Search Results (48)

This essay examines two hybrid poetic texts that emerged from a period of feminist activism in U.S. and global poetry communities from 2014 to 2017: the collaboratively, anonymously authored “No Manifesto” (2015) and the radically revised second edition of the book of poetry and visual art YOU DA ONE by Jennif(f)er Tamayo. “No Manifesto” and YOU DA ONE embrace the hybrid tactics of collectivity, incongruity, and nonresolution as ways of protesting sexism and sexual violence in poetry communities. Synthesizing theories of hybridity from poetry criticism as well as immigrant and borderlands studies, the essay defines hybridity as a literary representation of cultural positions forcefully imposed upon subjects. Born out of the domination of sexual and state violence, hybridity marks the wound that remakes the subject, who develops strategies for resistance. By refusing to play by the rules of poetic or social discourse—the logics of domination that would have them be singular, cohesive, and compliant—Tamayo and the authors of “No Manifesto” insist on alternative ways of performing activism, composing literature, and entering the public sphere. These socially engaged, hybrid poetic texts demonstrate the power of the collective to disrupt the social and literary status quo. Full article

While poetry has long relied on musical and visual elements for its communicative power, numerous contemporary poets are drawing so dramatically on the resources of the visual arts and on elements of musical scoring that their poems become inter-arts hybrids. The interdisciplinary character of environmental writing and its attachment to material conditions of planetary life particularly invite the use of visual and/or audio technologies as documentation or as prompts toward multisensory attention that may shift readers’ perceptions of the more-than-human world. This essay examines four recent works of ecopoetry from the US to explore some of the diverse ways in which, by integrating into volumes of poetry their own visual and musical art, poets are expanding the environmental imagination and enhancing their environmental messaging. The visual and musical elements, I argue, offer fresh perceptual lenses that help break down cognitive habits bolstering separations of Western humans from more-than-human realms or dampening awareness of social and cultural norms that foster environmental degradation and violations of environmental justice. The multi-modal works discussed are Jennifer Scappettone’s The Republic of Exit 43, JJJJJerome Ellis’s Aster of Ceremonies, Danielle Vogel’s Edges & Fray, and Jonathan Skinner’s “Blackbird Stanzas.” Full article

Suicide is often referred to as a silent killer, and the need to break down barriers and build bridges to communication and understanding remains of vital importance. Working within the field of further and higher education for more than 18 years with students experiencing suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviours has highlighted how often deep pain, grief, and trauma go unspoken, unseen, and unheard. Societal and cultural stigma, judgement, misunderstanding, and assumptions remain, all of which silence and can lead to a negative sense of self, others, and a person’s experience of being in the world. This article shows how using arts-based and visual research methods, as part of a mixed methods study, can offer unique insights into the inner world of lived experiences. It draws on analysis of 62 artworks made by 20 students between the ages of 16 and 25 with personal experiences of attempted suicide. These included two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, photography, poetry, and digital art. The research methodology is also discussed, including a 5/6-step approach to the analysis of visual data and data synthesis that has been created to ensure a robust, socially contextualised, and framed analysis. This follows polytextual thematic analysis using a multimodal approach and draws on visual social semiotics. Analysis of visual and arts-based data has revealed aspects of meaning that would otherwise not have been identified. This has led to the development of a model that can help us better understand the cycle of stigma and judgement and how we may be able to break it. This article demonstrates how a creative approach provides a means to share some of the complexity of feelings in a relatable way that has the capacity to bridge the divide between what is hidden and what is seen, bringing this human experience out of the shadows. It aims to honour everyone whose experiences have gone unseen, unspoken, and unheard, as well as the research participants’ wish for their artworks to be shared as a way to challenge the stigma that silences. It further hopes to demonstrate the power of arts-based and visual methods in research whilst also acknowledging some of their limitations so that they can be used more widely with under-represented, marginalised, and silenced voices. Full article

In this article, we focus on the association of sound and sense harmony in the collection of sonnets written by Shakespeare in the XVI° beginning of the XVII° century and propose a new four-dimensional representation to visualize them by means of the system called SPARSAR. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, we automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets and combined them with the semantics and polarity expressed by their contents. We explain in detail the algorithm and show the representation of the whole collection of 154 sonnets and comment on them extensively. In a second experiment, we use data from the manual annotation of the sonnets for satire detection using the Appraisal Theory Framework, to gauge the system’s accuracy in matching these data with the output of the automatic algorithm for sound–sense harmony. The results obtained with a 94.6% accuracy confirm the obvious fact that the poet has to account for both sound and meaning in the choice of words. Full article

