tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/poetry-2102/articles
Poetry – The Conversation
2024-03-28T05:46:38Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214835
2024-03-28T05:46:38Z
2024-03-28T05:46:38Z
‘Property poetry’? Real estate ads and literature have more in common than you might think
<p>A few years ago, I turned some <a href="https://www.powderkegmagazine.com/amelia-dale">real estate advertisements into poems</a> by adding line breaks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Fantastic views of the beach, ocean, <br>
headland and hinterland,<br>
you can see the Haven,<br>
you look straight up <br>
the green grass of the Skillion</p>
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<p>I was interested, among other things, in asking what happens when we compare the language of real estate copy with more obvious forms of poetry.</p>
<p>If you read a real estate ad with the same attention you might bestow on a poem you can observe how it deploys metre, metaphor, and the tropes of landscape poetry. You can note how some advertisements directly reference the sublime or the picturesque, and how others open with a rhyming couplet.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-poetic-metre-53364">Explainer: poetic metre</a>
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<p>Australian poet Lucy Van characterises real estate copy as a form of poetry. No other poetry, she <a href="https://www.liminalmag.com/liminal-review-of-books/agent-of-the-year">observes</a>, </p>
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<p>is more familiar to the Australian reading audience, more widely read and better understood, not only for what is said but importantly for what is not said, than the 150-200 word copy that flogs real estate.</p>
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<p>Like other paid work involving some form of writing, real estate copywriting, or what Van calls “property poetry,” is a job that has attracted writers of literature. I know at least one Australian creative writer who has worked in this industry.</p>
<p>Courses on writing real estate advertisements are run by the <a href="https://www.writerscentre.com.au/store/courses/real-estate-copywriting/">Australian Writers’ Centre</a>: pitched at “a writer with a passion for property or an agent looking to hone your ad writing skills.” A key learning outcome of such a course is developing the ability to “add value,” or push up the price of the property through your description of it.</p>
<p>The literary nature of real estate copy raises several larger questions. What is the relationship between writing and ownership of land? What is the history of writers “adding value” to landed property? How does literature normalise and respond to the inequities of private property in Australia?</p>
<h2>19th-century real estate copy</h2>
<p>The history of people comparing the language of real estate to poetry is at least as old as the boom in property auctions and real estate advertisements that occurred in early 19th-century England.</p>
<p>Newspapers frequently joked about the poetic language used in real estate auctions and ads. They consistently, if facetiously, described the prominent real estate auctioneer, George Robins, as a landscape poet, on par with William Wordsworth.</p>
<p>Poets of the period were also aware of the proximities between their writing and that of the burgeoning real estate industry. In his long, rambling poem Don Juan, Lord Byron compares himself to an auctioneer. This is after his lengthy description of a Gothic Abbey:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>An old, old monastery once, and now <br>
Still older mansion, of a rich and rare <br>
Mix’d Gothic, such as artists all allow <br>
Few specimens yet left us can compare.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fittingly, Byron’s lines were taken up by his acquaintance, the auctioneer Robins, who quoted them in ads for the sale of an abbey in <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509585.2016.1235824">The Times in 1846</a>.</p>
<p>Descriptive poems oriented around a house and property are, of course, older than real estate copy. An obvious example in English literature is the 17th-century Country House poem, which praises the country house owner through praising their property.</p>
<p>But these poems are not about houses or estates on the market. In England up until the 19th century, a real estate industry did not exist. Laws and cultural norms meant the family estate was typically passed down as an undivided parcel of land from one male heir to the next, rather than sold. </p>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>These laws – and their exclusion of women and younger sons of landowning families – motivate the plots of most of Jane Austen’s novels. </p>
<p>They are why, in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Elinor Dashwood must leave the house they grew up in when their father dies, and become dependent on the charity of their relatives. Similarly in Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennet’s house and land – since he only has daughters – will go to Mr Collins upon his death. </p>
<p>Laws of primogeniture kept land ownership in the hands of a small, privileged and overwhelmingly male group. They also concentrated political power in that same class. Owning land brought with it political rights, such as the right to vote.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-revolutionary-vision-of-jane-austen-71000">Friday essay: the revolutionary vision of Jane Austen</a>
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<h2>Real estate and the colony</h2>
<p>The more contemporary attitude towards land as a commodity (something that only comes up in Austen’s later work, especially her final, unfinished novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166177.Sanditon?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qZgoXYkuez&rank=2">Sanditon</a>) is inextricable from the history of colonialism. </p>
<p>In the British colonies, property law, rather than privileging an ancestral chain of ownership, was developed to dispossess First Nations people as efficiently as possible. Laws and customs were then exported elsewhere, including to imperial centres. As the Australian poets <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03063968221098623#bibr1-03063968221098623">Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks</a> have put it, </p>
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<p>[t]he “vacant” land of the settler colony provided the conditions for modern property laws to be written and enacted.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Barron Field" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572352/original/file-20240131-15-txtfeg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1115&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/pastoral-ponderings-and-settler-politics-how-a-colonial-judge-and-poet-wrote-terra-nullius-into-law-199962">Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens have shown</a> how the Australian judge, Romantic poet, and Wordsworth acolyte, Barron Field, in both his legal rulings and his poetry, established the foundations for <em>terra nullius</em>: the notion that Australia was an empty, unowned land. </p>
<p>Field’s sweeping nullification of First Nation sovereignty in his poetry and his judgements rendered the country as one without history. Australia could be an Enlightenment blank space for colonial experiments structured around a land market. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pastoral-ponderings-and-settler-politics-how-a-colonial-judge-and-poet-wrote-terra-nullius-into-law-199962">Pastoral ponderings and settler politics: how a colonial judge and poet wrote terra nullius into law</a>
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<p>For example, the establishment of South Australia was heavily influenced by the theories of author <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/wakefield-edward-gibbon-2763">Edward Gibbon Wakefield</a>, who argued for establishing a colony funded through land sales to settlers. <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/torrens-sir-robert-richard-4739">Richard Robert Torrens</a>, parliamentarian and briefly Premier of South Australia, further refined the settler property regime through <a href="https://dti.sa.gov.au/history-of-the-torrens-system">the Torrens system</a>, which offered a simple and effective way to establish title to land and erased First Nations’ ownership. Torrens Title quickly became standard throughout the British empire.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cover of The White Possessive" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/572351/original/file-20240131-21-cz6313.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Writer and theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson, in her book, <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_White_Possessive/VTB0DwAAQBAJ?hl=en">The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty</a>, places real estate at the heart of contemporary white Australian settler consciousness. For Moreton-Robinson, Australian national identity “is built on the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty because the nation is socially and culturally constructed as a white possession”. </p>
<p>Moreton-Robinson notes that the settler reaction to <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case">the 1992 Mabo decision</a> granting native title was a “discourse of loss” and fear of “dispossession” ultimately “orchestrated to recenter white possession of the nation.” </p>
<p>More recently, in the Voice referendum, part of the “No” campaign presented the Voice as a conspiracy to seize privately owned property. The successful “No” campaign thrived from the inherent contradiction between Indigenous sovereignty and settler ownership of stolen land.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-the-voice-to-parliament-would-not-force-people-to-give-up-their-private-land-212784">No, the Voice to Parliament would not force people to give up their private land</a>
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<h2>Critiquing our real estate obsession</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cover of The Winter Road" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/573628/original/file-20240205-15-tq2hyl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Kate Holden’s recent nonfiction book, <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/winter-road">The Winter Road: A Story of Legacy, Land and a Killing at Croppa Creek</a>, centres on the well-publicised murder by elderly farmer Ian Turnbull of an environmental protection officer, Glen Turner. For Holden, Turner’s murder, and the sympathy Turnbull subsequently won from the public, cannot be isolated from the living legacy of invasion and colonisation. </p>
<p>Holden connects Turnbull’s persistence in illegally clearing vast tracts of koala habitat, and his murder of Turner, to British Enlightenment theories of property. The English philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke/">John Locke</a>, she observes, “placed emphasis on labour to morally justify the owning of property. The more work put into the land, the more settled a man was upon it.” </p>
<p>Holden traces associations between Locke’s ideas, the history of <em>terra nullius</em> and the “strange, morbid fixation in Australian myth of just how hard a person has to work on this land.” She writes, </p>
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<p>[b]y the time of Australia’s settling, the ineluctable mark of a British citizen was land ownership. It enfranchised him, gave him rights […] Land – elemental, foundational – was the desperately prized asset in a new colony. Without it, man was only an object.</p>
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<p>Successive governments and polls acknowledge that home ownership continues to be an “aspiration” of an overwhelming majority of Australians, even if it is out of reach to an increasing proportion of the population.</p>
<p>Yet the contradictions and inequities surrounding the trade in stolen land are rehearsed largely without reflection or analysis across contemporary Australian culture. </p>
<p>TV series like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14344354/">Luxe Listings Sydney</a> (where million-dollar ocean view mansions are sold to a tiny, cashed-up clientele), The Block, and Escape from the City, participate in a nation-wide settler obsession with real estate. </p>
<p>“We love house hunting. We hate house hunting,” <a href="https://www.liminalmag.com/liminal-review-of-books/lucy-van">writes Van</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-dont-want-realism-i-want-magic-behind-the-fantasy-fuelling-our-real-estate-voyeurism-164708">'I don’t want realism. I want magic': behind the fantasy fuelling our real estate voyeurism</a>
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<p>Michelle de Kretser’s recent novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59432505-scary-monsters?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Szwj6CgXVc&rank=1">Scary Monsters</a>, like Van’s essays, takes a more critical approach to real estate culture.</p>
<p>An interest in property suffuses both halves of de Kretser’s bifurcated novel, particularly obvious in the “Lyle” section, set in a dystopic future not that different from the present. It begins with a “For Sale” sign, soon followed by interpolated real estate copy, that, in keeping with de Kretser’s novel is drily foreboding: </p>
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<p>Here is a house that can accommodate the joys and sorrows of your family.</p>
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<p>De Krester is nothing if not precise about how settler-colonial violence installs ownership of land at the heart of the Australian national imaginary. Lyle euthanizes his elderly mother so that he and his wife can downsize and relocate to “a luxury development”. Appropriately enough, it is in a repurposed abattoir, advertised as “an urban village in an emerging precinct where imagination, history and visionary architecture come together to create a whole new story”.</p>
<p>The emphasis on “new story” is deliberate. Settler real estate culture in de Kretser’s satire involves erasing history and speculating upon the future. Lyle’s migrant family abandons their heritage. Lyle dismisses Aboriginal people as </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a living reminder of the past. Who feels comfortable facing up to old mistakes? […] The whole point of Australia is a bet on the future.</p>
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<p>In Scary Monsters, real estate speculation is violently forward-looking, operating in direct contradiction with grappling with a history of dispossession. For Lyle, </p>
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<p>Real estate is another way to say Australia. Acquiring it, changing it, making a profit on it, in short, managing the property cycle with confidence – it’s the story of our nation.</p>
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<p>Amanda Lohrey, in her <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-are-we-obsessed-with-renovation-amanda-lohrey-explores-the-promise-and-limits-of-transforming-our-environment-211668">new novel The Conversion</a>, also explores the Australian obsession with buying and renovating homes, linking renovation to the practice of silencing a past. </p>
<p>Australian writing can dissect the way land is owned and the how the nation is imagined as a white possession. Yet literature can also help establish and perpetuate systems of private property. Meanwhile, the real estate industry continues to learn from literature new ways to rhetorically “add value” to properties.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214835/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amelia Dale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Writers have long rhapsodised about real estate – or the difficulty acquiring it – but contemporary authors are asking awkward questions about the inequities of our property obsession.
