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The article discusses Allen Ginsberg's visit to China in 1984, where he participated in a writers' conference. The conference aimed to explore the source of writers' inspiration and foster cultural exchange between China and the United States. Ginsberg's visit included readings, lectures, and interactions with Chinese literary and academic circles. He wrote poems inspired by his experiences in China, reflecting on poverty, backwardness, and the country's reform and opening up policies. Ginsberg's work emphasizes freedom, spontaneity, and the unity between China and the United States. [Extracted from the article]

Three recent books of poetry scholarship illuminate different answers to the question: What social function does poetry have? Moving between institutions and the poems that are produced in relation to them, these critics focus on poetry's parroting of common clichés, euphemisms, and banalities, on its engagement with historical concepts, and on its conscription into liberalism and nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature is the property of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper analyzes some of Anne Bradstreet’s “marriage” poems, in an attempt to show that the shift in her poetic voice, namely the turn to a more secular approach to poetry, makes her relevant today as the first published poet in America and the first American writer who struggled to establish a new literary paradigm in the New World. The poems “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment”, “Another” I and "Another" II represent a shift from the “nostalgia” of English literature and the establishment of a new, feminine poetic voice, preoccupied with the condition of the woman writer and the fate of poetry in the patriarchal seventeenth-century American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the development of non-lyric traditions in American poetry, the author investigates ways the poet disappears from the poem while poetic form is seriously destabilized. Two fundamental "alternatives to the egoposition," as Charles Olson writes in Mayan Letters (83), are identified: the poetics of attention on the one hand, and concrete poetry and language writing on the other. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetries of attention, the ego becomes an organ responding to experience, turning the creative self into an attentive mind that opens itself unto the world. Twentieth-century concrete poetry eliminates the self-expressive firstperson subject while allowing the language material to take the place of the subject. The radicalization of American poetry culminates in language writing, which places the creative process under the control of language, thereby doing away with the self that formerly gave cohesion to the text, and allowing language, as opposed to meter and prosody, to perform a central structuring function. Conducting close prosodic and grammetrical readings, the author demonstrates that in all these poetries—whether attention is directed to the world or to the word—the elimination of the lyrical self goes hand in hand with the disruption of regular poetic form. (EB) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the work of poet Sarah Piatt and her engagement with various Victorian poets, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The author focuses on Piatt's poems that draw on the myth of Persephone and explores how they reflect debates between realism and idealism in the 19th century. The article also discusses the cultural and historical context surrounding the myth of Persephone and its relevance to Victorian writers. Additionally, the article analyzes Piatt's poem "A Daffodil" and its intertextual connections, suggesting multiple interpretations and highlighting the complexities of the myth and human experience. [Extracted from the article]

Laura E. Richards's (1850-1943), the first lady of American nonsense poetry, was among the few nineteenth-century professional women writers who composed literary autobiographies, and the only one who wrote two, one for adult readers and one for children. The present essay argues for reading Laura E. Richards's nursery and Nonsense rhymes as her third autobiography. Unlike her formal autobiographies, which primarily served to maintain a mythic legacy of her renowned parents, Julia Ward and Samuel Gridley Howe, Richards's nonsense poetry subtly subverts the constraints of this narrative. Beneath a playful surface, her rhymes reveal insights and tensions that her official autobiographies strategically obscure. By examining Richards's nonsense verses alongside her autobiographies, personal and historical accounts, and within the broader context of nineteenth-century Nonsense poetry and women's and children's literature, this essay argues for a richer, more nuanced understanding of her life and work. In doing so, it repositions Richards and her poetry within the cultural and literary history of her time, offering both the poet and her oeuvre the critical attention they have long been denied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the posthumous editing of poet Alfred Arteaga's work by David Lloyd, highlighting Arteaga's significant contributions to Xicanx poetry and Chicano poetics. Arteaga's unique style, blending languages and genres, is explored, emphasizing his commitment to hybridity and resistance to exclusion. The article reflects on Arteaga's thematic consistency, erudition, and formal control, underscoring the importance of preserving his work for future scholars and readers. The editing process culminated in the publication of "Xicancuicatl: Collected Poems," aiming to honor Arteaga's legacy and ensure the continued relevance of his poetry in contemporary cultural and political contexts. [Extracted from the article]

