of our research. Our primary objective is to explore how the fusion of new poetry and melodic compositions in Zhao Yuanren's works imbues art songs with a vivid sense of national identity. Through the provision of quantitative data, this study contributes to the evolution of Chinese art songs in the contemporary era and offers insights into the cultural implications of the genre. To analyze the structural characteristics and phonetic elements presented in the melodies of the New Poetry Collection, we employ visual image analysis. Additionally, we conduct acoustic data analysis, focusing on parameters such as frequency (Hz), intensity (dB), and pitch (st), which enable us to visually represent the speech sound aspects embedded in musical compositions and vocal performances. Our findings suggest the following: (1) Quantitative linguistic methodologies, as applied through the lens of linguistic musicology, offer a valid theoretical framework for the examination of Chinese art songs. (2) The subset of art songs under scrutiny in this study demonstrates adherence to specific linguistic constraints in various ways. (3) The phonetic elements identified in this research hold the potential to nationalise art songs and may have broader applications in other artistic domains. This study injects a rational, empirically grounded approach into the traditional realm of musicological cantorial relationships, thus providing valuable empirical data for the nationalisation of art songs. These findings underscore the practical significance of Chinese culture as a national treasure and lend support to the flourishing of Chinese art songs while preserving their cultural identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These poems from immigrants, titled after a line in Robert Pesich's "Borders", come with a content warning: If you read these poems, you will never look at a peach the same way again. Later in this issue, I have also opened my treasure chest of poems that have been waiting in the wings from Ken Weisner, Michael Glaser, Carol Cellucci, and Kaaren Kitchell, ending with a poem of my own. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the poetry collection "One Year and Three Months" by Luis García Montero, written in the aftermath of his wife's death, exploring how grief is translated into words. Topics discussed include the skill required to write about grief effectively, the blending of personal and fictional elements in García Montero's work, and the challenges of translating cultural references and nuances while preserving the emotional depth of the poetry.

Among the four poems, "Untitled" was written thirty-four years ago, in the summer of 1989. That is when the poet was still a teenager, burned with creative fire. Song stopped creative writing in the early 1990s and only recently did he resume writing short stories and poems. He is currently writing a series of short stories and novellas about the end of the 1980s. The other three poems published here, including "China," were all drafted in 2018. Song's friend Taiwanese novelist Lo Yi-chin, encouraged him to keep the creative fire burning. Song and Lo co-authored a poetry collection, which was published by Ryefield in 2022, under the title White Horse and Black Camel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the latest issue of the journal "Medieval Mystical Theology," which aims to be both scholarly and international. The current issue features four essays on different Christian mystics, including Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gregory of Nyssa, St Bonaventure, and John Scottus Eriugena. Each essay explores different aspects of mystical theology, such as desire for union with God, the interplay between the mystical and moral, the nature of reading, and the devotional nature of Eriugena's poems. The essays provide valuable insights into these topics and offer a diverse range of perspectives. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the late political poetry of Eileen Myles within the context of a grassroots organization, collective mobilization and the economic and cultural conflicts over what constitutes a "commons" in the U.S. in the last decade. Topics include argument on a form of political commitment in Myles' writing such as in her "Evolution" poetry collection, criticism of the poet's use of the word "I" in the poem, and comments on Myles' representation of class politics in her writing.

In Thomas Hughes's 1588 drama The Misfortunes of Arthur, King Arthur desires his "carcasse" to "lurke" in obscurity after his death, so that his missing body may inspire future generations with promises of his glorious return. In a comparable passage in Richard Niccols's 1610 edition of the Mirror for Magistrates, Arthur tells the reader that he hopes his fame will continue to inspire when his limbs lie "rapt in mould." The two texts' emphasis on the importance of the sovereign's physical body to his legacy reinforces Claire McEachern's suggestion in The Poetics of English Nationhood that "embodied, the state becomes familiar" and facilitates subjects' desire for inclusion in the nation. In this article I demonstrate how the state became familiar via the Arthurian body—in performance and especially in print—as that body spoke directly to the concerns of all subjects and readers who constituted the English nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue marks the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's death by presenting ten new readings of his major poetry by some of the most innovative voices working in the field of Romanticism today. Contributors have been invited to offer a concise essay on a single poem, being free to determine the critical parameters of their interpretation. Throughout the special issue, Shelley's own generic and formal range is matched by the diverse critical energies (comparatist, formalist, historicist, decolonial, ecological) that contributors have brought to bear on his poems. The result is a series of original and provocative readings grounded in radically different methodological intuitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the dialectics between national decadence and regeneration in d'Annunzio's Il piacere. It argues that the novel's fin-de-siècle reception was conditioned by the author's prior classification as an immoral, anti-national writer in the wake of the poetry collection Intermezzo di rime. This classification determined a reading of d'Annunzio's debut novel in terms of decadence, while Il piacere itself actually pointed toward a literature of regeneration. The novel staged d'Annunzio's opposition to his own prior classification, while making claims for a more committed and more internationally relevant model of Italian literature in the context of European modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelley and Keats published their most important poetry collections in the summer of 1820, Keats's Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, both with 'other poems' which became famous staples of Victorian anthologies. The 1820 volumes include the poets' anguished self-portraits, defining Romanticism for later readers. The poems also should be read as the poets' continuing dialogue about the nature and function of art. For Keats, great art is a 'balm and comfort' to suffering humanity, uniting beauty and truth, implicitly telling later generations: 'that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.' Shelley, in contrast, is a prophet of revolution. Driven by his 'passion for reforming the world', he sees art as an intercessor between the oppressed and their society, urging by precept and example that human beings have the power to change their lives. The dialogue goes back to the earliest works of the poets, and remains unresolved in their last unfinished works, Shelley's Triumph of Life and Keats's Fall of Hyperion. For us, the dialogue, still unresolved, remains of supreme interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on Alice Oswald's Woods etc. and the translation of some of the poems into French. The article first identifies the stylistic hinges on which Oswald's poetry collection rests. Alice Oswald, who read Classics at Oxford, draws on the structures of orality found in epic poetry with an emphasis on sounds and rhythm to transcribe a powerful experiencing of the natural world. The poet-gardener fathoms a hidden, other dimension of nature. This sensory, mostly acoustic opening up to nature is what the translation process attempts to render ... but how? How can the translator draw the French 'acoustic community' (Schafer 1977, 214) into this experience? Can the sound-and-rhythm-based translation make the natural living world resonate in the French listeners' psyches in the same way? The article draws on the works of Henri Meschonnic, Umberto Eco, Lawrence Venuti and Clive Scott to answer these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]