Amelia Dale, Lecturer in English, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/226150
2024-03-22T10:15:52Z
2024-03-22T10:15:52Z
William Blake’s Universe: making a European out of the poet and artist who never left England
<p>William Blake’s Universe, the new (free) <a href="https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/plan-your-visit/exhibitions/william-blakes-universe">exhibition</a> at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, is a celebration of work by the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/romanticism">Romantic artist</a>, writer and visionary. </p>
<p>Famous now but little known in his lifetime, Blake (1757-1827) has been given star billing by <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/william-blake-artist">Tate Britain</a> recently. But at the Fitzwilliam, he is made to share the spotlight with fellow artists from Britain and Germany, notably <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philipp-Otto-Runge">Philipp Otto Runge</a> (1777-1810), whose luminous <a href="https://online-sammlung.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/de/objekt/HK-1016/der-morgen-erste-fassung?term=&filter%255Bobj_actuallocation_s%255D%255B0%255D=19.%2520Jahrhundert&filter%255Bfacet_obj_artistName%255D%255B0%255D=Philipp%2520Otto%2520Runge&context=default&position=9">The Small Morning</a> hangs in the exhibition’s final room.</p>
<p>The approach of exhibition curators David Bindman and Esther Chadwick is quietly provocative. Blake is known tb as a poet, he never left Britain, and he never met Runge. He was also a contrarian, with broadly anti-establishment views. So what is at stake in reframing Blake as a European artist, and does the exhibition convince?</p>
<h2>Blake’s universe</h2>
<p>The exhibition’s title and the life-sized cast of Blake’s head that greets you as you enter, suggest its aim will be to present a trip inside his mind. And to an extent, it does. The bulk of work on display is by Blake himself, much of it drawn from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s own magnificent collection.</p>
<p>Particular highlights are Blake’s glowing drawing <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1856-0209-417">Albion Rose</a> and the mysterious <a href="https://blakearchive.org/copy/europe.k?descId=europe.k.illbk.01">Ancient of Days</a>, his beautifully coloured, hand-printed poems <a href="https://blakearchive.org/copy/america.o?descId=america.o.illbk.02">America</a> and <a href="https://blakearchive.org/work/europe">Europe</a>, and his energetic re-interpretations of ancient Greek sculptures like the <a href="https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/image/media-6749">Laocoön</a>.</p>
<p>Also on display are spectacular works by other artists, including Benjamin West’s <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/death-on-the-pale-horse-1">Death on the Pale Horse</a> and Caspar David Friedrich’s series of seven sketches in sepia, <a href="https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/friedrich-caspar-david">Ages of Man</a> (Die Lebensalter).</p>
<p>Evidently this “universe” does not belong to Blake alone. It is rather a shared imaginative and cultural space, inhabited by Blake and other Romantic artists across Europe from the 1770s to the 1820s. </p>
<p>Portraits of the main players appear in the exhibition’s ante-room. First Runge, whose soulful self-portrait is twinned with Blake’s life mask at the entrance. Then John Flaxman, James Barry, and Henry Fuseli, whom Blake knew personally, and Asmus Jacob Carstens and Caspar David Friedrich, whom he did not. </p>
<h2>Blake the artist?</h2>
<p>It is revelatory to see Blake in the company of artists like these. Poems like The Tyger, London and the verse <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54684/jerusalem-and-did-those-feet-in-ancient-time">And did those feet</a> (better known as the hymn Jerusalem, after it was set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916), mark Blake out as a poet.</p>
<p>In fact he was this and more. The online <a href="https://www.blakearchive.org">William Blake Archive</a> hints at the range of his work rendered in text, engraving, printmaking, drawing and painting. </p>
<p>It was rare for Blake to write a poem without illustrating it. Working with his wife Catherine, he hand-engraved, hand-coloured and hand-printed “illuminated books” of his verses, releasing dozens of copies over his lifetime essentially as small press editions. </p>
<p>However, he made his living creating and selling visual art – engravings and book illustrations – to commercial publishers. He also produced single and serial works of art for private patrons. </p>
<p>Blake aspired to be better known as an artist (and writer too), and to share his work with a larger audience. But his career floundered, hampered by the precariousness of the art market during the Napoleonic wars, the low social status of his commercial engraving, and his contrary views.</p>
<h2>The exhibition</h2>
<p>The bold exhibition design ensures there is a strong central narrative. Each room focuses on the engagement by European artists with the past, present and future. </p>
<p>The past is that of classical antiquity and the old masters, whose works were copied and repurposed by artists across Europe as they honed their skills in academy schools. The present is that of war and revolution, in America, France and Haiti. The future is that of spiritual renewal, conceived of variously in mystical, Christian, pantheistic and nationalist terms. </p>
<p>Within this historical narrative are clustered smaller scenes which reward attentive viewing. Sketches after Michelangelo, visits to a leper hospital, and the mystical Christian philosophy of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jakob-Bohme">Jakob Böhme</a> are just some of the themes identified and shown to be common concerns among what initially may seem like a disparate group of artists.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ijgOOgL325Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The exhibition architecture invites active engagement too. Separated pages of Blake’s illuminated book, Europe, are displayed on a corrugated screen zig-zagging across the central room, jagged as a bolt of lightning – a phenomenon associated with political revolution. </p>
<p>Early on in the exhibition, a window is cut from the “past” to the “future”, complicating the historical narrative. Is it true that we always progress, that things always get better?</p>
<h2>Blake the European?</h2>
<p>Blake never had the funds to travel to mainland Europe, nor was he sponsored by one of his patrons to go to Rome. He also never read German, although he did learn Italian later in life, and illustrated Dante. </p>
<p>He was not, like <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-taylor-coleridge">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</a>, influenced by German idealist philosophy. But to be schooled at the Royal Academy, as Blake was from 1779 to 1785, was to learn from European models. And to have a <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199730414/obo-9780199730414-0029.xml">Moravian</a> (a type of Protestant) mother may have included learning German songs and hymns in childhood.</p>
<p>The Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, the mystics Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg were all favourites of Blake’s, and commonly read across continental Europe. Add to this the reverberations of revolution, war, trade, imperialism – all of which sound in Blake’s art and poetry – and it’s clear that Blake was not insular in his outlook.</p>
<p>The question of Blake’s Europeanness is posed everywhere in this exhibition, but never overtly. The working title “Blake in Europe”, was lost along the way. Never quite asked are further questions about the limits of the shared European Romantic culture that the exhibition promotes. Which culture, or cultures, you could ask, and whose?</p>
<p>As <a href="https://blakesociety.org/open-letter-to-the-guardian/">Sibylle Erle, Chair of the Blake Society</a> has said: “For us, Blake is for everybody.” Go to William Blake’s Universe if you can, and see what you think.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/226150/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Haggarty works for the University of Cambridge, to which the Fitzwilliam Museum belongs. Sarah Haggarty wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue for William Blake's Universe. </span></em></p>
A subtle and thoughtful show, full of shimmering connections that put Blake back in touch with European art figures and influences.