The rapid advancement of digital technology has necessitated a reevaluation of traditional educational methodologies, particularly in literature and visual arts. This study investigates the application of metaverse technology to integrate contemporary poetry and visual arts, aiming to enhance university-level education. The purpose is to develop a convergent teaching method that leverages the immersive and interactive capabilities of the metaverse. The research involves a joint exhibition project with students from Sangmyung University and international participants, incorporating a metaverse-based educational program. A sample of 85 students participated in the program, and their experiences were evaluated through surveys and focus group interviews (FGIs). The findings reveal significant correlations between content satisfaction and method satisfaction, underscoring the importance of engaging and interactive methods. The study also identifies technical challenges and provides insights for optimizing digital platforms for educational purposes. The implications suggest that integrating metaverse technology in arts education can significantly enhance creativity, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary skills, offering a sustainable and innovative approach to modern education. Based on these implications, this paper proposes methods for incorporating the insights gained from case analyses and implications into the design of educational programs. It is anticipated that this approach will contribute to enhancing the quality of convergence education in higher education institutions. Furthermore, it is expected that this program will serve as a starting point for the systematic implementation of integrated education and the use of digital platforms, thereby helping to reduce disparities in integrated education between countries. Full article

De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis (DLSC) by Hrabanus Maurus is a seminal work in the medieval Christian literature that explores the Cross as the central structure of the universe through a unique amalgamation of poetry, prose, and visual art. The work employs a multi-layered narrative that enriches the reader’s understanding, encouraging a meditative interaction with the text that emphasizes the contemplative over the recitative. This paper analyzes Hrabanus’s intricate use of verbal and visual elements to guide his readers into a profound meditation on the universal significance of the Cross. Full article

Two major poets of the Russian Neo-Avant-Garde—Gennady Aygi and Elizaveta Mnatsakanova—created textual works that transgressed the limits of language and the borders between the arts. Each pursued their own method of the visualization and musicalization of verbal matter, yet both share a particular musical sensibility, which guarantees the integrity of the linguistic structure of their verse, despite the fragmentation and logical incoherence of its elements. The atonal (serial) musical tradition has a special significance for these experimental poetics of minimalism. Mnatsakanova, herself a musicologist, who was friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, not only used the techniques of contemporary music composition in her visual and sound poetry, but also collaborated with electronic musicians in her recorded poetry performances. Aygi experimented with language, not only crossing the boundaries between music and poetry, but also between sound and silence. For him, music was a way of expressing pre-verbal subjectivity and reproducing signs of meaning that are hidden from ordinary perception. In his poems, Aygi brought together Chuvash folk music with experimental techniques of minimalism, correlating his own work with such Soviet unofficial composers as Andrey Volkonsky and Sofia Gubaidulina. This paper will address the issues of transmutation between verbal, visual, and sound art in poetic minimalism of the Soviet-era underground. Full article

Elder Nora Marks Dauenhauer, Kheixwnéi, a poet and oral literary scholar and a mentor of the author, told the author “Life is a poem”. This essay will explore the ways in which the oral literary and visual arts of the Northwest Coast interact, how artists across multiple disciplines attain knowledge and develop as artists, and the ways in which the arts sing the poetry of Tlingit life. Examining the relationship between the arts will deepen one’s understanding of each art and illuminate how they inform and enrich one another. 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

Forests and forestry have been recurrent topics in Finnish environmental poetry since the 1970s, reflecting the importance of the cultural meanings of forests and forest-related livelihoods in Finland. Despite the recent forest boom in Finnish contemporary art and literature, contemporary sylvan poetics in Finnish poetry has remained an understudied topic. Moreover, the wider ecocritical discussions on the artistic and poetic dimensions of forest management and economy are still scarce, at least in the Nordic cultural context. To ignite these discussions, this study examines the meanings of forest clearings in contemporary Finnish poetry. Theoretically, this study draws from ecocriticism, with a particular emphasis on ecopoetics. By focusing on typography, rhetorics and thematics, this article shows how forest poems written by Jouni Tossavainen, Janette Hannukainen and Mikael Brygger combine technical forestry terminology with affective language and visual means to express anthropogenic changes in forests, resulting in a specific expressive style conceptualised as the poetics of lack. This poetics consists of ideas and rhetorical and typographical elements that together denote and express a variety of experiences, emotions and thoughts regarding a lack of trees, as well as a lack of natural organisation in forest growth. Full article

