Search Results (13)

Background: In 2021, Taiwan’s healthcare workers faced significant stress due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. This study aims to enhance healthcare workers’ self-awareness of their stress and improve their work efficiency by using symphonic poetry to inspire resilience. Methods: This qualitative study involved in-depth interviews with a panel of physicians, nurses, and specialist nurses. The interviews were conducted using ATLAS—ti 7.5 qualitative analysis software for content analysis. Participants must have attended the “Meeting Mahler, Meeting Myself” concert organized by the medical center. The concert was based on the poetry from the fifth movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection”, and included symphonic poetry and a manual. The manual combined pictures and a complementary interview guide to facilitate participants sharing their pandemic experiences and health. Results: A total of 19 healthcare workers participated in the interviews. All participants had attended the institute’s symphonic poetry concert “Meeting Mahler, Meeting Myself”. The average age of the participants was 44.1 ± 11.4 years, and their average working experience was 19.1 ± 13.1 years. The group included nine physicians (47.4%), eight nurses (42.1%), and two specialist nurses (10.5%). The results were categorized into three major themes: “Pandemic-Induced Physical and Mental Exhaustion”, “Symphonic Poetry as a Tool for Building Resilience”, and “Enhancing Mental Toughness to Overcome Adversity”. Conclusions: Healthcare workers experienced stress and exhaustion during the pandemic. Symphonic poetry can serve as a supportive tool to inspire resilience and enhance mental toughness among healthcare professionals facing pandemic-related challenges. Full article

This essay seeks to stress the importance of the American poet Walt Whitman to Gilles Deleuze, using how love is variously explored to think about their methods in relationality. I firstly consider how many classic responses to Whitman express division regarding his work. This is indicated by how D.H. Lawrence stresses the satisfactions and exhilarations of reading Whitman but also refers to the sense of embarrassment and shame which readers might experience on doing so, not least because of Whitman’s own apparent shamelessness. For Lawrence, this is exemplified by Whitman’s proclamation that he “aches with amorous love”, as if he were a Deleuzian desiring machine existing only to ache and nothing but. Yet there is no such embarrassment detectable in Deleuze’s responses to Whitman’s work, and his responses are characterized by their insistence that Whitman always insists upon a dimension to experience beyond such conventional desires. He is more than a poet of the body with organs, which in turn enables an understanding of his work as an anticipation of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as it was first expounded in Anti-Oedipus. To explore this further, direct and indirect correspondences between Deleuze and Whitman are explored, with particular attention to a range of poems from the 1855 Leaves of Grass. These readings show that if there is a conceptual relationship in their work, their style and syntax are also a way in which they relate thought and action. To triangulate the consideration of the varieties of love that are manifest in Deleuze and Whitman, I use Hannah Stark’s essay on Deleuze and love, showing how different aspects of Deleuze’s writing and thought either consciously or unconsciously relate to the American poet. I reflect upon Deleuze’s claim in his essay on the poet that Whitman’s sustained advocacy of “comradely love” represents a practice of radical relationality, and that this also offers a sense of social and political transformability that is key to both. To provide a final shape to this discussion, I refer to Fredric Jameson’s posthumously published seminars on Deleuze, in which he gives particular attention to the philosopher’s particular interest in American literature. Ultimately, the essay finds that Whitman is given a unique status in Deleuze, one which even threatens to jeopardize his own philosophical system, and that the reason for this may well be love. Full article

The “Three Teachings Syncretism” (sanjiao heyi, 三教合一), i.e., the integration of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, represents an important religious philosophy in ancient China. This article aims to analyze how this ideology is presented and expressed directly in Song and Jin poetry, along with its modern value and significance. To achieve the research objectives, the paper isolates related poems from the Complete Song Poetry and Complete Liao Jin Poetry as the research objects. First, it organizes and classifies the relevant poems through the ways in which the idea of “Three Teachings Syncretism” is presented. Second, it examines the reasons behind this phenomenon, including the intellectualization of poetry and the Confucian academic background of Buddhist monks and Daoist priests. Thirdly, it explores the value and significance of this thought for modern China, showcasing the inherent diversity, inclusiveness, and harmony in Chinese culture. Full article