Sarah Haggarty, Associate Professor in English, University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in English, Queens' College, University of Cambridge
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225697
2024-03-15T13:32:00Z
2024-03-15T13:32:00Z
Haiku has captured the essence of seasons for centuries – new poems contain a trace of climate change
<p>A successful haiku could be described as a half-finished poem. Originating in Japan <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/haiku">in the 17th century</a>, the haiku uses a combination of sensory language, seasonal references, a sense of contrast and a focus on the present tense to share an experience between writer and reader. </p>
<p>It relies on the reader to “finish” the poem by employing their recollections of sensations and emotions to connect to the moment described as vividly as they do their own experiences.</p>
<p>Haiku often depict moments in a particular season by describing the behaviour of animals, the weather and the appearance of plants. With a new generation of haiku poets, there’s a whole new collection of work that reflects how seasons are changing as a result of rising global temperatures.</p>
<p>Could haiku poetry written more recently contain a trace of the changes wrought by our warming climate? That’s something one of us (Jasmin) set out to investigate by analysing haiku published in English over the last 30 years. </p>
<p>First, let’s learn how to read haiku.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Do the seasons feel increasingly weird to you? You’re not alone. Climate change is distorting nature’s calendar, causing plants to flower early and animals to emerge at the wrong time.</em></p>
<p><em>This article is part of a series, <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/wild-seasons-152175?utm_source=InArticleTop&utm_medium=TCUK&utm_campaign=WS">Wild Seasons</a>, on how the seasons are changing – and what they may eventually look like.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>What enables this brief poetic form to achieve its resonance is its use of negative space. A haiku is a poem in two parts – a fragment (one line) and a phrase (two lines), divided by a pause (signified by a line break or punctuation). </p>
<p>Related to the concept of <a href="https://new.uniquejapan.com/ikebana/ma/"><em>ma</em></a> in Japanese visual arts, which perceives empty space in an artwork as a positive entity, the negative space in haiku is a way in to the contemplative experience of the poem.</p>
<p>The following by Japanese poet <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D">Matsuo Basho</a> (1644-94) is the most famous haiku ever composed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>old pond –</p>
<p>a frog leaps in</p>
<p>water’s sound</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A frog in a pond surrounded by spawn." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581926/original/file-20240314-28-a0jjk9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frogspawn is a harbinger of spring in the UK.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/common-frog-frogspawn-uk-1328083865">Lesley Andrew/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To write a different account of this same event, you could say something like a frog leapt into an old pond and made a sound. But the key distinction between the two is the negative space that follows Basho’s first line. It encourages the reader to pause, breathe and contemplate the old pond before they encounter the frog leaping and the sound of the water. </p>
<p>When our minds become still, and reflective, like the old pond, we witness the action of an animal living simply according to its nature. We perceive things just as they are. The result is an experience of interconnectedness: a realisation that we are not separate from the natural world, but a part of it.</p>
<p>In the following haiku by Basho we experience the season as both a physical setting and as a metaphor for emotional experience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>no-one walks</p>
<p>along this road but I</p>
<p>autumn evening</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A tree-lined urban path in the evening." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581927/original/file-20240314-30-dpj1lj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Autumn’s arrival can be felt in falling leaves and earlier sunsets.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/autumn-city-night-maple-trees-alley-1950393067">S_Oleg/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a world of increasing anxiety and distraction, the negative space in a haiku affords us moments of reflection and invites us into a dialogue with the rest of the natural world. </p>
<p>It requires a sensitivity on the part of the reader, but its effect is to instil an appreciation for what surrounds us. Through a meaningful, felt awareness of the seasonal cycles, the reading and writing of haiku inspires a deeper connection to our environment.</p>
<h2>How haiku is changing</h2>
<p>I spent the summer of 2022 in my home office, consuming decades of haiku journals and anthologies, trying not to leave sweaty fingerprints on their ancient covers in the unnatural 40°C heat. As that year’s researcher-in-residence for the British Haiku Society, working on a project called <a href="http://britishhaikusociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Twisting-Point.pdf">Twisting Point</a>, I was searching for tell-tale traces of climate change in the English-language haiku archives.</p>
<p>My goal was to contrast present-day haiku against older archival ones, using the differences between them to make readers sensitive to nature’s decline and to suggest how the English-language haiku form might be evolving due to climate change. </p>
<p>I was looking at 30 years’ worth of haiku. In the UK during this time flying insect populations have <a href="https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/may/uks-flying-insects-have-declined-60-in-20-years.html">fallen by over 60%</a>, 41% of wildlife species have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/03/populations-of-uks-most-important-wildlife-have-plummeted-since-1970#:%7E:text=In%2520addition%2520to%2520the%2520214,%252C%2520habitat%2520loss%2520and%2520degradation.">decreased in abundance</a> and the frequency of heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather have <a href="https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weather-and-climate/2022/uk-climate-continues-to-change-in-2021#:%7E:text=The%2520latest%2520annual%2520report%2520shows,the%2520year%2520across%2520the%2520UK.">all increased</a>. More than enough change has occurred in these three decades to manifest in the archives.</p>
<p>Yet, these changes emerge in a strange fashion. It’s hard to write about nature’s losses, and writers tend to do so unconsciously. Rather than tracking population declines in concrete terms, then, the language used around certain species has altered, becoming soaked in grief.</p>
<p>For example, over 25 years numbers of curlews, a wading bird, have <a href="https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/breeding-bird-survey/bbs-publications/bbs-reports">halved</a> in the UK. Earlier haiku described their powerful cry “lengthen[ing] the hill[s]”; a poem written in 2022 found them “calling across wintry mudflats, haunting the wind”. Similarly, since 2000, <a href="https://butterfly-conservation.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/State%20of%20UK%20Butterflies%202022%20Report.pdf">declining butterflies</a> have moved from being a “cloud” common in the background of haiku to lone survivors “pushing against time”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A wading bird in shallow water with a long, slender, curved beak." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582070/original/file-20240314-26-b83fcc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Curlews use their crescent beaks to probe the soft intertidal mud for worms.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/curlew-blue-nature-background-bird-eurasian-393557542">Emutan/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The archetypal seasonal words used in haiku are shifting too, disrupting centuries-long traditions of meaning and emotion. As winter has been squeezed into weeks, spring arrives earlier and frosts become tardier, snowdrops have become a symptom of the changing haiku form.</p>
<p>Here is a haiku published in the 1990s in the spring seasonal category (the traditional haiku date for spring’s beginning is February 4):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>song of a greenfinch</p>
<p>a ray of sun on cold steps </p>
<p>and a few snowdrops</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By 2022, snowdrops are emerging in December in this tanka (a slightly longer poem variety) by Ruth Parker:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Omicron triumphs</p>
<p>and sends Christmas packing – but in the garden</p>
<p>the delicate white hope</p>
<p>of snowdrops</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Small white flowers." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581929/original/file-20240314-24-rorauy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Snowdrops are flowering earlier as the climate warms.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/snowdrop-common-galanthus-nivalis-flowers-1319256830">Daniel Chetroni/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I was struck by how few haiku seemed to address climate change. Twisting Point became my call to arms for haiku writers. Haiku are about intense moments of perception, in which <a href="http://britishhaikusociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Twisting-Point.pdf">“the vast is perceived in one thing”</a>. But in addressing climate change so little, are English-language haiku really depicting “the vast”?</p>
<p>Since 2022 the issue has come to the fore, with The Guardian describing how Japanese haiku writers are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/14/lost-to-the-climate-crisis-japan-haiku-poets">“lost for words”</a> in the face of climate change. Meanwhile, Twisting Point is to be <a href="https://poetrysociety.org.nz/affiliates/haiku-nz/haiku-poems-articles/">republished in a journal</a> of the New Zealand Poetry Society. The call to haiku arms is growing: the vast climate crisis is upon us, and we should write about it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225697/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jasmin Kirkbride is a member of the British Haiku Society, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UKI) and the Haiku Foundation Registry. She is also a member of the Society of Authors and Mensa.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Chambers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Haiku poems chart flowers appearing earlier and species retreating to the margins.
