Darío, Borges, Neruda and the Ancient Quarrel between Poets and Philosophers

There is a paradox of in teaching subversive literature: university teachers are funded by society and impose on Dionysiac trances a culture of examinations and a comforting rationality. From within the safe institutional framework of the university, we constantly implement Plato's expulsion of the poets from the public arena because they arouse and confuse our minds. This analysis will explore this Nietzschean conflict in three Spanish American poets and simultaneously outline and defend the excessive way poets read other texts as they re-enact this 'ancient' quarrel between poetry and philosophy, in terms of the imperative, or social burden, of having to be responsibly 'Latin American'

Ecopoetic Place-Making: Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move

Re-habitar – Translating Gary Snyder into Portuguese

The fact that Gary Snyder is practically unknown in Brazil hasalways worried me. Differently from some other North-American poets such as, for example, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski and Robert Creeley, whose works are already published in Portuguese, Snyder is practically nonexistent in our editorial market and remains very little studied in Brazilian academic circles.Tradução de: Luci Collin Lavalle.The fact that Gary Snyder is practically unknown in Brazil hasalways worried me. Differently from some other North-American poets such as, for example, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski and Robert Creeley, whose works are already published in Portuguese, Snyder is practically nonexistent in our editorial market and remains very little studied in Brazilian academic circles

The recent New England Pulitzer prize winners--Coffin, Frost, Hillyer

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston UniversityProblem. In this study we shall examine the life, work, beliefs, and contemporary criticism of Coffin, Frost, and Hilly er in an endeavor to show: 1. that the better New England poets represent an island of classicism in the general sea of American poetic romanticism. 2. that the average American poetry critic of the day completely misunderstands and misinterprets the New Englanders. 3. that the great mass of critical evaluation of the day is hopelessly inadequate in its classification of modern poets, especially those of New England. The proof of the first proposition will aid us in deciding whether the New England background has contributed anything special to its poets. The proof of the second proposition should show the need for checking the loose and vague critical use of terms and the oversimplified classification of poets by means of a single label. The proof of the third proposition will bring us to a defense and justification of the much maligned New Englanders. Method. Our method will first require that we present a brief review of the contemporary American scene in poetry. The review will be organized along two major lines: 1. A history of the trends in American poetry since 1912. 2. A discussion of the chief American poets since 1912. The history of the poetic trends will enable us to perceive in its broad outlines the general direction which the mass of our poetry has taken. The discussion of our outstanding poets will enable us to tie this direction down to particular individuals. Once this background has been established we can then place the New England poets against it so as to see more clearly exactly what their position is. Our next step will consist of a factual summary of the lives of our three poets--Coffin, Frost, and Hillyer. This will give us material with which we can compare the backgrounds of the poets, and will lead us to a consideration of those influences in their backgrounds which have made for classicism. The final procedure will take us to a careful analysis of the criticism which has been offered on these men by their contemporaries; and a critical examination of the poetry which they have written, and the beliefs which they have expressed. For the review of the contemporary scene the chief modern literary historians and critics will be referred to. Biographical data on the lives of our poets will be gathered from all available published sources. The discussion of the background for classicism will be based on reputable histories of the particular New England institutions involved. Finally, the critical material on our poets will be collected from all of the materials on the subject that are extant; and the examination of the work and beliefs of the poets will be based on their latest and best known writings. Findings. With the problem in mind, and using the methods outlined above several things became evident. The general body of modern American poetry was shown to be romantic and experimental and the chief of the practicing poets were see to be for the most part romantic users of free verse. The New England poets stood out by virtue of the fact that they were classical and traditional in their poetry and because of the tremendous percentage of success that they had achieved (on the Pulitzer Prize) as against the poets of the rest of the country. The lives of our poets--Coffin, Frost, and Hillyer--revealed certain things which they had in common: residence and education acquired in New England's old universities (Harvard and Bowdoin), connection and contact with England, love for the land and nature, membership in Phi Beta Kappa, and publication in the Atlantic Monthly. These institutions we saw were all connected in the New England background because their founders and chief men had in each instance consisted of the same group. We pointed out that the original influences had been classical and traditional and had persisted to this day. They were in large measure responsible for the classicism of the poets of our study. In our examination of the work and beliefs of the New Englanders it was at once made clear beyond doubt that all of them were classical in their attitude toward their poetry and traditional in their use of verse. We saw, too, that the critics misunderstood and misinterpreted the New Englanders accusing them: 1. of having no philosophy, 2. of being aloof and showing no concern for man. Our analysis of the work and beliefs of the poets proved this to be untrue. The New Englanders all deplored our modern mechanized, mercantile society and recommended a return to nature and the simple, elemental things of life. They all showed a strong belief in the unity of humanity and God, and in the value of the human spirit. Coffin we saw to be more assertive in this belief and more propagandists in his approach. Frost and Hillyer both repudiated any tendency toward extreme points of view socially or politically and adhere to the middle ground, the golden mean, as a way of life. In our study of modern criticism as it has been applied to these men two things became evident: 1. that most of the critics attempted to classify these poets with some one term such as "realist," etc., 2. that the critics for the most part disagreed greatly over what terms were to be applied, some using "realist" while another used "naturalist" for the same thing. We saw in our analysis of Coffin, Frost, and Hillyer that the first of these practices is a serious fallacy since the poets were all complex men with many sides to their development, all of which require adequate critical consideration. The second practise is obviously bad for criticism as a science since the first necessity of any profession is that those who practise it agree on the terminology which they must use