The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. Full article

The term ‘musicalization’ comes from Aldous Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point where it denotes the use of music-derived models in fiction. The oeuvre of Russian writer Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) provides telling examples of such an approach to constructing both prose and poetry, as in his works, the conventional features of art prose and art poetry are, as a rule, considerably reduced. Kharms’s pieces, typically, consist of discrete ‘incidents’, which can be compared to musical motifs or themes; their organization into finished works is often based upon principles that have their recognizable counterparts in art music of different epochs. Some of Kharms’s texts quoted and commented on in the article show affinities with compositional ideas by major twentieth-century composers such as Alban Berg, Witold Lutosławski, Morton Feldman, Gérard Grisey, and Sofia Gubaydulina. Full article

Poetic devices implicitly work towards inducing the reader to associate intended and expressed meaning to the sounds of the poem. In turn, sounds may be organized a priori into categories and assigned presumed meaning as suggested by traditional literary studies. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, I have automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets by William Shakespeare and have combined them with the themes expressed by their contents. In a first experiment, sounds have been associated with lexically and semantically based sentiment analysis, obtaining an 80% of agreement. In a second experiment, sentiment analysis has been substituted by Appraisal Theory, thus obtaining a more fine-grained interpretation that combines dis-harmony with irony. The computation for Francis Webb is based on his most popular 100 poems and combines automatic semantically and lexically based sentiment analysis with sound grids. The results produce visual maps that clearly separate poems into three clusters: negative harmony, positive harmony and disharmony, where the latter instantiates the need by the poet to encompass the opposites in a desperate attempt to reconcile them. Shakespeare and Webb have been chosen to prove the applicability of the method proposed in general contexts of poetry, exhibiting the widest possible gap at all linguistic and poetic levels. Full article

The present paper discusses the presence and vitality of peasant poetry as an expression of the peasant way of life in Sertão do Pajeú (Brazil), and it seeks to understand to what extent it can play an important role in the territory, such as agroecological organizations considering work from the concept of “coexistence with the semiarid” as a communication and popular education tool. We performed semi-structured interviews, participant observation and bibliographic and documentary research. In addition, we filled in a field journal and took photographic and audiovisual records. We understand peasant poetry as an expression of the popular culture of that territory, produced by peasant poets to interpret, communicate and reaffirm their way of life and their relationship with nature. Peasant poetry is part of the identity and is currently present in the collective memory of Sertão do Pajeú, and it has been guided by agroecological organizations and can become an instrument capable of enhancing the search for environmental sustainability in the territory. Full article

This article examines Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki’s (1867–1916) memoir Recollecting and Such (Omoidasu koto nado; 1910). I argue that Sōseki invites the reader to imagine breath through his literary representation of both physiological and metaphysical experience and the rhythm of the narrative’s experimental poetic form. In concert with the theme of this special issue, I show how Recollecting and Such self-reflexively restores and evokes the corporeal experience of sensation beyond just visual perception: the narrative reveals itself as a poetic form of measurement and its first-person narrator a “rhythmanalyst”, someone who listens to the internal rhythms of his own body and then to that of the external world (Henri Lefebvre). The narrator’s awareness of the duration, frequency, and intensity of sensation as well as his regular compositions of metered verse—haiku and kanshi (traditional Chinese poetry as practiced in Japan; Sinitic verse)—are ways that the narrative measures the limits of life, memory, and sensory experience. The oscillation between prose and poetry in the narrative generates an organic rhythm, simulating the long and short breaths of a convalescing body, which invites the reader to breathe together—“to conspire” in the literal sense—with the text as a form of sympathy. Full article