Jasmin Kirkbride, Lecturer in Publishing, University of East Anglia
Paul Chambers, PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222751
2024-03-13T22:28:39Z
2024-03-13T22:28:39Z
How do you write a ‘Vietnamese’ poem? Nam Le’s defiantly cerebral verses shuffle the deck of identity, belonging and being
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581500/original/file-20240313-28-dismmx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C10%2C2293%2C2341&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nam Le.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Simon & Schuster</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Flying in the face of much contemporary poetry, Nam Le’s first collection <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/36-Ways-of-Writing-a-Vietnamese-Poem/Nam-Le/9781761423369">36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem</a> is defiantly cerebral, relishing the polysyllabic, the latinate and the esoteric. This is not to say that there aren’t notes of utter beauty and great feeling, just that Le is not afraid of being difficult. The difficulty is part of the collection’s aesthetic. </p>
<p>In an interview, Le said that he dreamed his work could sustain a “cold read” as easily as an “academic assault”. These are severe yardsticks for a poet to write by, so it is little wonder that his poems are exacting, sometimes peremptory in tone. </p>
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<p><em>Review: 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem – Nam Le (Simon & Schuster)</em></p>
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<p>Underlying even the most comic or lyrical of moments in the book is a seriousness and a woundedness that tips into anger and sorrow. Because the poetry is meticulous and skilled – the work of a poet who has lived with poetry for the longest time – the anger, the woundedness and the sorrow are directed and purposeful, not confessional, not easily sincere or authentic.</p>
<p>With poem titles including [16. Violence: Autologous], [18. Inter-Analectional] and [30. Asymptotic], there is no quick or easy reading. The square brackets suggest domains outside of poetry – linguistics, coding, mathematics – but brackets also embed a phrase or idea more deeply within a sentence or an already parenthetical idea. </p>
<p>The effect is of a <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100201557">mise en abyme</a> – an infinite regression – that resists the impulse to classify and order. The bracketed and numbered titles make the process of referencing a poem from the collection, whether in a review or elsewhere, more laborious and exacting. This is a kind of play – serious play, but play nonetheless. </p>
<p>That each title is adjectival is a reminder that each poem refers outwards. It is not an end, but a “way” to a larger poem – perhaps but not necessarily the elusive, impossible Vietnamese poem of the title.</p>
<h2>Imagination, emotion, intellect</h2>
<p>Nam Le has won prestigious and lucrative prizes. He studied at Harvard, where he was fiction editor of the Harvard Review, and has published <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/david-malouf">a book on David Malouf</a> as part of Black Inc.’s “writers on writers” series. </p>
<p>But he is best known as the author of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-boat-9780143009610">The Boat</a>, a collection of short stories that includes the award-winning eponymous story about Mai, a young girl who is smuggled out of Vietnam. </p>
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<p>The story was written beautifully and viscerally enough to find itself on reading lists of universities and schools, nationally and overseas. In its scope and language, The Boat drew something mythic from the short story form. Perhaps this had something to do with Le’s disregard for length – at 40 pages, it’s a long short story – or perhaps it was because his driving narrative prose dipped into the rhythms and imagery of poetry. </p>
<p>The Boat was a story that captured the imagination, harnessing the historical and the political, but ultimately rendering these realities secondary to the work that art does. If transcendence is too vexed a term, then Le’s story might be said to transform the reader, at least temporarily, into a being concerned with existence, with the business of being human in a fallen world. </p>
<p>In pitting the frail singularity of a child against the forces of war and border politics, The Boat appeals to the emotions. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, with its insistence on the constructedness and the materiality of language – both as sound and writing – appeals to the intellect. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/andre-daos-brilliant-debut-novel-explores-his-grandfathers-ten-year-detention-without-trial-by-the-vietnamese-government-201570">André Dao's brilliant debut novel explores his grandfather's ten-year detention without trial by the Vietnamese government</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Ways and means</h2>
<p>To ask whether this book is a collection of poems or a single long “Vietnamese” poem is to step through the looking glass, where an entity called “You” looms large, and meanings and associations become slippery. </p>
<p>Read as a book-length poem, 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem has an almost overdetermined chronological structure. Narratively speaking, it starts at the beginning and ends at the end. </p>
<p>The first poem, [1. Diasporic], is too stylised to be read as straightforwardly autobiographical. But when Le posits it as the first “way” to write a Vietnamese poem, he plays on his origins and the “dynamic borderline” (as Jacques Derrida puts it in <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska-paperback/9780803265752/">The Ear of the Other</a>), between a writer’s life and their work. </p>
<p>The book ends with a 37th poem, implying that one poem in the collection does not constitute a “way”. [37. Post-racial/-glacial] is ecopoetic. It is an exercise in speculative futurism that imagines a post-racial world – something that may be the furthest thing now imaginable. The “glacier” is the addressee, but it is also an image, symbol and metaphor – of climate catastrophe, geological timeframes, and the “sediments” of page and self. </p>
<p>[1. Diasporic] opens with parody, a deep-throated burlesque: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In English, mind You.<br>
You dink I writee Yiknamee?<br>
Shame on You.<br>
It was Your violence dumbed me.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The forceful use of deictic markers – the “you"s and "me"s and "here"s and "now"s – moves the reader about the poem as effectively as game controls. Second person is always a bit abrasive, but the capital letter makes "You” an affront to the reader, and deliberately so. </p>
<p>The parody of migrant English – “dink” – is cringeworthy, but it is also the perfect set-up for the wordplay that follows when Le breaks “displacement” up into “dis place ment”. The effect is poignant, the punning almost Beckettian (this place meant). The final line of the poem, the line that propels the reader on their “way” through the collection, is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What’s Vietnamese in me<br>
Could fit in a poem.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The simplicity of the statement has the beauty and affecting quality of the confessional. But to draw the easy parallel between the life of the poet and the line of the poem would be to miss the art. The effect of the stripped back eloquence is heightened by the movement away from the crass, parodic, cruel opening. </p>
<p>Le has almost written a manifesto for art in a post-truth world. Throughout the collection, he displays a passion for the truths that emerge from art, which is not the kind of truth that relies on the fidelity between a poet’s biography and their work. </p>
<p>Sincerity is challenged and reconstituted in [13. Eastern-epistemological] / (NINE WHITE MASTERS SITTING IN A TREE). In this poem, Ezra Pound and Seamus Heaney – white patriarchs of poetry – are targeted with “sitting in a tree” nursery-rhyme mockery. But by the end of the poem, Le does something else with Pound. Remembering Pound’s complicity with Mussolini, but also his support of the poetry of the Jewish-American <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/objectivist-poets">Objectivist poets</a>, such as <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/louis-zukofsky">Louis Zukofsky</a> (“Zukofsky about sincerity”), Le elevates the “word”. Pound ends up entangled in the complicated grammar of something beautiful: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>singing sunrise through an ideogram tree<br></p>
<p>Its shade lanced sunlight down to just the<br>
Spot where word’s made perfect, and the<br>
Word’s – the word is, that – the word<br>
Is “sincerity”.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the opposite of polarising hate-discourses. Nuances, paradoxes and antinomies arise in and through the difficulty – from the need to apply intellect and learning. The complex deck of cards that produce identity, belonging and being is shuffled. </p>
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<p>Many of the poems use avant garde techniques: fragments, quotations, collage, lists. There is the typographic play of footnotes, grey shading and the blacking out of lines. [26. Erasive] takes bureaucratic violence to task, semi-obliterating official reports, leaving only a trickle of letters to be pieced together in the tradition of Blackout Poetry.</p>
<p>Le is as concerned with visual appearance as with semantics. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he is serious about the way form produces meaning, and is often complicit in political violence and oppression. </p>
<p>Lines are often dense – wordy mouthfuls where syntax is distorted, broken up or down. Words are chosen as much for their sound and percussive qualities as their meanings. This concern with materiality of language means that in the most turgid of lines, or lines where diction teeters towards bombast, even outright bathes in it, there is a reward in the sounds of “smashed-together consonants” and the “tonguing” required for articulation.</p>
<p>Reminiscent of the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/language-poetry"><em>L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E</em> poets</a> and Mallarmé’s <a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.php"><em>Un Coup de Dés</em></a>, [31. Nautical] is the most experimental of Le’s poems. Typographic symbols are arranged down the page, organised around the capitalised and bolded word “<strong>ARCHIPELAGO</strong>”. The layout invites alternate thought-routes and encounters, presenting the poem as much as a visual artefact as a semantic packet. </p>
<p>It is important to note that not all of Le’s poems are difficult or highbrow. Idiomatic speech and profanity are important parts of his arsenal. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mother country mother tongue<br>
motherfuckers on the run<br>
eat their words and white bread, son<br>
earn your white man’s tongue.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lines are from [19. Oral-metaphorical], where bathos and vulgarity abound. As Le riffs on the concepts of mouth and tongue, an alternative anatomy of speech emerges. The mouth is described not only as the apparatus of speech, ingestion and eroticism, but “the true / soul’s window”.</p>
<p>Lines and words of Vietnamese are sparingly and strategically placed throughout. They are integral to the experience of the book, as they redraw the boundaries and territories of English with forms and words and concepts that make the language strange and new to itself. </p>
<p>Le takes English to task as a language of empire and capitalism. He challenges its grammar, its generative racism and inherited prejudices. Latin, untranslated, is as present as Vietnamese – even more so. It serves as a reminder of how idiotic it is to think in terms of purity of language, and who speaks what.</p>
<p>This is especially the case in [15. Dire-critical], where English’s lack of tonal variation is foregrounded as poverty. Diacritics signalling the rise and fall of voice are essential to Vietnamese (and so many languages). They are figured here as both endangered and precious. </p>
<p>In a superb final stanza, a Vietnamese body burned by napalm compounds pregnant grief and intergenerational trauma into a single, loaded, “future-tensed … dot”.</p>
<p>In [5. Violence: Taxonomic], racist taxonomies and translations are formally flipped. The first half of poem runs through the Latin of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_nomenclature">Linnaeas’s binomial system</a>, ending strategically with the infamous “<em>varietas</em>” of humans classified by colour of skin. </p>
<p>The second part of the poem hinges on the motto “<em>Nosce te ipsum</em>” – “know yourself”. Every skin colour Linnaeus identifies is fed back to him, as though he were the specimen, from his “yellowish” sallowness to blood irrigated by “black bile”.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-david-maloufs-an-imaginary-life-28201">The case for David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Difficulty and artistic sovereignty</h2>
<p>Part of the point of making poems difficult is that they don’t talk to everyone. The difficulty resists a populism that devalues expertise. At at time when people seem increasingly unable to read in any way other than literally, satire and irony are also risky. 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem shows that Le is not risk-adverse.</p>
<p>Difficulty slows the reading down. It makes the reader either accept a partial understanding or inspires them to work harder to decode and understand. It resists simple causal readings – the kind of readings that would see an event in the writer’s life as the explanation for an event in a poem or a book.</p>
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<p>Artistic sovereignty is something Le admires in the work of David Malouf. In an essay in Granta titled <a href="https://granta.com/a-great-lake/">A Great Lake</a>, he argues that Malouf’s writing has refused to follow a particular trajectory. It has not followed the trajectory of Malouf’s life, nor has it stuck to a few recognisably “Maloufian” themes or topics. Cutting his own artistic path, irrespective of market demands or literary trends or publishing expectations, Malouf “seems to have preserved – with natural lightness of touch – this personal, artistic sovereignty for himself”. </p>
<p>Sovereignty comes with the power to name, to call the shots – to decide what is war, what is terrorism, who is beautiful, who isn’t, who speaks, who doesn’t, who belongs, what matters, whose stories dominate.</p>
<p>The moments in 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem that appear unguarded are few, but they are also sovereign. Like the small knapsack of cut diamonds in the collection’s 32nd poem, they are unexpected, worked for – and the work matters – and designed to give old ways new currency.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222751/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Hamadache does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To ask whether 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poems or a single long poem is to step through the looking glass.
Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220026
2024-03-12T12:29:06Z
2024-03-12T12:29:06Z
What is the Japanese ‘wabi-sabi’ aesthetic actually about? ‘Miserable tea’ and loneliness, for starters
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580795/original/file-20240309-24-70pplt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2046%2C1454&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A perfectly imperfect tea bowl.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/earthenware-bowl-with-glazing-against-black-royalty-free-image/1689830483?phrase=wabi+sabi&adppopup=true">Zen Rial/Moment via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On a recent visit to New York I stopped at a Japanese bookstore in Manhattan. Among the English-language books about Japan, I encountered a section of a shelf marked “WABI-SABI” and stocked with titles such as “Wabi Sabi Love,” “The Wabi-Sabi Way,” “Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers,” and, in all lowercase, “simply imperfect: revisiting the wabi-sabi house.” </p>
<p>What is wabi-sabi, and why does it rate its own section alongside such topics as sushi and karate?</p>
<p>Wabi-sabi is typically described as a traditional Japanese aesthetic: the beauty of something perfectly imperfect, in the sense of “flawed” or “unfinished.” Actually, however, wabi and sabi are similar but distinct concepts, yoked together far more often outside Japan than in it. Even people who have been brought up in Japan may struggle to define wabi and sabi precisely, though each is certainly authentically Japanese and neither is especially obscure.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two rows of books displayed spine-out in a store." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580796/original/file-20240309-30-4z3p0j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A wabi-sabi sighting in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul S. Atkins</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<p>As <a href="https://asian.washington.edu/people/paul-s-atkins">a scholar of classical Japanese language, literature and culture</a>, I too have a professional interest in wabi and sabi and how they have come to be understood outside Japan. A cursory search of Google Books shows that the term began to appear in print in English around 1980. Perhaps this was a delayed reaction to a book by <a href="https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/people-and-functions/authors-scholars-and-activists/yanagi-soetsu-1889-1961">Japanese art critic Yanagi Soetsu</a>, “<a href="https://kodansha.us/product/the-unknown-craftsman/">The Unknown Craftsman</a>,” which was translated into English and published in 1972.</p>
<p>In it, in an essay titled, “The Beauty of Irregularity,” Yanagi wrote about the art of the tea ceremony and its simple grace. More broadly, as the title suggests, he was captivated by a sense of beauty apart from traditional ideals of perfection, refinement and symmetry. </p>
<p>Behind “roughness,” Yanagi wrote, “lurks a hidden beauty, to which we refer in our peculiar adjectives ‘shibui,’ ‘wabi,’ and ‘sabi.’” </p>
<p>Shibui means austere or restrained, yet it was wabi and sabi that caught on abroad – perhaps because they rhyme.</p>
<p>After taking off in America and other countries, the phrase wabi-sabi was imported back to Japan as a compound term; the mentions I found in online Japanese sources typically addressed such topics as how to explain wabi-sabi to foreigners. Wabi-sabi does not appear in standard dictionaries of the Japanese language.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The interior of a simple room with faded walls, wooden beams, and a simple scroll hanging in the background." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580798/original/file-20240309-20-kp1zde.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A tearoom in Kyoto, Japan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/tea-room-low-angle-view-royalty-free-image/200552152-001?phrase=japan+tea+room&adppopup=true">Karin Slade/Corbis Documentary via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Miserable poetry</h2>
<p>Wabi is a noun derived from the classical Japanese verb “wabu,” related to the modern verb “wabiru” and adjective “wabishii.” Wabu means to languish or be miserable. </p>
<p>Here is a celebrated example from a ninth-century waka poem, <a href="http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_600ce_waka.htm">the brief verse of 31 syllables</a> that forms the backbone of classical Japanese poetry. The poet, a courtier named Yukihira, was a provincial governor who, by some accounts, <a href="https://asia453.wordpress.com/literary-locations/locations2016/lack-and-loneliness-on-the-shores-of-suma/">was exiled to Suma Bay</a>, a famous stretch of coastline in western Japan.</p>
<blockquote>Should by chance<br>
Someone ask for me,<br>
Answer that I languish<br>
At Suma Bay, shedding<br>
brine upon the seaweed.</blockquote>
<p>Suma Bay wasn’t all misery for Yukihira; according to legend, <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78554">he loved and was loved</a> by two sisters there. But his poem well captures the pain of wabi – the misery of having been exiled from the courtly world he knew.</p>
<h2>Miserable tea</h2>
<p>Eventually, the misery of wabi made its way into one of Japan’s most iconic traditions: tea.</p>
<p>The custom of drinking powdered green tea, called matcha, entered Japan around 1200. Zen monks returning from China brought the powder home, using it as a medicine and a stimulant. Over time, tea spread to the rest of the population; by the middle of the 16th century, it was a mundane part of everyday life.</p>
<p>It was precisely then that the preparation and serving of tea was sublimated to high art, now known as “chadō” or “sadō,” <a href="https://www.urasenke.or.jp/texte/about/chado/">the so-called Way of Tea</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Two people kneeling in a small, roofed room open to the outdoors, set in a garden, look at the photographer." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/577821/original/file-20240226-20-q7p9f5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Japanese couple in a 19th-century tearoom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/japanese-couple-in-teahouse-news-photo/534244298?adppopup=true">Historical Picture Archive/Corbis Historical via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the tea ceremony gained in popularity, powerful warlords competed in acquiring the most coveted utensils, including braziers, kettles, scoops, whisks and the bowllike cups in which the tea was whipped and sipped. The tearoom itself might be decorated with rare works of art, such as paintings or calligraphy mounted on hanging scrolls, elaborate flower vases and incense burners.</p>
<p>Then there emerged a group of connoisseurs and teachers of tea who championed a more severe and austere style of presentation: “wabi-cha,” which literally means miserable tea. Whereas newly ascendant warriors and merchants used the tea gathering to flaunt their wealth, <a href="https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/76335">wabi-style tea</a> emphasized subtlety, frugality and restraint.</p>
<p>It is not hard to see traces of wabi in old tearooms, with their patina of age and elegant but unobtrusive furnishings, and in the utensils themselves – in particular, the misshapen, cracked or somber-hued teabowls. </p>
<p>Wabi-style tea perhaps reached its pinnacle in the 16th century, when the celebrated tea master <a href="https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1028&context=arch_facultyschol">Sen no Rikyū</a> introduced innovations still used today. These include bamboo tea scoops, black raku-style ceramic teabowls and the “crawling entrance”: the 2-by-2-foot door through which attendees wriggle in order to enter the cozy, womblike tearoom.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A plain black bowl with a faint golden pattern, resting against a white backdrop." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580799/original/file-20240309-30-b210tf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A raku-ware teabowl with a design of geese, made in the 18th or 19th century.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/raku-ware-tea-bowl-with-design-of-descending-geese-18th-news-photo/1365697034?adppopup=true">Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A lovely loneliness</h2>
<p>Like wabi, sabi is a noun: in this case, derived from the classical verb “sabu.” Today, the verb “sabiru” means to rust, with its connotations of age and decay. The modern adjective “sabishii” means lonely.</p>
<p>Classical poems yield many examples of sabi but it really took off as an aesthetic ideal in the 17th century. Poets often tried to capture its particular kind of loneliness in the 17-syllable poetic form of haiku.</p>
<p>As the scholar <a href="https://news.stanford.edu/2020/10/02/makoto-ueda-stanford-japanese-literature-professor-emeritus-dies-89/">Makoto Ueda</a> remarked, sabi is “not the loneliness of a man who has lost his dear one, but <a href="https://press.umich.edu/Books/L/Literary-and-Art-Theories-in-Japan">the loneliness of the rain</a> falling on large taro leaves at night, or the loneliness emerging out of a cicada’s cry amid the white, dry rocks, or the Milky Way extending over the rough sea, or a huge river torrentially rushing in the rainy season.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/basho">Matsuo Bashō</a>, a 17th-century master of haiku, saw sabi <a href="https://www2.yamanashi-ken.ac.jp/%7Eitoyo/basho/shitibusyu/sumidawara1.htm">in this verse</a> by his disciple Mukai Kyorai, translated by Ueda: </p>
<blockquote>Under the blossoms<br>
Two aged watchmen,<br>
With their white heads together—.</blockquote>
<p>The juxtaposition of wabi-sabi as a single term is of recent, not ancient, vintage, and it does not seem to have occurred in Japan. Nonetheless, the terms originated in Japanese aesthetics: sabi out of poetry and wabi out of tea. </p>
<p>Combined, they appear to fill a gap in the Western vocabulary for talking about art and life – a leaning away from perfection, completion and excess, and a yearning toward leaving something undone, broken or unsaid.</p>
<p><em>This story has been updated to correct the description of a tearoom door’s dimensions.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>I was a student of Professor Makoto Ueda.</span></em></p>
‘Wabi’ and ‘sabi’ are Japanese words with long histories, but they are rarely used together in the way Western designers have come to use the term.
