Nonfiction forms in contemporary poetry by Black and Asian American Writers

Writers experiment with form inside poetry for various reasons, including a desire for play. Creating poetry is a creative process that involves experimentation. This research highlights poetry that adapts established nonfiction forms into poetry forms, examining poetry published in 2000-2024 by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander American (AANHPI) writers and Black writers (writers of African ancestry) within the United States. For writers of color especially, nonfiction forms can provide a different way of entering into conversations about race, ethnicity, gender, identity, power, privilege, and authority. This research examines poetry by A. Van Jordan, Franny Choi, Alison C. Rollins, Victoria Chang, and Brittany Rogers. The forms these writers employ are varied including definitions, flow charts, tables, and obituaries. Sometimes adaptations of nonfiction forms are a better fit for the subject matter writers seek to express through poetry

Music as a Language

Music has a unique way of communicating that is not tied solely to any one culture or language. Beyond its aesthetic appeal, music possesses inherent characteristics that enable it to function as a language, conveying emotions, ideas, and narratives. Just as words are combined to form sentences and paragraphs in language, music notes are combined to form melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. These notes, rhythms, and melodies of music can be understood and appreciated by people from different parts of the world, regardless of the language they speak. Language is defined as a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release. Music is also composed of written symbols and these symbols allow for the expression of identity, imaginative expression, emotional release, and communication. This paper is broken down into two main parts. The first is to establish the mechanics of music and language concerning syntax, phrasing, tone, symbols, and semantics. The second explores how music is similar to language, in an effort to support the argument that music has the potential to be a language itself, through a discussion of how we utilize music to communicate, tell stories, and protest, as well as the relationship between music and rhetoric

I\u27m Still There, Looking for You in that Forest: A Phenomenological Investigation into PTSD

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that has gained a great deal of attention since its formal inception in the 1970’s. But like many other mental disorders, there exists a gap between the lived experience of the PTSD sufferer and the scientific knowledge of the psychiatrist. If phenomenology is, as Husserl says, the unifying, sense-giving foundation of all science, it seems we must start inquiry with a scientific understanding of lived experience. I will attempt to bridge the gap between psychiatry and lived experience by using phenomenology to make clear the essence of PTSD. In our investigation, we will examine PTSD through a broadly Husserlian lens. Guided by the symptomology of PTSD, we will attempt to make clear the features of consciousness that render PTSD possible as a configuration of consciousness. Special attention is paid to memory, presence, and the Heideggerian concept of care. We uncover, by the end, that the essence of PTSD, is temporal “stickiness”—wherein the past sticks to all temporal modes through recollection. Assuming that our description is successful, we have more evidence to believe that phenomenology is a proper and reliable methodology for understanding lived experience—and therefore all science

Muriel Rukeyser in Analysis: Body of Waking

In 1953, after the death of her mother Myra, Rukeyser began an analysis with Jungian analyst Frances G. Wickes and engaged in intentional, rigorous “work on the self” that culminated in the publication of Body of Waking, her first book of poems after a 10-year silence. Rukeyser captured parts of her work on the self in a detailed account of her analysis, included in The Inner World of Choice, Wickes’s third book (1963), which Rukeyser researched and anonymously co-wrote. Entitled “The X in the Calculation,” the chapter follows the case of an unnamed woman who suffered from debilitating fears that threatened her adult life with exhausting alternations of rebellion and inertia. Rukeyser, assuming her analyst’s perspective, excoriates her “victim complex,” her rages, her fears. By contrast, in Body of Waking, her poetic tribute to Wickes, Rukeyser plumbs the resources of poetry and Jungian analysis, embracing the erotic as an untapped power of women linked to their “human cunt” and the processes of sex, birth, and nursing. Anticipating Audre Lorde’s proclamation on “The Uses of the Erotic,” Rukeyser champions it as a source of profound pleasure, nourishment, strength, political resistance, and cultural survival, which over centuries of misogyny had been “translated,” contained, and robbed from women. Lingering in the “littoral” space of becoming, of dreaming and waking, Rukeyser reclaims the power of the erotic, and credits her therapist, Wickes, with helping her espouse an affirmative, womanly sense of self and freeing her from fears and inhibitions that, as she mourns in a group of poems in Body of Waking, had stunted her mother’s life and led to the suicide of three male friends, hounded by heteronormative social and sexual pressures.Keywords: Muriel Rukeyser, Body of Waking, Frances Wickes, Jungian Analysis, Eros, Homoeroticis

Hermeneutical Injustice and Special Education

Hermeneutics is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with interpretation. Importantly, it is concerned with the interpretation, understanding, and communication of our own experiences. Our identities, how they are constructed and performed, are based a large part on how we interpret, understand, and communicate our experiences. Hermeneutical injustice, then, occurs when there is a gap in our own ability to understand our experiences let alone communicate them to others. This directly impacts identity. Students in the K-12 Special Education system in this country experience this lacuna. In this paper I will explore the Hermeneutical injustice faced by students in public school special education. By looking at the medical and charity models of disability, I will propose that students are subjected to what can be called an Educational Model of Disability. This educational model directly impacts the identity of these students through a language of deficit. With no language of pride or accomplishment, these students are more vulnerable to poor educational and life outcomes. I will then engage with a few ways in which our special education teachers could make real strides in mitigating this gap and providing special education students with confidence in identities as worthy and successful young people

Indispensability Arguments and Proclus’s Deductive Proofs for Mathematical Platonism

This article analyzes two types of arguments for mathematical platonism, paying close attention to the deductive argument advanced by Proclus. In the first section of the article, I lay out two arguments for mathematical platonism: a contemporary indispensability argument and Proclus’s more ancient Neoplatonic argument. The former takes an approach based on ‘inference to the best explanation’ and scientific theories, but as a result, faces serious objections. For example, scientific theories change, and because the argument is dependent on the latest scientific theories, it seems that the argument cannot give one epistemic certainty in the conclusion. The latter argument draws on ancient Greek thought—specifically Proclus, and his Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. This argument does not rely on scientific knowledge, but metaphysics, and thus seems to establish a conclusion not dependent on changing knowledge. I follow up the exposition of these arguments with two criticisms from the contemporary philosophy of mathematics. In the second section of the article, I introduce Proclus’s way of thinking about mathematical entities to counter two objections to mathematical platonism: (1) the epistemic access problem, and (2) the causality problem. In contrast to Aristotle, Proclus thinks that the soul contains mathematical forms as latent actualities, or reason principles (λόγοι) in the soul, which account for the possibility of mathematics. Because mathematical entities always are in the soul, and not some ‘separate world’ as modern critics of mathematical platonism think, the epistemic access problem falls away. I then address the causality problem by pointing out that numbers exercise a unique type of causality that physical objects do not. This stems from the use of the Greek word ‘aitia’ (αίτια)