Literary studies: poetry and poets Books

Book SynopsisThis book examines the representation of empathy in contemporary poetry after crisis, specifically poetry after the Holocaust, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina. The text argues that, recognizing both the possibilities and dangers of empathy, the poems under consideration variously invite and refuse empathy, thus displaying what Anna Veprinska terms empathetic dissonance. Veprinska proposes that empathetic dissonance reflects the texts’ struggle with the question of the value and possibility of empathy in the face of the crises to which these texts respond. Examining poems from Charlotte Delbo, Dionne Brand, Niyi Osundare, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Fitterman, Wisława Szymborska, Cynthia Hogue, Claudia Rankine, Paul Celan, Dan Pagis, Lucille Clifton, and Katie Ford, among others, Veprinska considers empathetic dissonance through language, witnessing, and theology. Merging comparative close readings with interdisciplinary theory from philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, history and literary theory, and trauma studies, this book juxtaposes a genocide, a terrorist act, and a natural disaster amplified by racial politics and human disregard in order to consider what happens to empathy in poetry after events at the limits of empathy. Table of Contents1. Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 The Permeability of Terms 1.2 The Benefits and Dangers of Empathy 1.3 The Poetry of Empathetic Dissonance after Three Contemporary Crises 1.4 The Chapters 2. Chapter 2: The Unsaid 2.1 & the Holocaust 2.2 & 9/11 2.3 & Hurricane Katrina 3. Chapter 3: The Unhere 3.1 & the Holocaust 3.2 & 9/11 3.3 & Hurricane Katrina 4. Chapter 4: The Ungod 4.1 & the Holocaust 4.2 & 9/11 4.3 & Hurricane Katrina 5. Conclusion 5.1 Challenges and Limitations 5.2 Empathy: Thread and Needle 5.3 Alternative Avenues 5.4 Future Directions 5.5. To the Reader 5.6 Unconclusion 

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Book SynopsisThis collection gathers together an exciting new series of critical essays on the Romantic- and Victorian-period poet John Clare, which each take a rigorous approach to both persistent and emergent themes in his life and work. Designed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Clare’s first volume of poetry, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, the scholarship collected here both affirms Clare’s importance as a major nineteenth-century poet and reveals how his verse continually provokes fresh areas of enquiry. Offering new archival, theoretical, and sometimes corrective insights into Clare’s world and work, the essays in this volume cover a multitude of topics, including Clare’s immersion in song and print culture, his formal ingenuity, his environmental and ecological imagination, his mental and physical health, and his experience of asylums. This book gives students a range of imaginative avenues into Clare’s work, and offers both new readers and experienced Clare scholars a vital set of contributions to ongoing critical debates.Table of Contents1. Introduction; Simon Kövesi and Erin Lafford.- 2. Poetry’s Variety: John Clare and the Poetic Scene in the 1820s and 1830; David Stewart.- 3. ‘Sweet the Merry Bells Ring Round’: John Clare’s songs for the drawing room; Kirsteen McCue.- 4.‘Sea Songs Love Ballads &c &c’: John Clare and Vernacular Song; Stephanie Kuduk Weiner.- 5. John Clare’s Landforms; Sara Lodge.- 6. John Clare’s Ear: Metres and Rhythms; Andrew Hodgson.- 7. The Shepherd’s Calendar and Forms of Repetition; Sarah Houghton-Walker.- 8. John Clare’s Dynamic Animals; James Castell.- 9. Multispecies Work in John Clare’s ‘Bird Nesting’ Poems; Katey Castellano.- 10. Biosemiosis and Posthumanism in John Clare’s Multi-Centered Environments; Scott Hess.- 11. Common Distress: John Clare’s Poetic Strain; Michael Nicholson.- 12. ‘fancys or feelings’: John Clare’s Hypochondriac Poetics; Erin Lafford.- 13. ‘A song in the night’: reconsidering John Clare’s later asylum poetry; James Whitehead.- Index.

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Book SynopsisThis textbook teaches the writing of poetry by examining all the major verse forms and repeating stanza forms in English. It provides students with the tools to compose successful lines of poetry and focuses on meter (including free verse), rhythm, rhyme, and the many other tools a poet needs to create both music and meaningfulness in an artful poem. Presenting copious examples from strong poets of the past and present along with many recent student examples, all of which are scanned, each chapter offers lessons in poetic history and the practice of writing verse, along with giving students a structured opportunity to experiment writing in all the forms discussed. In Part 1, Rothman and Spear begin at the beginning, with Anglo-Saxon Strong Stress Alliterative Meter and examine every major meter in English, up to and including the free verse forms of modern and contemporary poetry. Part 2 presents a close examination of stanza forms that moves from the simple to the complex, beginning with couplets and ending with the 14-line Eugene Onegin stanza. The goal of the book is to give students the essential skills to understand how any line of poetry in English may have been composed, the better to enjoy them and then also write their own: the keys to the treasure chest. Rothman and Spear present a rigorous curriculum that teaches the craft of poetry through a systematic examination and practice of the major English meters and verse forms. Under their guidance, students hone their craft while studying the rich traditions and innovations of poets writing in English. Suitable for high school students and beyond. I studied with Rothman in graduate school and went through this course with additional scholarly material. This book will help students develop a keen ear for the music of the English language.—Teow Lim Goh, author of Islanders Trade Review“A poet/educator and fellow teacher attempt the impossible: a rigorous textbook that provides creative writing students ‘the building blocks of verse in a progressive, well-organized, and clear way,’ with instruction ‘in every major meter and repeating stanza form in English’—without killing the works themselves in the dissection. Casual readers are advised not to try to ingest the result whole, but rather to consult as needed while exploring poetry.” (Harvard Magazine, harvardmagazine.com, Issue 1, 2023)Table of ContentsPreface.- Introduction.- Part One: Metrical Forms.- 1. Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Strong-Stress Meter.- 2. Ballad Meter.- 3. Stress-Based Imitations of Classical Forms: The Sapphic and the Catullan Hendecasyllable.- Interchapter: An Explanation of Scansion.- 4. Iambic Tetrameter.- 5. Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse.- 6. Triple Meters: Dactyls and Anapests.- 7. Free Verse: A) Whitmanian Versicles, B) Loose Iambics, C) Syllabics, D) Unrhymed Stressing, E) Free Rhyming, F) Prose Rhythms and the Variable Foot.- 8. Nonce Meters.- Part Two: Stanza Forms.-9. Couplets.- 10. Terza Rima.- 11. Quatrains.- 12. Cinquains and Sextains.- 13. Rhyme Royal.- 14. Ottava Rima.- 15. Spenserian Stanzas.- 16. The Sonnet and Eugene Onegin Stanzas.- 17. Nonce Stanza.