Paul S. Atkins, Professor of Japanese, University of Washington
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223312
2024-02-15T19:04:36Z
2024-02-15T19:04:36Z
Should Taylor Swift be taught alongside Shakespeare? A professor of literature says yes
<p>Does Taylor Swift’s music belong in the English classroom? No, obviously. We should teach the classics, like <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/">Shakespeare’s Sonnets</a>. After all, they have stood the test of time. It’s 2024 and he was born in 1564, and she’s only 34. What’s more, she is a pop singer, not a poet. Sliding her into the classroom would be yet another example of a dumbed-down curriculum. It’s ridiculous. It makes everyone look bad. </p>
<p>I’ve heard all that. And plenty more like it. But none of it is right. Well, the dates might be, but not the assumptions – about Shakespeare, about English, about teaching, and about Swift. </p>
<p>Swift is, by the way, a poet. She sees herself this way and her songs bear her out. In Sweet Nothing, on the <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-midnights/">Midnights</a> album, she sings:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the way home<br>
I wrote a poem<br>
You say “What a mind”<br>
This happens all the time.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m sure it does. Swift is relentlessly productive as a songwriter. With Midnights, she picked up <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/04/entertainment/taylor-swift-album-of-the-year-grammys/index.html">her fourth Grammy for Album of the Year</a>. And here we are, on the brink of another studio album, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortured_Poets_Department">The Tortured Poets Department</a>, somehow written and produced amid the gargantuan success of Midnights and the Eras World Tour. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-did-taylor-swift-get-so-popular-she-never-goes-out-of-style-213871">How did Taylor Swift get so popular? She never goes out of style</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An ally of literature</h2>
<p>Regardless of what The Tortured Poets Department ends up being about, Swift is already a firm ally of literature and reading. She is <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-donates-6000-books-to-library/">a donor of thousands of books</a> to public libraries in the United States, an advocate to schoolchildren of the importance of reading and songwriting, and a lover of the process of crafting lyrics. </p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnbCSboujF4">2016 Vogue interview</a>, Swift declared with glee that, if she were a teacher, she would teach English. The literary references in her songs are endlessly noted. “I love Shakespeare as much as the next girl,” she wrote in a <a href="https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a26546099/taylor-swift-pop-music/">2019 article for Elle</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mdgKhdcQrNw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Her interview Read Every Day gives a good sense of this. Swift speaks about her writing process in ways that make it accessible. She explains how songs come to her anywhere and everywhere, like an idea randomly appearing “on a cloud” that becomes the first piece in a “puzzle” that will be assembled into a song. She furtively whisper-sings song ideas into her phone when out with friends. </p>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/news/read-taylor-swifts-full-nsai-songwriter-artist-of-the-decade-award-speech">acceptance speech for the Nashville Songwriter-Artist of the Decade Award</a> in 2022, Swift explained how she writes in three broad styles, imagining she is holding either a “quill”, a “fountain pen”, or a “glitter gel pen”. Songcraft is a joyous challenge for her. </p>
<p>If, as teachers of literature, we are too proud to credit Swift’s plainly expressed love of English (regardless of whether we like her songs or not), we are likely missing something. To bluntly rule her out of the English classroom feels more absurd than allowing her in. </p>
<p>Clio Doyle, a lecturer in early modern literature, has <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-taylor-swift-belongs-on-english-literature-degree-courses-219660">summarised</a> Swift’s suitability for English in a recent article which concludes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The important thing isn’t whether or not Swift might be the new Shakespeare. It’s that the discipline of English literature is flexible, capacious and open-minded. A class on reading Swift’s work as literature is just another English class, because every English class requires grappling with the idea of reading anything as literature. Even Shakespeare. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doyle reminds us Swift’s work has been taught at universities for a while now and, inevitably, the singer’s name keeps cropping up in relation to Shakespeare. This isn’t just a case of fandom gone wild or Shakespeare professors, like <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/why-taylor-swift-is-a-literary-giant-by-a-shakespeare-professor-20230518-p5d9cn.html">Jonathan Bate</a>, gone rogue. </p>
<p>The global interest in the world-first academic <a href="https://swiftposium2024.com/">Swiftposium</a> is a good measure of how things are trending. Moreover, it is wrong to think Swift’s songs are included in units of study purely to be adored. Her wide appeal is part of her appeal to educators, but that doesn’t mean her art is uncritically included. </p>
<p>The reverse is true. Claire Hansen <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/pop-star-philosopher-poet-taylor-swift-is-shaking-up-how-we-think-20240207-p5f342.html">taught Swift in one of her literature units at the Australian National University</a> last year precisely because this influential singer-songwriter prompts students to explore the boundaries of the canon.</p>
<p>I will be teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together in a literature unit at the University of Sydney this semester. Why? Not because I think Swift is as good as Shakespeare, or because I think she is not as good as Shakespeare. These statements are fine as personal opinions, but unhelpful as blanket declarations without context. The nature of English as a discipline is far more complex, interesting and valuable than a labelling and ranking exercise. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-shakespeares-sonnets-an-honest-account-of-love-and-a-surprising-portal-to-the-man-himself-156964">Guide to the classics: Shakespeare’s sonnets — an honest account of love and a surprising portal to the man himself</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Teaching Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets</h2>
<p>I teach Shakespeare’s sonnets as exquisite poems, reflective of their time and culture. I also teach three modern artworks that shed contemporary light on the sonnets. </p>
<p>The first is Jen Bervin’s 2004 book <a href="https://www.jenbervin.com/projects/nets">Nets</a>. Bervin prints a selection of the sonnets, one per page, in grey text. In each of these grey sonnets, some of Shakespeare’s words and phrases are printed in black and thus stand out boldly. </p>
<p>The result is a <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/palimpsest">palimpsest</a>. The Shakespearean sonnet appears lying, like fertile soil, beneath the briefer poem that emerges from it. Bervin describes this technique as a stripping down of the sonnets to “nets” in order “to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible – a divergent elsewhere”. The creative relationship between the Shakespearean base and Bervin’s proverb-like poems proves that, as Bervin says, “when we write poems, the history of poetry is with us”. </p>
<p>The second text is Luke Kennard’s prizewinning 2021 collection <a href="https://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2021/04/notes-on-the-sonnets/">Notes on the Sonnets</a>. Kennard recasts the sonnets as a series of entertaining prose poems. Each poem responds to a specific Shakespearean sonnet, recasting it as the freewheeling thought bubble of a fictional attendee at an unappealing house party. In an interview with C.D. Rose, Kennard <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/30078-luke-kennard-interview-the-answer-to-everything-notes-on-the-sonnets">explains</a> how his house party design puts the reader </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in between a public and private space, you’re at home and you’re out, you’re free, you’re enclosed. And that’s similar in the sonnets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The third text is Swift’s Midnights. Unlike Bervin’s and Kennard’s collections, in which individual pieces relate to specific sonnets, there is no explicit adaptation. Instead, Midnights raises broader themes. </p>
<h2>Deep connection</h2>
<p>In her Elle article, Swift describes songwriting as akin to photography. She strives to capture moments of lived experience: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The fun challenge of writing a pop song is squeezing those evocative details into the catchiest melody you can possibly think of. I thrive on the challenge of sprinkling personal mementos and shreds of reality into a genre of music that is universally known for being, well, universal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her point is that the pop songs that “cut through the most are actually the most detailed” in their snippets of reality and biography. She says “people are reaching out for connection and comfort” and “music lovers want some biographical glimpse into the world of our narrator, a hole in the emotional walls people put up around themselves to survive”.</p>
<p>Midnights exemplifies this. It is a concept album built on the idea that midnight is a time for pursuit of and confrontation with the self – or better, the selves. Swift says the songs form “the full picture of the intensities of that mystifying, mad hour”. </p>
<p>The album, she says, is “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams” for those “who have tossed and turned and decided to keep the lanterns lit and go searching – hoping that just maybe, when the clock strikes twelve […] we’ll meet ourselves”.<br>
Swift claims that Midnights lets listeners in through her protective walls to enable deep connection: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before. I struggle with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and […] I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Midnights is not a sonnet collection, but it has fascinating parallels. There is no firm narrative through-line. Nor is there a through-line in early modern sonnet collections such as Shakespeare’s. Instead, both gather songs and poems that let us see aspects of the singing or speaking persona’s thoughts, emotions and experiences. Shakespeare’s speaker is also troubled through the night in sonnets 27, 43 and 61.</p>
<p>The sonnets come in thematic clusters, pairs and mini-sequences. It can be interesting to ask students if they can see something similar in the order of songs on the Midnights album – or the “3am” edition with its seven extra tracks, or the “Til Dawn” edition with another three songs. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575766/original/file-20240215-16-akcmh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of William Shakespeare – John Taylor (1610).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shakespeare.jpg">Public domain.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, in their edition of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/all-the-sonnets-of-shakespeare/AE1912C43BE4F50391B25B83C0C03B1F">All the Sonnets of Shakespeare</a>, say Shakespeare’s collection is “the most idiosyncratic gathering of sonnets in the period” because he “uses the sonnet form to work out his intimate thoughts and feelings”. </p>
<p>This connects very well with the agenda of Midnights. Both collections are piecemeal psychic landscapes. The singing or speaking voice sometimes feels autobiographical – compare, for example, sonnets 23, 129, 135-6 and 145 to Swift’s songs Anti-hero, You’re On Your Own, Kid, Sweet Nothing, and Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve. At other times the voices feel less autobiographical. Often there is no way to distinguish one from the other. </p>
<p>Swift’s songs and Shakespeare’s Sonnets are meditations on deeply personal aspects of their narrators’ experiences. They present us with encounters, memories, relationships, values and claims. Swift’s persona is that of a self-reflective singer, just as Shakespeare’s is that of a self-reflective sonneteer. Both focus on love in all its shades. Both present themselves as vulnerable to industry rivals and pressures. Both dwell on issues of power. </p>
<h2>Close reading</h2>
<p>Shakespeare’s sonnets are rewarding texts for close reading because of their poetic intricacy. Students can look at end rhymes and internal rhymes, the way the argument progresses through <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/quatrain">quatrains</a>, the positioning of the “turn”, which is often in line 9 or 13, and the way the final couplet wraps things up (or doesn’t). </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575756/original/file-20240215-26-s2wemm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Title page of the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sonnets1609titlepage.jpg">Public domain</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The songs on Midnights are also rewarding because Swift has a great vocabulary, a love of metaphor, terrific turns of phrase, and a strong sense of symmetry and balance in wording. More complex songs like Maroon and Question…? are great for detailed analysis. </p>
<p>Karma and Mastermind are simpler, yet contain plenty of metaphoric language to be unpacked for meaning and aesthetic effectiveness. Shakespeare’s controlled use of metaphor in Sonnet 73 makes for a telling contrast. </p>
<p>The Great War, Glitch and Snow on the Beach are good for exploring how well a single extended metaphor can function to carry the meaning of a song. Sonnets 8, 18, 143 and 147 can be explored in similar terms.</p>
<p>Just as students can analyse the “turn” or concluding couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet to see how it reshapes the poem, they can do the same with songs on Midnights. Swift is known for writing effective bridges that contribute fresh, important content towards the end of a song: Sweet Nothing, Mastermind and Dear Reader are excellent examples. </p>
<p>Such unexpected pairings are valuable because they require close attention and careful articulation of what is similar and what is not. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, for example (the famous one on lust), and Swift’s Bigger than the Whole Sky (a powerful expression of loss) make for a gripping comparison of how intense feeling can be expressed poetically. </p>
<p>Or consider Sonnet 29 (“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) and Sweet Nothing: both celebrate intimacy as a defence against the pressures of the public world. How about High Infidelity and Sonnet 138 (where love and self-deception coexist), considered in terms of truth in relationships? </p>
<p>There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down involved. And there’s no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/223312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liam E Semler receives research funding from the Better Strangers project which is a collaborative education research project between the University of Sydney and Barker College. Better Strangers hosts the Shakespeare Reloaded website (<a href="https://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/">https://shakespearereloaded.edu.au/</a>) and explores innovative approaches to teaching and learning Shakespeare. </span></em></p>
There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down, and no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.