American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans

American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans is a collective response to the individual suffering behind the statistics. Big Shoulders Books editor Chris Green asked one-hundred poets from across the city to take turns writing a communal poem about Chicago’s gun violence. The poets range in age, gender, race, ethnicity, and poetic experience. Such well-known poets as Ed Hirsch, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Roberson, Marc Smith, Ana Castillo, and Kevin Coval write with teen poets from the South and West sides . . . many from the group Young Chicago Authors, but also young poets from Chicago’s alternative high schools, where statistically, students experience the most gun violence in the city. The poem is a pantoum, a poetic form where every line is repeated twice. Green chose this form because its structure of repeating lines mirrors the semi-automatic firing of a weapon and also the seemingly endless cycle of shootings in Chicago. In 2019, Chicago police seized over 10,000 guns—an average of one gun every 48 minutes, which gives you a sense of how many weapons are on the streets. However, the main title of this poem, American Gun, points to the gun epidemic as not simply a Chicago problem, but an American one. Despite the rhetoric of conservative political and corporate interests, most Americans (including NRA members) want more sensible gun laws. Our country needs more truth, more collaboration—something like this poem where diverse people sing together in sanity and beauty. When politics fails us, poetry tells us we are not alone in our outrage and hope.https://via.library.depaul.edu/big_shoulders_books/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Railroad in American Poetry

In many ways travel by train is a speeded-up version of what we are all doing – a here and now experience of what it\u27s like to be human. Trains tend to make us reflective and introspective. For over 150 years poets have used railroad imagery in an attempt to enter into the universal experience of trains. This thesis will examine the remarkably strong hold the railroad image has had on the consciousness of poets, ranging from the Transcendentalists to contemporary American poets. For many of the nineteenth-century poets, the image of the railroad expresses the promise and the danger of technology in modern industrial society, while the contemporary poets do not generally write poems “about” the railroad, but use train imagery to journey through the psychic landscape of the country and one\u27s own mind and being. Today\u27s train poems reveal why they must take a journey through the landscape of the self in order to be fully awake in the world. There are hundreds of railroad poems out there that reveal poets\u27 psychic journeys. Almost every major and minor American poet since Emerson has either written a train poem or has used railroad imagery in their poems. Trains continue to fascinate our poets\u27 imaginations despite the railroad\u27s demise, because they still represent profound metaphors in American consciousness- symbols of speed and power personifying industrial society itself; yet at the same time trains remain a symbol of time\u27s passage upon our\u27 scarred, native soil. In examining railroad verse, we will look at how the consciousness of the poet explores what trains are, because like any good poem, railroad poems also probe into the language depths of the unconscious mind, which is the repository of primal, sensory images, and reach forth toward a harmony or wholeness with the rational, ordering, conscious mind. The first four chapters of the thesis invite us to travel along the nineteenth-century railroad of Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. On their trains we find that the image of the railroad is incorporated harmoniously into the landscape. Succeeding chapters examine the poetry of the twentieth-century. I separated the chapters into the following themes to represent the diversity of the railroad in American poetry: Come Serve the Muse,Again;” Arrivals and Departures at the Station; Sketches of American People and American Landscapes; Troop Trains and Holocaust Trains;” and Journeying Through the Landscape of Consciousness. In these chapters the image of the train will take us on an inward journey of personal and spiritual freedom

The Owl, vol. 6, no. 4

Contents: Was the American War justifiable on the part of the United States; A dream of ships; Letter from our London correspondent; American science triumphant; Echos from an owlet\u27s nest; A New Zealander among the poets; Idle Notes; Editor\u27s Table; Olio; Table of honor; Students business directoryhttps://scholarcommons.scu.edu/owl/1028/thumbnail.jp

Augmenting Poetry Composition with Verse by Verse

We describe Verse by Verse, our experiment in augmenting the creative process of writing poetry with an AI. We have created a group of AI poets, styled after various American classic poets, that are able to offer as suggestions generated lines of verse while a user is composing a poem. In this paper, we describe the underlying system to offer these suggestions. This includes a generative model, which is tasked with generating a large corpus of lines of verse offline and which are then stored in an index, and a dual-encoder model that is tasked with recommending the next possible set of verses from our index given the previous line of verse

Sensing Sounding: Close Listening To Experimental Asian American Poetry

This dissertation examines a selection of Asian American experimental poetries from the 1960’s to the present day through the sensory paradigms of avant-garde aesthetic discourse. By approaching both the poem and racial formation in sonic terms, this dissertation project argues that rethinking the sensory as well as the political ramifications of sounding can help us recuperate Asian American poets’ often overlooked experimentation with poetic form. Specifically, I read the works of Marilyn Chin, Theresa Cha, John Yau, Cathy Park Hong, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Tan Lin. By tracing the historical conditions of Orientalist objectification and re-interrogating postmodern theories of sight, sound, and the body, I seek to show how these poets’ invocation of sonic paradigms reworks those theories and to broaden our critical vocabulary for writing about sound in poetry