Through close readings of William Langland, John Keats, Anne Carson, and Ben Lerner, this essay describes an enigmatic effect in and of English literature. Proposing Christian apophaticism as both source and analogue of literary styles, the essay introduces the concept of "apophatic effects," references to a literary realm not merely virtual but definitively inaccessible to perception. The imaginative leap that modern scholars value in English literature, epitomized by Keats's speaker's reflections on the urn, is a form of theological thinking that has forgotten where it came from. The essay touches on the relationship between literature and theology, the formation of the discipline of English, the definition of lyric, and Keats's influence on contemporary North American avant-garde poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Lines and Lyrics: An Introduction to Poetry and Song" by Matt BaileyShea delves into the relationship between poetry and music, exploring concepts like rhythm, meter, and form. The book aims to make music theoretical ideas accessible through the lens of lyrics and poetry, providing interactive exercises for a wide readership. It emphasizes the significance of diction in analyzing poetry and lyrics, while also dissecting elements like meter, rhyme, lines, and syntax. The text highlights the intricate relationship between music and language, encouraging further research in the intersection of poetry and music. [Extracted from the article]

African Americans and Palestinians share a long history of prolonged traumas, ethnic genocide, and systematic apartheid, which finds its traces in Palestinian and African American poetry of resistance. The brutal practices of the Israeli government in Palestine, as well as the racist ideology and imperialistic hegemony of the recurring American governments, became the primary targets of African American and Palestinian resistance poetry. This treatise critically investigates social, political, historical, and human zones of contact between African American and Palestinian poets through the lens of postcolonial theory, highlighting topics of collective interest that underpin the discourse of the two poetic traditions. Exploring historical and textual spaces, the article illustrates tendencies toward home, identity, freedom, and struggle that permeate the Palestinian and African American poetic discourse. With its focus on poetry, the article highlights parallels between the two literary traditions that brought Palestinians and African Americans together in their fight for independence, self-determination, sovereignty, and universal justice. While African American nonviolent protest poetry is marked by intense nostalgia and a burning yearning for freedom, Palestinian resistance poetry is primarily defined by intense rage, revolution, and a vehement burning desire to reclaim the lost land and identity via all possible acts of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Frost believes that "a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom". When delight meets wisdom in a poem, the strong feeling and profound thought of the poet often appear disarmingly simple. Perhaps this is what Frost calls "emotion has found thought and thought has found words". Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was published over a hundred years ago in March 7, 1923, which has not only enjoyed its great popularity ever since but also has been interpreted and reinterpreted by teachers and scholars of British and American poetry around the world. It is attempted here in this paper to reread this poem in terms of its being Frost's "favorite" poem, "the pleasure of ulteriority", imagistic diction and syntax, "a synecdochist", "the darkest evening of the year" and "a momentary stay against confusion", so as to illustrate Frost's way of deceptive simplicity in his poetic composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the reclamation of forgotten roots in Puerto Rican diaspora poetry, focusing on three poems from the post-Nuyorican migration period. The analysis highlights the presence of indigenous and African roots in these poems, demonstrating a progression in navigating historically marginalized aspects of Puerto Rican identity. The article discusses the themes and perspectives presented in the poems, which explore the poets' connections to their Taíno and African heritage, their complex feelings about their identity, and their experiences as Puerto Ricans in the United States. The text emphasizes the importance of embracing diverse cultural influences and calls for representation and recognition of the Puerto Rican community in the broader Caribbean literary canon. [Extracted from the article]

This essay takes Kenneth White’s description of “a quiet apocalypse” as a starting point to read the complexities of W.S. Merwin’s poems in The Lice (1967). The poems are to be related to the context of the Vietnam war: the horrors perpetrated by the U.S. in Vietnam are legible in the tense and dark poems that protest against them, but they are never explicitly mentioned. Rather, what unfolds is a generic discourse on humankind’s irrepressible propensities to predation, violence and self-destruction. The poems delineate empty indeterminate agents that are intent on performing the dreadful acts that will lead them to a deadly future of extinction. In the wake of T.S. Eliot’s and William Carlos Williams’ opposed yet paradoxically converging visions of spring, W.S. Merwin revises the figure of the poet into the ominous prophet of a programmed apocalypse, delivering in his poems the cryptic messages of a suicidal community of the human.