Pauses act as important acoustic cues to prosodic phrase boundaries. However, the distribution and phonetic characteristics of pauses have not yet been fully described either cross-linguistically or in different genres and speech styles within languages. The current study examines the pausal performance of 24 Czech speakers in two genres of read speech: news reading and poetry reciting. The pause rate and pause duration are related to genre differences, overt and covert text organization, and speech tempo. We found a significant effect of several levels of text organization, including a strong effect of punctuation. This was reflected in both measures of pausal performance. A grammatically informed analysis of a subset of pauses within the smallest units revealed a significant contribution for pause rate only. An effect of tempo was found in poetry reciting at a macro level (speaker averages) but not when pauses were observed individually. Genre differences did not manifest consistently and analogically for the two measures. The findings provide evidence that pausing is used systematically by speakers in read speech to convey not only prosodic phrasing but also text structure, among other things. 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

Musing with Petric Bodies, Hanging on to Dear Life is an essay that critically reflects on the live performance work “Becoming Boulder”, which occurred on 31 January 2015 as part of the Science Communication Art New Zealand Intercreate Symposium at New Plymouth, New Zealand. I performed a contact improvisation with a large andesite boulder, in a king tide, on a stormy day, at a culturally significant place for an extended period of time. Written using the present tense and as a dialogical text, the essay employs ekphrasis and practices geo-poetry to colour the scene and critically contextualise the potentials and limits of empathetic engagement with another form of organic assemblage. Complexities that come with being a foreigner or immigrant, well-versed in contemporary New Materialist discourse, and dwelling in a land rich with indigenous knowledge are voiced amongst gestures to get close to, identify with, and perform as an ancient, far from dead weight, body. While musing and critically contextualising on the potentials and limits of empathetic engagements, the essay seeks to exemplify the value of material situated learning that occurs in the space of making or doing of durational, experimental, site-responsive performance works. Full article

We explore the structural similarities in three different languages, first in the protein language whose primary letters are the amino acids, second in the musical language whose primary letters are the notes, and third in the poetry language whose primary letters are the alphabet. For proteins, the non local (secondary) letters are the types of foldings in space ($\alpha$-helices, $\beta$-sheets, etc.); for music, one is dealing with clear-cut repetition units called musical forms and for poems the structure consists of grammatical forms (names, verbs, etc.). We show in this paper that the mathematics of such secondary structures relies on finitely presented groups $f_p$ on r letters, where r counts the number of types of such secondary non local segments. The number of conjugacy classes of a given index (also the number of graph coverings over a base graph) of a group $f_p$ is found to be close to the number of conjugacy classes of the same index in the free group $F_{r-1}$ on $r-1$ generators. In a concrete way, we explore the group structure of a variant of the SARS-Cov-2 spike protein and the group structure of apolipoprotein-H, passing from the primary code with amino acids to the secondary structure organizing the foldings. Then, we look at the musical forms employed in the classical and contemporary periods. Finally, we investigate in much detail the group structure of a small poem in prose by Charles Baudelaire and that of the Bateau Ivre by Arthur Rimbaud. Full article

The long history of poetry and the arts, as well as recent empirical results suggest that the way a word sounds (e.g., soft vs. harsh) can convey affective information related to emotional responses (e.g., pleasantness vs. harshness). However, the neural correlates of the affective potential of the sound of words remain unknown. In an fMRI study involving passive listening, we focused on the affective dimension of arousal and presented words organized in two discrete groups of sublexical (i.e., sound) arousal (high vs. low), while controlling for lexical (i.e., semantic) arousal. Words sounding high arousing, compared to their low arousing counterparts, resulted in an enhanced BOLD signal in bilateral posterior insula, the right auditory and premotor cortex, and the right supramarginal gyrus. This finding provides first evidence on the neural correlates of affectivity in the sound of words. Given the similarity of this neural network to that of nonverbal emotional expressions and affective prosody, our results support a unifying view that suggests a core neural network underlying any type of affective sound processing. Full article