In Trout’s Lie, Percival Everett seems to be once more exploring pure form as part of a quest for abstraction. Yet the effect of the poems in the collection largely relies on the materiality of language characterizing all poetry—mostly a play on sounds and the visual dimension of the text. How to conciliate the quest for pure form and the unruliness of the bodily? It will be argued that Everett brings them together through a work on forms not only in space but also in time, focusing on endings in both the abstract and the concrete sense of the term. Full article

The loss and damage transpiring because of anthropogenic climate change is a confronting reality, especially for frontline communities of the Pacific Islands. Understandings and assessments of loss and damage often fall short on coverage of intangible and noneconomic dimensions, such as losses to culture, place, Indigenous knowledge, and biodiversity, among others. In responding to this knowledge deficit, this paper turns its attention to the burgeoning Pacifika arts community because creative and cultural expressions have been critical avenues for sharing experiences, navigating loss, and exploring grief throughout history, including in the context of climate-driven loss. We analyse a series of Pacifika spoken, written, and visual items (n = 44), including visual art, poetry, song, film, documentary, and theatre, to identify the key categories and themes of noneconomic loss and damage (NELD) that emerge, better understand their nature, indicate their levels of prominence, reflect on them in relation to existing NELD frameworks and categories, and identify strategies for processing and coping. Our findings add to existing understandings of losses to territory, cultural heritage, human mobility, and health while also putting forward identity and agency as additional prominent NELD types. We emphasise that loss occurs within an interconnected and complex system that is centred on the critical relationships between people and their land, and greater attention must be paid to this interconnectivity as the foundation of identity and wellbeing. These perspectives enable stakeholders to better integrate experiences of NELD into future planning efforts so that they are not skewed (i.e., considering only economic loss and damage) or discounting people’s experiences. This will be critical for holistically building greater resilience and for communication in international fora and climate negotiations. Full article

Although ambiguity in written, oral, and visual communication is inevitably present across all human societies and cultures, variation among these societies and cultures occurs in the sociocultural causes of its existence. This study helps formulate a conceptual framework that enables the enrichment of knowledge about this variation. It takes a first step by highlighting Arab-specific reasons behind ambiguity in academic writings in humanities and social sciences. The investigation entails thematically analysing the thoughts of 905 Arabs in academia. The findings point to a ‘doing-the-minimum’ mentality, whereby one may act hastily and impatiently and do just enough for one’s manuscript to be published in any journal, thereby rushing into publication while skimping on quality and diminishing attention to manuscript clarity. Another finding is the ambition for rewards that Arab institutions assign to publication, whereby one may boost their publication records to reap these rewards, resulting in high quantity while sacrificing quality (e.g., clarity). Another reason discovered is the conceptualisation of writing as a formulaic and ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ task (templates to be completed and, thus, manuscripts to be constructed), instilling a focus on technicality instead of cognitive depth and clarity. An additional reason found is the passive application of foreign theories and conceptual frameworks without subjecting them to critical reflection, reapplying foreign surveys and mimicking survey-based articles, thereby making their articles culturally shallow, suffer from cultural irrelevance, and thus, ambiguity. This is along with the integration of poetry (wherein ambiguity is culturally viewed as desirable and showing poets to be sophisticated) into Arabs’ daily social and educational lives and mindsets, encouraging the acceptability of ambiguity as a possible linguistic quality in scholarly writing as well. The social context lacks direct, explicit, and free articulation, encouraging one to resort to roundabout ways of composing their manuscripts, thus, making the manuscripts fall into ambiguity. 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

This paper focuses on the Russian Golden Age author Konstantin Batiushkov’s involvement with fine arts. He is recognized as an exquisite elegist, an immediate predecessor of Alexander Pushkin in poetry, and “a pioneer of Russian Italomania.” Much less known is that Batiushkov was always deeply involved with painting, drawing, and sculpture—not only as a poet but as Russia’s first art critic, an ad-lib art manager, who worked on behalf of the President of the Russian Academy of Arts Aleksei Olenin, and an amateur artist. The paper offers addenda to the commentary on his essay devoted to the 1814 academic exhibition, commonly referred to as the earliest significant example of Russian art criticism. Many of Batiushkov’s extant paintings and drawings belong to the time when he was mentally insane. Since he was a self-taught artist, his visual works of this period can be categorized as early examples of art brut. Full article