Articles

Prosody and pain in 'Scherzos Benjyosos'

Phil Baber
Author photo (left) courtesy of Keston Sutherland.

In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true). Rather the pressure that prosodic constraints exert on the poet’s language, and therefore upon his thinking, exposes seams of pain and of potential happiness which could not have been anticipated nor, perhaps, discovered in any other way.[1]

In the course of Keston Sutherland’s Scherzos Benjyosos, inarticulate pain is transformed into elegy, and elegy, at the last, into love song. This is first and foremost a prosodic achievement. I do not mean by this simply that prosody offers figures or symbols for the poems’ thematic and narrative content — that the book’s tormented passage from pain to love is echoed and illustrated by the shapes and sounds of the text on the page and in the ear (though to some extent this is true).

June 14, 2023

The poetics of the ostrakon

N. H. Pritchard's 'Mundus' at the Whitney Museum

Claudio Sansone
Portion of ‘Sappho 2’ ostracon. Image adapted from a photo via Wikimedia Commons.

What is an ostrakon? And what does an ostrakon have to do with the work of N. H. Pritchard? Norman Henry Pritchard was a member of the Umbra poets in the Lower East Side in the 1960s and a self-avowed “transrealist” who blended visual and sound poetry in many of his poems, some of which might be termed quasisurrealist or quasi-imagistic.

March 9, 2023

these are my eyes: Michele Leggott's poetry

With 'A Vida Portugeusa,' a new poem by Michele Leggott

John Geraets
Michele Leggott
“chisel-bouncer / you are the big stick / made with fire / and containing the means / of making more sacred and profane” (“te ahi tapu rākau / jacob’s fire song,” ‘MIRABILE DICTU,’ 18). Pictured left to right: New Zealand poets laureate Elizabeth Smither, Michele Leggott, Jenny Bornholdt, Brian Turner, and Bill Manhire. Photo by Maarten Holl, courtesy of Stuff Limited.

The volume MIRABILE DICTU (2009) celebrates Michele Leggott’s tenure as inaugural Aotearoa-New Zealand poet laureate (2007–9) and marks an inflection point in her poetic career. In brief, the volume presents a world of adaptation: coming and going, joining and severing, isolation and community.

March 7, 2023

A constellation of transnational poetics

Siwar Masannat
Left to right: Gerald Vizenor, Don Mee Choi, and Craig Santos Perez. All photos via Wikimedia Commons.

From Deleuze and Guattari’s essay on “Minor Literature” to Alfred Arteaga’s work on Chicanx poetics, theorists have studied the relationship between power and language, describing how creative writers find inventive ways to interrogate monolingual and nationalist logics.[1] Often, personal as well as historical conditions shape an author’s linguistic choices. My interest here lies in how poets use citation and translation as craft techniques in forging poetic languages that challenge powerful configurations and histories.

January 26, 2023

'to be a boundless reflection'

On critical composition in Hejinian and Scalapino's 'Sight' and 'Hearing'

Miriam Atkin

As a writing teacher, I am relentlessly bugged by the question of how to move students toward an organic practice of critical inquiry, to help them feel pulled by it at the most basic, creaturely level. In my search for a pedagogy that feels right and real, I look toward the texts that have become my own exemplars of compelling argumentation and analytic integrity, only to realize that my favorite works of critical writing are, in fact, poetry.

December 12, 2022