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Book SynopsisIn October 1967, Pier Paolo Pasolini travelled to Venice to interview Ezra Pound for broadcast on national television. One a lifelong Marxist, the other a former propagandist for the Fascist regime, their encounter was billed as a clash of opposites. But what do these poets share? And what can they tell us about the poetics and politics of the twentieth century? This book reads one by way of the other, aligning their engagement with different temporalities and traditions, polities and geographies, languages and forms, evoked as utopian alternatives to the cultural and political crises of capitalist modernity. Part literary history, part comparative study, it offers a new and provocative perspective on these poets and the critical debates around them – in particular, on Pound’s Italian years and Pasolini’s use of Pound in his work. Their connection helps to understand the implications and legacies of their work today. Trade Review“Sean Mark’s in-depth study of Pound and Pasolini, subtitled Poetics of Crisis, is a remarkable piece of scholarship, beautifully written, masterfully organised, and which reads almost like the plot of a detective novel … .” (Jonathan Pollock, Transatlantica Issue 2, 2023)Table of ContentsIntroduction: Pound and/or Pasolini Chapter 1: Family Portraits Chapter 2: Creatures Facing Backwards Chapter 3: Exposition Chapter 4: An Economy of Signs Chapter 5: Failure Coda: Afterlives Appendix A. The Pasolini-Pound Interview B. The Ronsisvalle-Pound Interview

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Marking Paul Celan's 100th birthday and the 50th anniversary of his death, this volume endeavours to answer the following question: why does Celan still matter today – more than ever perhaps? And why should he continue to matter tomorrow? In other words, the volume explores and assesses the enduring significance of Celan's life and œuvre in and for the 21st century. Boasting cutting-edge research by international scholars together with original contributions by contemporary artists and writers, this book attests to, on the one hand, the extent to which large swathes of contemporary philosophy, poetics, literary scholarship, and aesthetics have been indebted to Celan's legacy and are simply unthinkable without it, and, on the other hand, to the malleability, adaptability, breadth and depth of Celan's poetics, which, like the music of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Queen, is reborn and rediscovered with every new generation.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisThis book is the first extensive research on the role of poetry during the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). How can poetry, especially peaceful medieval Sufi poems, be applied to exalt violence, to present death as martyrdom, and to process war traumas? Examining poetry by both Islamic revolutionary and established dissident poets, it demonstrates how poetry spurs people to action, even leading them to sacrifice their lives. The book's originality lies in fresh analyses of how themes such as martyrdom and violence, and mystical themes such as love and wine, are integrated in a vehemently political context, while showing how Shiite ritual such as the pilgrimage to Mecca clash with Saudi Wahhabi appreciations. A distinguishing quality of the book is its examination of how martyrdom was instilled in the minds of Iranians through poetry, employing Sufi themes, motifs and doctrines to justify death. Such inculcation proved effective in mobilising people to the front, ready to sacrifice their lives. As such, the book is a must for readers interested in Iranian culture and history, in Sufi poetry, in martyrdom and war poetry. Those involved with Middle Eastern Studies, Iranian Studies, Literary Studies, Political Philosophy and Religious Studies will benefit from this book. "From his own memories and expert research, the author gives us a ravishing account of 'a poetry stained with blood, violence and death'. His brilliantly layered analysis of modern Persian poetry shows how it integrates political and religious ideology and motivational propaganda with age-old mystical themes for the most traumatic of times for Iran." (Alan Williams, Research Professor of Iranian Studies, University of Manchester) "When Asghar Seyed Gohrab, a highly prolific academician, publishes a new book, you can be certain he has paid attention to an exciting and largely unexplored subject. Martyrdom, Mysticism and Dissent: The Poetry of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) is no exception in the sense that he combines a few different cultural, religious, mystic, and political aspects of Iranian life to present a vivid picture and thorough analysis of the development and effect of what became known as the revolutionary poetry of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This time, he has even enriched his narrative by inserting his voice into his analysis. It is a thoughtful book and a fantastic read." (Professor Kamran Talattof, University of Arizona)

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