The paper explores Russian Formalism's impact on literary theories and practices of the Language school in American poetry. Poets of this school were interested in the Formalists mainly due to their connections with the poetry of the Russian Futurism. Yet the theoretical thought of the Formal School was one of the main inspirations for "Language poets", in a dvocating for a new language-centered material poetics. Viktor Shklovsky's theory of ostranenie and his own techniques in literary writing had a direct influence on LanPo's sense of literary style and strategies (in the writings of Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and some others). The value of the Formalists was in their social orientation: the principles of MLK and OPOYAZ were reinvented in the new conditions of American alternative poetics of the 1970-1980s. The paper also accounts for the resonances of Russian Futurism in neo-avant-garde A merican poetry, as well as for correspondences between Language Poetry and Russian postmodernism (Conceptualism and Metarealism). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An American teacher of literature and poetry living in Montréal, Curtis Brown, recovers Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) as a 'virus novel', venturing an integrated response to two literary questions occasioned by the recent pandemic: What might the contemporary 'Covid novel' look like? And how did the Spanish flu of 1918–1919—which infected a third of the world's population and killed 50 million—leave literary traces so few and faint? Brown tracks the genesis of An American Tragedy in Dreiser's personal life, his research in microbiology and his general interest in plagues to show how a form traditionally associated with the 'individual moral adventure' was repurposed for an institutional epic of viral contagion and systemic malaise. Charting the vicissitudes of Dreiser's reputation over a century, and presenting his formal innovations as widely assimilated, largely unrecognized, and more relevant than ever, Brown concludes that a writer's influence, like a virus, can disappear into ubiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the ecofeminist themes in the poetry of contemporary American poet Louise Glück, with a particular focus on how her selected animal poems subvert anthropocentric paradigms and challenge patriarchal narratives that marginalize both nature and women. Through a close textual analysis of these poems, the research elucidates Glück's strategies for blurring the rigid boundaries that delineate humans from nature, thereby illuminating value dualisms and unjust hierarchies. Furthermore, the study highlights how Glück's poetry critiques the logic of domination and advocates for a more interconnected and reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment. It posits that poetry serves as a powerful medium for ecofeminist discourse, offering valuable insights into the revaluation of women's relationships with nature and animals. Ultimately, this research contributes to a nuanced understanding of ecofeminist thought and animal studies, while also exploring their implications for environmental ethics and activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers Tyehimba Jess's representation of the lives of several historical African American musicians from the post-emancipation period in his 2016 collection Olio. Reading Olio in the context of African American musical traditions, it considers how Jess's syncopated sonnet forms appropriate and contest historical instances of white supremacy to undermine the dehumanizing logics of plantocracy. At the same time, it explores how the collection's threedimensional forms materialize feelings of constraint to reveal the embeddedness of antiblackness in American popular culture, and the fragility of liberty into the twentieth century and beyond. While Olio reifies the tension between freedom and bondage in the post-bellum nation, this paper argues that Jess's archival recuperation of elided historical figures and innovative configuration of sonnet form demonstrate an ethos of creativity, as it envisions alternative forms of community and autonomy through poetry and music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Susan Howe's difficulty has often led critics to address her poetry in relation to language poets and abstract expressionists causing many to read her poems as painterly hybrids dependent on reader-beholder experience rather than meaning. Putting Howe's poetry in conversation with Modernist painting, I establish that Howe's painterly aspects, like her 1960s counterparts on the verge of an ontological crisis, cease to be painterly. Although Howe's poems engage with the problems at the end of Modernist painting--the possibility of white space and pictorial composition--they do so with a canvas that has come to function like a page. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a world-renown American critic and theorist in poetry, Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024), with her in-depth exploration into western avant-garde poetry and poetics and her theoretical and methodological reconstruction by means of dialog with the 20th-century American critical theories, made great and unique achievements, which can be labelled as "the third path" in poetry criticism in terms of its transcending New Criticism and Cultural Criticism in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Since her first visit to China in 2007 and her co-founding of the Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics in 2008, Perloff's critical theories and ideas have been translated or introduced into China. This paper presents an examination of Perloff's "third path" of poetry criticism, and its introduction to and influence upon China's poetry creation and criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Marjorie Perloff was a distinguished scholar, poetry critic, and theorist. Her profound insights and unique perspectives on modern and contemporary American poetry have earned her high recognition in the international academic community. She was not only an Emeritus Professor at Stanford University and the University of Southern California but also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Philosophical Society. Her research spanned multiple fields, with outstanding achievements particularly in avant-garde poetry and modernist and postmodernist theory. Her works, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics, have not only provided new perspectives for understanding modern poetry but also advanced the development of poetry theory, establishing leading theories such as the poetics of indeterminacy and micro-poetics. Professor Perloff also served as the long-term president of China-American Association for Poetry and Poetics, actively promoting cultural exchange between China and the United States and fostering deep cooperation in the field of poetry research. Though Professor Perloff passed away, she has left behind us a valuable academic legacy. We will always keep her in our hearts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The target of this essay is to open possible pathways to approach the phenomenon of a self-remodeling of classicist poetry in the 20th and early 21st century by focusing on the process from two different angles rarely perceived as related to each other: first, the remodeling of Chinese lyrical classicism through a strand of modern American poetry harking back to Ezra Pound and currently crystallized in the translations of David Hinton and, second, the transition that modern Chinese poetry written in classical language and conforming to prosodic rules of classical style poetry, sometimes referred to as “old style poetry” jiu ti shi, underwent after its rebirth as “unofficial” poetry online since the beginning of this century. Although there are obviously no direct links between the aforementioned tradition of modern American poetry and neoclassicist cyberpoets like Zeng Shaoli I argue that in both cases the classicist inspiration and poetic drive is motivated by concern with the increasing imbalance between natural, social, and individual resources, on the one hand, and an indomitable desire to accumulate economic and political power on the other. A permanent devaluation of language in the human realm, matched by a permanent devaluation of currencies in the economic sphere, provokes poetic responses in the very interest of humanity. The neoclassicist lyricisms that I draw into comparison display both subtle distinctions and common traits in this response to the starkly different environments of their respective contemporary literary scenes.

Alan Dugan was a contemporary American poet. His last volume, entitled Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, was published in 2001 and won Dugan a second National Book Award. This paper is based on Alan Dugan’s narration of animals in his new poems and Dugan’snarration of animals, which conveys his profound thinking and care about human beings and the life form of existence. “Human beings” are often closely related to animals. The animal narration in Dugan’s literary works expresses a hidden human world “behind his back.” Therefore, “animals” is one of the keys to interpreting Dugan’s complex, mysterious, and bizarre narrative world. The expression and writing of animals can be used as a breakthrough point of Dugan’s research so as to dig deeply into his spiritual world and artistic characteristics in order to achieve a new understanding and thinking of his literary creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Faithful and Virtuous Night” is a collection of poems by modern American poet Louise Glück that won the American National Award in 2014. This paper uses these four poems as the main body of inquiry: “Faithful and Virtuous Night” (the title poem of the collection), “Cornwall,” “Afterword,” and “Midnight,” all of which use a fictionalized male painter as the narrator and use the painter’s voice to tell the reader about his life experiences. This paper intends to analyze the complex characterization of the male painter, focusing on the awareness of death embodied by the imagery (journey and color) in the collection of poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores John Cage's "62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham," a love poem dedicated