Liam E Semler, Professor of Early Modern Literature, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/221710
2024-02-09T14:13:47Z
2024-02-09T14:13:47Z
Love songs in Hindu devotion – the Tamil poets who took on the female voice to express their intense longing for the divine
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/573886/original/file-20240206-26-p3825b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=129%2C273%2C2282%2C2415&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An image of a reclining Lord Vishnu with the alvar poets arrayed below him. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Nadar Press Ltd., Sivakasi, ca. 1920s. From the personal print collection of Archana Venkatesan and Layne Little</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Valentine’s Day often revives attention on <a href="https://lgrahamwrites.com/2020/02/13/valentines-day-in-literature/">romantic themes in literature</a>. Stories are cited in media with the aim of helping people navigate the demands of the human heart on a day that has become intimately associated with romantic love. </p>
<p>One literary tradition rarely highlighted is that of <a href="https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/a/194/files/2016/07/Cutler-and-Ramanujan-Classicism-to-Bhakti-wq1iw6.pdf">Hindu “bhakti” or ecstatic devotion</a>, which birthed some of the most stirring mystical poetry composed in the world. The earliest bhakti poems were composed in Tamil, a classical Indian language, in praise of the two great gods of Hinduism — Shiva and Vishnu.</p>
<p>While the poet-devotee adopts many attitudes in relation to their chosen deity, one of the most common is the relationship between a human lover and divine beloved. This is especially true in the poems to Vishnu, <a href="https://religions.ucdavis.edu/people/archana-venkatesan">which I study</a>, where many male poets assume the female voice to express their longing for union with the divine beloved, conceived as male. </p>
<h2>Poetics of longing</h2>
<p>The Tamil poet-devotees to Vishnu lived between the sixth and ninth centuries in the Tamil-speaking regions of peninsular India. Because they are in eternal contemplation of Vishnu, they are called the “alvar” or the “Immersed Ones.” </p>
<p>There are 12 alvar poets, all from different social backgrounds, including one woman, named Kodhai. Much of the alvars’ poetry reveals an intense longing for a silent and absent god, so much so that it has been called “<a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/49789497">viraha bhakti</a>,” or devotion in separation. </p>
<p>The love appears, at least as presented by the poet, as completely one-sided – sparked by a chance encounter with a mysterious and inscrutable deity. It is an unshakable and transformative love that roots itself deep in the poet. </p>
<p>Some male alvar poets adopt the female voice to give full-throated expression to their love for the beautiful male deity Vishnu in all his many forms. The use of a female voice by a male poet is not unusual in the Tamil or Sanskrit literature. But what distinguishes the male bhakti poets’ female voice is the structure of bhakti poetry itself, where the poet and the voice in the poem are read as identical. </p>
<p>Thus, what is in the poem is received by the bhakti traditions as autobiographical accounts of the ups and downs of their <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/cs/title/songs-of-experience-the-poetics-of-tamil-devotion/oclc/43476148">desire for a permanent union</a> with the divine beloved. Then, from this perspective, the male poet uses the gender switch to <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/885027455">explore bhakti’s emotional terrain</a>, particularly as an embodied and physical love for god. In the <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/897060258">words of a 13th century commentator</a>, the poet chooses his own voice in the fleeting moments of union, but the female voice in the endless time in separation. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A series of icons made of black stone of male devotees, standing with folded hands, dressed in colorful, long loincloth." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574403/original/file-20240208-18-86knbn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Images of alvar poets in Ninra Narayana Perumal temple in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Drramakrishnan-Ks/publication/329736254_Perumal_Thirumozhi/links/5c189a9b299bf139c76078c3/Perumal-Thirumozhi.pdf">Ssriram mt/ Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These male poets deploy the full range of archetypal female characters that populate Tamil classical love poetry – the heroine, her mother, her friend and the fortuneteller from the hills – to describe their love for Vishnu. </p>
<p>To this cast of characters, the poets also occasionally use, as Kodhai herself does, mythological female figures. The cowherd women of the wondrous town of Vrindavan, where the youthful divine Krishna is eternally at play, is a particular favorite for the alvar poets. </p>
<h2>Male poets and female voice of longing</h2>
<p>Two ninth century alvar poets, Nammalvar and Tirumankai, are particularly deft in their <a href="https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1383">use of these female voices of longing</a>. Their heroine dominates their poems; her tone in turns demanding, insistent and despairing as she seeks through language to call the absent divine beloved back to her.</p>
<p>To do this, she vividly describes the mesmerizing beauty of the god, manifesting him before her in words, when she can’t have him in an embodied form. Simultaneously, she describes the agonizing effects of her love, hoping the god will show compassion toward her. </p>
<p>In one such verse, Nammalvar, <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/1145431269">in the voice of a lovelorn heroine, says</a>:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code>Worse than the fiercest fire
is the fine powdered darkness of night
the tall chariot of the beautiful sun doesn’t appear,
my beloved, his eyes bright as lotus-blooms, does not come
Who can end my heart’s grief?
I dissolve to nothing. (Tiruvaymoli, V.4.9.)
</code></pre>
<p>If the heroine provides a catalog of her lovesickness, the additional voices of mothers, friends and fortunetellers comment on it. They are the outside observers of the external manifestation of the heroine’s and the poet’s own inner turmoil and desperate desire for union with the divine. </p>
<h2>Love in many shades</h2>
<p>Not all the male alvar poets use one of these archetypal female voices, and a female voice does not always have to speak about romantic love. Some poets such as the late eighth-to-ninth century Kulasekhara Alvar <a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/1039658576">adopt the persona of the doting mother</a> of the Hindu Gods Krishna or Rama, who is also considered an avatara of Vishnu. </p>
<p>In these guises, they sing lullabies to him, adorn him and imagine, like mothers do, a magnificent future for their child. These poems are not composed from the vantage of separation; rather, they are poems of intimacy and joy, celebrating maternal love.</p>
<p>There is, however, one exception to these joyful maternal poems. In a wrenching set of 10 verses in his poem “<a href="https://search.worldcat.org/title/1039658576">Perumal Tirumoli</a>,” Kulashekara Alvar speaks in the voice of Devaki, Krishna’s birth mother, who is forced to give him up to protect his life. In these 10 verses, the poet as Devaki laments the misfortune that prevented her from raising her son, juxtaposing her inconsolable grief with the immeasurable joy of Krishna’s foster mother, Yashoda. </p>
<p>In the poems of the alvar, love, directed toward Vishnu, takes many forms: humble service; unconditional, protective maternal adoration; and the intense intimacy of lovers. Composed from the vantage of separation and rendered in the female voices of women – mothers and abandoned lovers – these poems offer a unique understanding of the mysterious bond that exists between god and his dearest devotees.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/221710/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Archana Venkatesan receives funding from the American Institute of Indian Studies in the form of a four-month short-term Senior Fellowship (June-Sept 30, 2024) to conduct field research in Tamil Nadu, India.</span></em></p>
In Hindu devotional poetry, love directed toward Vishnu can take many forms, including service, maternal adoration and the intense intimacy of lovers.
