Search Results (9)

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies in a number of exemplary texts, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip in the North American context and ISDAL by Susannah Dickey, The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell, and MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello, among others. This comparative approach encompasses close readings and analysis of particular compositional approaches evident in both national contexts, in addition to the use of archival sources, news-reporting, and aesthetic strategies of interruption. The article suggests that “a poetics of material interruption” is at play in poetries on both sides of the Atlantic, gesturing towards marginalising forces of gender and colonisation, thus linking to themes prevalent in the above poetries in both Irish and North American contexts. The author poses a “poetics of material interruption” in the aesthetics and composition of the above mixed-genre poetries, perhaps arising from their interactions with the material conditions to which they respond. Full article

Emerging from the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in the riverine environments of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries, the Miya Poetry movement is a unique environmentalism of the marginalized in contemporary Assam, India. Writing as a native scholar of Assam, I look at how the poetry movement displays the ethos of an ecopolitical spirituality that embodies the riverine ecology, environmental politics, and sacrality and how it challenges the majoritarian state’s narrative of the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers being denigrated as the “environmental waste producers”. My concept of “ecopolitical spirituality” is in tandem with Carol White’s ‘African American religious naturalism’, which elucidates the remembrance and evocation of traditional environmental relationships of and by the marginalized communities with the purpose of healing and rehumanizing themselves. I begin with a short history of the Miya Poetry movement among the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers in Assam. It narrates how the leading Miya poets adopt the local “Miya” dialect to express the traditional and continued relationships of Bengali Muslim char-dwellers who find themselves entangled with and nurtured by the land, rivers, plants, and animals. I then examine how Bengali Muslims have been framed by the majoritarian state and Assamese society as “environmental waste producers”. With climate change-induced destructive floods, along with post-colonial state’s rampant building of embankments leading to violent floods and erosion, Bengali Muslim char-dwellers are forced to migrate to nearby government grazing reserves or national parks. There, the majoritarian state projects them to be damaging the environment and issues violent evictions. In state reports too, the Bengali Muslim char-dwellers have been equated with “rats”, “crows”, and “vultures”. I use the concept of “environmental racism” to show how this state-led denigration justifies the allegation of the Muslim char-dwellers as “environmental waste producers” and how the Miya Poetry movement counters the racist allegation with new metaphors by highlighting the traditional relationships of the marginalized community with the riverine environment. In the final section, I look in detail at the characteristics and reasons that make the poetry movement ecopolitically spiritual in nature. I thus lay out an argument that the ecopolitical spirituality of the Miya Poetry movement resists the statist dehumanization and devaluation of Miya Muslims by not mocking, violating, or degrading the majoritarian Assamese but by rehumanizing themselves and their relationship with the environment. Full article

The contemporary American university largely operates as an agent of domestication, tasked more with enforcing the social and economic order than with expanding the horizons of possibility. The dawn of the Anthropocene, however, demands that we reconceive of the humanities not as self-sufficient, hierarchical, or divided away from other modes of seeking knowledge but as core to what human being and responsibility ought to mean in the more-than-human world. The present essay makes a case for reworking—and rethinking—the American university along the lines of Mark C. Taylor’s prompt to reconceive of the academy as a multidisciplinary forum for the “comparative analysis of common problems”. I suggest that religious teachings—and religious traditions themselves—can offer models for the intertwining of the humanities (literature, poetry, philosophy, the expressive and applied arts), the social sciences (the study of governance, political thought, the study and formulation of law), and the natural sciences as well as mathematics and engineering. Further, I argue that when faced with radical and unprecedented changes in technological, social, economic, and environmental structures, we must, I believe, engage with these traditional texts in order to enrich and critique the liberal mindset that has neither the values nor the vocabulary to deal with the climate crisis. We must begin to sow new and expansive ways of thinking, and I am calling this work the “rewilding” of our universities. Parallel to the three Cs of rewilding as a conservation paradigm, I suggest the following three core principles for the rewilding of higher education: creativity, curriculum, and collaboration. Though I focus on the interface of religion, ecology, and the study of the environmental, social, and moral challenges of climate change, I suggest that these categories of activity should impact all domains of inquiry to which a university is home. Full article

The New American Poetry anthology delineated “schools” of North American poetry which have become seminal: The Black Mountain School (Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov), the New York School (John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara), the San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer), and the Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure). The word seminal is used in a traditional way, from the root: “of seed or semen … full of possibilities”, but here also because the work is dominated by men and the omission of poets like Diane di Prima and Joanne Kyger seems especially egregious now. As compared to the whiteness of academic verse of the time, the New American Poetry was radical and more diverse, but could be seen as quite inadequate in those aspects from a contemporary perspective. Of course culture must always be judged in proper context, including its era and the anthology has had a powerful impact on the poetry of the continent from which it came. This paper posits that The New American Poetry, had it looked even slightly off the shore of North America, could have included the Neo-Barroco school of Latin American poetry. The affinities are almost endless and the limited scope of even the most radical poets of the post-war generation is exposed. Full article