to the poet's longtime partner. Though scholars of Cage's writing and music tend to ignore the queer context in which his work was created, this study attempts to reconcile the poet's art with his life. As a homosexual couple in the postwar period, Cage and Cunningham observed a closeted silence throughout their lives together, preferring to refer to one another as collaborators rather than romantic partners or lovers. While such strategies were not uncommon, the couple's use of Zen philosophy to imbue their silent relationship with an almost religious purpose distinguishes them from many others. Indeed, the poem embodies this situation well. Offering, at one moment, a glimpse into the couple's private life, at the next, the piece consistently subverts this gesture through various avant‐garde techniques. In fact, in its unusual use of typography and its experimental performance history, Cage's mesostic reimagines the space and terms of traditional love poetry — much like his relationship with Cunningham reworked traditional gender roles. By bringing these aspects of Cage's life and work to light, this article aims to provide scholars with a fuller understanding of postwar queer poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I contend that both HIV and AIDS must continue to be seen as crises if the pandemic is ever to be brought to an end. I start by exploring the presence of death imagery in Danez Smith's poetry in light of Marianne Hirsch (2008) and Samuel O'Donoghue's (2018) reflections on postmemory, arguing that AIDS haunts the experience of HIV in Smith's work in the form of postmemory. Based on this idea, I engage with the ongoing debate about the "post-crisis era" (Kagan, 2018; Rofes, 1998), and critical "post-AIDS discourse" (Basu et al., 2022; Walker, 2020) to claim that postmemory constitutes one of the multiple expressions of the "network of crises" which AIDS and HIV continue to be in the 21st century (Cheng et al., 2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georgia Brady Barnhill's book, "Gems of Art on Paper: Illustrated American Fiction and Poetry, 1765–1885," provides a comprehensive and detailed account of the growth of illustrated American fiction and poetry. Barnhill explores the development of the illustration industry, from early experiments to technological advancements, and the evolution of illustrators and craftspeople. The book focuses on a neglected period of book illustration and offers a holistic view of mainstream literary illustration, discussing specific editions, illustration technologies, and important creators. Barnhill's work is a valuable resource for scholars and researchers interested in the history of book illustration in America. [Extracted from the article]

Poems by Dean Rader, Montana Ray, Danez Smith, Brian Turner, and Elizabeth Willis register a perplexing trend in American poetry: the use of gun and bullet tropes in poems indirectly or not at all about guns. Many of the poets employing these tropes publicly oppose gun violence and promote poetry as a refuge from it, yet their poetry, paradoxically, affirms guns' literary power. The five poets selected for this study represent different styles emitting from diverse histories, ages, and literary backgrounds. Their poems likewise branch across a range of contexts and levels of abstraction. Studied together, their poetry exposes the centrality of guns not only to US America's collective self-image as a social body and national power but also to the American literary imagination. In light of this apparent contradiction, this essay considers what the pervasiveness of gun and bullet tropes suggests about the efficacy of poetry as enemy, accomplice, or rival of guns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the growing trend in literary studies towards poetics-based approaches, as evidenced by the increasing number of book titles using the term "poetics." The author examines the implications and limitations of this trend, questioning the boundaries and organization of poetics as an expanded term of art. The article also reviews two books, Lucy Alford's "Forms of Poetic Attention" and Adam R. Rosenthal's "Poetics and the Gift," which offer unique perspectives on poetry's status and essence. Alford's book focuses on attention as the central element of poetry, while Rosenthal's book explores the concept of the gift in poetry through case studies of various authors, engaging with Derridean argumentative protocols and interpretive effects. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses Virginia Jackson's book, "Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric," which challenges the concept of lyricization in American poetry. The book argues that the lyricization process, which reduced diverse verse forms to the singular category of "the lyric," was a result of racial formation in the United States. Jackson examines the works of Black and white poets from the nineteenth century to demonstrate how the racialization of poetry affected both groups. The article praises Jackson's meticulous analysis and suggests that her book provides a starting point for reevaluating the history of modern poetry. [Extracted from the article]