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Interpoetics is the betweenness and connection between poetry and poetics, viewed from different angles – an examination of the space between that uncovers more about poet, text, image, influence, and genre because it is between and of both sides. The inter is a hyphen, representing either/or and both/and: the cultural poetics of betweenness. Such liminality relates to identity and, thus, a Chinese diasporic or hyphenated poetics. This article examines the poets Hannah Lowe, Russell Leong, Marilyn Chin, and Fred Wah, who explore their own identities: Chinese, American, Canadian, English-speaking, hybrid, and the voice of the poet. How do these poets speak for themselves in a culture that did not always let them speak, and negotiate their art and hybridity or other aspects of their selves as people and artists in ways that refuse, evade, or break the stereotype? Being "Anglo Chinese" is being or writing in English in an English-speaking country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article works backwards by contextualizing the metaphorical explosion of metaphor, especially in the last century or so, and works back to Plato and Aristotle, who help us to see the outlines of metaphor in relation to poetics, rhetoric, philosophy and politics, as well as the critical and theoretical issues arising subsequently down to the present age, including the views of Zoltán Kövecses, Northrop Frye, Paul Ricœur, Hegel, Shakespeare, Thomas Aquinas and others. The nub of the matter is whether metaphor helps us get at the core of philosophy, that is truth, justice and beauty, the good life, or whether it deflects and deludes or both. My argument is that they do both for Plato and even for Aristotle, who is less severe on poetry and on poetic mimesis than is Plato. This friction between actual and fictional worlds might be resolved or at least meet in the possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English literature as a national literature is in many ways a nonstarter. Form and context, language and translation all exert centrifugal forces on English language and literature and, more specifically, poetry. English poetry becomes poetry in English, but even from the start in Old English, there are external cultural and linguistic forces. Here, I do not deny that we speak of English poetry or poetry in English, but I wish to explore the countervailing pressures away from the literature of a nation or an unbroken poetic tradition in English because literature in English was written before England was unified and is written in English in English-speaking places and other territories that have changed over time. T.S. Eliot’s tradition and the individual talent, which he first discussed in The Egoist in 1919, is a perceptive idea, but I would suggest that some of the individuals, even early on, were bilingual or multilingual and that the tradition is not unified culturally, socially, and politically. So here I offer a brief selection of literary history – that is, a historical account of poetry in English, in the context of Latin and other languages, with examples from Anglo-Saxon texts through those of Shakespeare and Ezra Pound to those works in the present – that shows aspects of comparative and world poetry from the beginning and not simply English poetry or poetry in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Possibly, there cannot be some kind of comprehensive or systematic view of comparative poetry or world poetry but that is not what we are suggesting here. The main idea of this special issue is to encourage distinguished scholars to explore the idea in their own way or to interpret particular examples of the comparative and the global in poetics – that is, the theory and practice of poetry – hence, the debate and the conversation among the articles. These multiple points of view open up discussion in many ways that should prompt others to think and work more in the area. Thus, the issue is an exploration and not some fixed theory of comparative and world poetry. Moreover, poetry matters in its vulnerability, fragility, and alternatives or possibilities. Poems – their writing and their reading – are at the heart of this exploration. Almost all of the contributors to this special issue address poems and pay close attention to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller provide different but productive ways to think about poetics and to read poetry closely and with attention. As a poet, reader and critic of poetry, I welcome their thoughts on the theory and practice of poetry. Whereas Miller sees the reading of poems as subjective and selective, Ghosh views it as universal and shared. Both readers help us in the drama of meaning, the tension between them. As convivial and suggestive as that difference between Miller and Ghosh may be, it allows us to experience the different sides of poetry and the philosophy of poetry, if we think about, say the Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian tradition of thinking about poetry and even Philip Sidney's response on the one hand and the rhetorical tradition of reading poetry on the other. Ghosh, although having mastered Western literature and poetry, as Miller has, also provides us with Eastern views, and this is also of great benefit to the reader of Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016). One of the great centres of literature is language and poetry is compressed and memorable language that forms the heart of literature: it is a key to thinking about Ghosh and Miller thinking literature across the various parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]