Since her debut in Paris in 1925 and meteoric rise to stardom, views of Josephine Baker have been dominated by the white artists and audiences who constructed her as an exotic “Other”. This article revisits the phenomenon of “La Bakaire” from the perspective of a Black female artist who witnessed her performance first-hand and participated in the same Jazz Age projects of fashioning New Negro womanhood and formulating Black Deco aesthetics. When Gwendolyn Bennett saw Baker perform, she recognized her as a familiar model of selfhood, fellow artist, and member of a diasporic Black cultural community. In her article “Let’s Go: In Gay Paree”, July 1926 Opportunity cover, and “Ebony Flute” column, she utilizes call and response patterns to transform racialized sexual objectification into collective affirmation of Black female beauty and artistry. The picture that emerges from Bennett’s art and writing is one of communal practices and interartistic expression, in which Baker joins a host of now-forgotten chorus girls, vaudeville actors, jazz singers, musicians, visual artists, and writers participating in a modern renaissance of Black expressive culture. Full article

What if encounters between modernist poetry and architecture exceed inspiration, imagery, and allusions? These two modes of making have crossed boundaries for over a century, from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic stanzas on Manhattan skyscrapers to architect John Hejduk’s poetry of memory and place. Buildings become materials for poetry, and poems become material for building. When a literary critic and an architect build on overlaps they have discovered in syllabi for American Poetry and Architecture Studio courses, their teaching collaboration becomes a sustainable maker-space for student work—and for the Humanities more generally. We found that linking a literature survey to an architectural design studio brings materiality and resourcefulness to working with poems and that interacting with the Humanities demonstrates praxis (theory + practice) from the perspective of architectural pedagogy. Our classes also engaged each other through The Repurpose Project, a community space that promotes reuse and diverts waste from the local landfill. The profusion of readily available materials at Repurpose afforded students with a rich sampling of architectural textures and languages, opening new possibilities for thinking and making. In an academic climate that groups literary studies and architecture as “not-STEM,” we designed sustainable and resilient pedagogies that go beyond problem solving. Finding the same quality of renewable resourcefulness in Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” we offer 13 tactics for teaching poetry as architecture. Full article

This essay argues that Anne Waldman’s 1973 selected poems, Life Notes, articulates a vision of the environment that is positively and reparatively enmeshed with language and culture. Embracing the paradox at the heart of the best environmental writing, Life Notes reveals our natural environments to be at once legible and unknowable, and embodies this through experimental forms, language, and typography. This collection of poems, which has yet to be paid significant critical attention (despite Waldman’s renowned status as a poet), artfully mediates the relationship between word and world, giving voice, shape, and form to what we might call the poet’s ‘ecology of knowing’, per Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation. Through a sustained process of imaginative elision of the human and nonhuman, I argue, Waldman illuminates the ways in which the ‘natural’ world is almost always touched by the human, and refutes the widely-held cultural fantasy that nature is self-evidently restorative or redemptive and thereby somehow at a remove from humankind. Life Notes, I suggest, is a ‘dissipative structure’, critically entangled with the everyday environment out of which it emerges and with which it remains ‘involved in a continual exchange of energy’ (Waldman). Full article

This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of “home” and travel in his poetry. Ali’s poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrounding home, exile, nostalgia, displacement, and travel play out. I argue that Ali’s verse, through multiple journeys ranging over locations, languages, cultures, and literary terrain, interrogates and collapses the boundaries between the “home” and the world. I read his poetry as voicing the “disturbed” and displaced home of Kashmir, while simultaneously distilling a “re-homing” desire. Such an impulse reconfigures and reimagines the home through the inhabiting and repeated “homing” of multiple, “foreign” locations. Poetic travel across geographic and literary terrain, in Ali’s oeuvre, thus speaks to the fraught and complex nature of the “home” in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, while remapping the home through the “re-homing” of the “foreign”. Arguing that “travel” is a means of negotiating and rethinking the “home” in Ali’s poetry, the article examines the intermeshed and dialogic relationship between home and travel that imbues his verse. Focusing particularly on poetic experimentation as a mode of travel, it aims to show how such literary travel makes new homes, while remembering and articulating Ali’s lost homes. Full article

This article explores Shirley Kaufman’s reading of the Bible as an elaboration on/of its feminine characters via three devices: (a) Dramatic monologues, in which the woman speaks for herself (“Rebecca” and “Leah”); (b) description of specific scenes that gives us a glimpse into the character’s point of view (“His Wife”, “Michal”, “Abishag”, “The Wife of Moses”, “Yael”, and “Job’s Wife”); and (c) interweaving of the biblical context into contemporary reality (“Déjà Vu” and “The Death of Rachel”). Fleshing these figures out, Kaufman portrays the biblical women through contemporary lenses as a way of “coming to terms with the past” and the historical exclusion of “women’s bodies” from Jewish tradition, thereby giving them a voice and “afterlife”. Her treatment of the biblical texts can thus be viewed as belonging to the new midrashic-poetry tradition by Jewish-American women that has emerged as part of the Jewish feminist wave. Herein, Kaufman follows Adrienne Rich and Alicia Ostriker’s “re-visioning” of the Bible and in particularly its women, empowering them by making use of her/their own words. Full article