Archana Venkatesan, Professor of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature, University of California, Davis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222590
2024-02-09T13:33:14Z
2024-02-09T13:33:14Z
Some of the Renaissance’s most romantic love poems weren’t for lovers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574483/original/file-20240208-16-27mgyx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=3%2C5%2C750%2C552&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Codex_Manesse_Bernger_von_Horheim.jpg">AndreasPraefcke/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As poets have demonstrated for centuries, a sonnet for your beloved never goes out of style. The gift of verse may carry extra cachet this Valentine’s Day, on the heels of Taylor Swift’s announcement that <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/taylor-swift-tortured-poets-department-track-list-1234962007/">her next album is poetry-themed</a>. </p>
<p>But in carrying out <a href="https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720274/petrarch-and-the-making-of-gender-in-renaissance-italy">my research on Renaissance literature and gender</a>, I’ve been struck by how many of that period’s love poems were not for lovers.</p>
<p>These sonnets, composed for friends and family, are not just beautiful; they’re also a reminder that love and Valentine’s Day aren’t exclusively for couples.</p>
<h2>The love sonnet is born</h2>
<p>The sonnet was invented in 12th century Italy as a 14-line poem with 11 beats per line and various rhyming patterns. Its originator, Giacomo da Lentini, was a poet in the Kingdom of Sicily who had been inspired by <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-heretical-origins-of-the-sonnet/">older Arabic and French poetry</a>.</p>
<p>But it was the Italian poet <a href="https://poets.org/poet/petrarch">Petrarch</a> who put the form on the map. In the 14th century, he wrote a collection of 366 poems, mostly sonnets. He penned the collection for a woman named Laura, whom he loved from afar in life and after her death.</p>
<p>Petrarch died in 1374, but his poetry became the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Petrarch/tkbVMQEACAAJ?hl=en">most widely published</a> literature of the Italian Renaissance. It was so popular that it inspired generations of poets, imitators known as “Petrarchists.” Petrarchism became a global phenomenon in the 16th and 17th centuries, spreading to Spain, France, England <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo3645653.html">and even the Americas</a>. </p>
<h2>Playing with sonneteering stereotypes</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-wyatt">Thomas Wyatt</a> is thought to have written the first English sonnets, in the early 16th century. His poems strongly relied on Petrarch; some of the best known, like “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/10/poem-of-the-week-thomas-wyatt">Whoso list to hunt</a>,” are quasi-translations of the Italian poet’s work.</p>
<p>Writing <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-poems/#:%7E:text=While%20he%20may%20have%20experimented,writing%20sonnets%20seriously%20around%201592.">a half-century later</a>, Shakespeare changed the form, ending his sonnets with a rhyming couplet, giving birth to the “Shakespearean sonnet.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Title page of a collection of Shakespeare's sonnets featuring a colorful illustration of Shakespeare, flowers and two cherubs." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=765&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574458/original/file-20240208-18-z1gp8z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=961&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to an unnamed young man.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGERCM1~6~6~1189282~187533:-Songs--Songs-and-sonnets--manuscri?qvq=q:112125&mi=0&trs=1#">Folger Digital Image Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than four centuries after the first printing of Shakepeare’s sonnets in 1609, his poems are still oft quoted. Many valentines will find themselves <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/18/">compared to a summer’s day</a> or swearing there can be no impediments between <a href="https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/read/116/">the marriage of true minds</a>.</p>
<p>Less well known, however, is the fact that half of Shakespeare’s poems were addressed to a young man, an unnamed “<a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/mysterious-identity-fair-youth/">Fair Youth</a>.” Depending on which Shakespeare scholar you ask, the gesture is either platonic, romantic or a little of both. In any case, it introduces an element of queerness, in that there’s homoeroticism and a <a href="https://huntington.org/verso/queerness-shakespeares-sonnets">challenge to what society deems natural</a>.</p>
<p>Yet today the Renaissance sonnet still has a reputation, even among scholars, for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman. But even before Shakespeare, in Renaissance Italy, the sonnet was a lot more varied than that.</p>
<h2>For friends and lovers</h2>
<p>For starters, even Petrarch wrote about more than just his love for Laura. </p>
<p>A number of his poems were composed for friends, with several of them for the Florentine poet <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/petrarchs-plague/#p-3-0">Sennuccio del Bene</a>. In <a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=113">poem 113</a>, Petrarch writes about returning to the region where Laura was born, but he opens by describing his love for his friend, saying he is only “half” himself without Sennuccio, and that both men would only be “whole” and “happy” if they were together.</p>
<p><a href="https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/canzoniere.html?poem=287">Poem 287</a> is a sonnet on Sennuccio’s death, in which Petrarch’s mourning is only mitigated by the knowledge that his friend is in heaven with other great poets, like Dante, and the now-deceased Laura. The short poem mixes his love and grief for both people, his beloved and his friend.</p>
<p>Today’s “<a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a26052713/galentines-day/">Galentine’s Day</a>” – a celebration of female friendship – has yet to spawn a male-friendship-centered “<a href="https://theconversation.com/galentines-day-has-become-a-thing-why-hasnt-malentines-day-130862">Malentine’s Day</a>.” </p>
<p>But platonic love between men carried no stigma in the Renaissance. Take the verses of Venetian writers <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orsatto-giustinian_(Dizionario-Biografico)/">Orsatto Giustinian</a> and <a href="https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/celio-magno/">Celio Magno</a>, who published their poetry in a single book in 1601. </p>
<p>Magno and Giustinian portray their friendship with the vocabulary of Petrarchan love. <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rime_di_Celio_Magno_et_Orsatto_Giustinia/SI81w2hdFcMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA160&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22tu%20non%20viui%22">In one sonnet</a>, Magno describes how he hates being separated from his friend, which is almost like being severed from himself: “You do not live, I do not live; together we are far from ourselves in this bitter state.” </p>
<p>At the risk of being the <a href="https://archermagazine.com.au/2021/03/heteronormativity-popular-history/">“and-they-were-roommates” historian</a>, I’ll note that the book also contains passionate poems from Giustinian to his wife, Candiana Garzoni. </p>
<p>That doesn’t cancel out the homoerotic tension in the men’s poems to each other, but it does make classifying their sexuality challenging. And maybe this shouldn’t be the point. If anything, their <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a46410977/broad-city-10th-anniversary-loving-your-best-friend/">romantic friendship</a> seems to skirt simple categories of sexual orientation. </p>
<h2>Sororal sentiment</h2>
<p>Most published writers in Renaissance Italy were men, but a not-insignificant number <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Five-Women-Shaped-Italian-Renaissance/dp/0367533995">were women</a>. Existing in a single copy in a library in Siena, Italy, is a joint poetry collection written by two sisters, Speranza Vittoria and Giulia di Bona. They lived with their mother and four other sisters.</p>
<p>Their sisters Lucrezia and Cassandra both died at a young age. The sonnets that Speranza and Giulia <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=ahDhW3sAAAAJ&sortby=pubdate&citation_for_view=ahDhW3sAAAAJ:Zph67rFs4hoC">composed for them</a> take the sort of heartbreaking imagery used to describe a lost partner, but is repurposed to portray their grief: the swan song, the sun gone dark, the poet’s wish to die in order to be near the object of their love. </p>
<p>In one melancholic poem about Lucrezia’s death, Speranza weeps for the “strange place, dark earth, and bitter stone” that “possess” her sister, and thus her own happiness.</p>
<p>The poems traded between Speranza and Giulia are brighter, exhibiting an abundance of love and admiration. In one pair of sonnets, written playfully yet impressively with matching rhyme words, the two liken each other to white ermines, <a href="https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/lady-with-an-ermine/HwHUpggDy_HxNQ?hl=en&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.872019804523145%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.7206646564529637%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000012%7D%7D">an animal considered a symbol of moral virtue</a>. </p>
<h2>Love is big</h2>
<p>There are so many other Renaissance Italian poems written for friends, parents, children and grandchildren – not to mention fiery love poems dedicated to Jesus and the saints, some by clerics, like <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv15d81vf?turn_away=true">Angelo Grillo</a>.</p>
<p>They serve as reminders of what the love poem can be. They push back against narratives that champion heterosexual relationships or that tout <a href="https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/teaching-premodern-asexualities-and-aromanticisms-908cc375af12">romantic coupling and sexual attraction</a> of any orientation as the most important relationship in a person’s life, <a href="https://theconversation.com/single-on-valentines-day-and-happily-so-155191">minimizing the importance of other loving relationships</a>.</p>
<p>These poems also encourage everyone to think more expansively about their own love and home lives. As an unmarried mother of a 5-year-old – and as someone who has only ever lived with friends or siblings – I have benefited immensely from <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/12/01/1216043849/bringing-up-a-baby-can-be-a-tough-and-lonely-job-heres-a-solution-alloparents">alloparenting</a>, the care provided for my son by all of the nonparents in his life.</p>
<p>I ended up in these living situations in part because of the pandemic, which, in a way, was a form of luck: Sometimes it takes a disruptive event <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-rhaina-cohen.html">to break cultural expectations</a> for the nuclear family and childrearing.</p>
<p>If writers could describe different types of love during the Renaissance, why limit what we can envision for ourselves?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shannon McHugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.
Shannon McHugh, Associate Professor of French and Italian, UMass Boston
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222012
2024-01-31T18:29:06Z
2024-01-31T18:29:06Z
Instapoetry is successful and there’s nothing wrong with that
<p>It looks like this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>words of encouragement<br>
or about love<br>
divided into stanzas<br>
signed off<br>
with the poet’s name </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instagram poetry has made writers like <a href="https://instagram.com/rupikaur_/">Rupi Kaur</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/donnaashworthwords/?hl=en">Donna Ashworth</a> rise to stardom, amassing thousands of followers and earning them quite a bit of money. </p>
<p>As a subgenre of poetry, it combines self-help, reflections on romantic relationships, identity and plain language to create poems that users can quickly grasp and share through hashtags like <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/instapoetry/?hl=en">#instapoetry</a>. Visually, Instapoetry is often accompanied by drawings, uses typewritten fonts and has an overall lack of capitalisation and punctuation. </p>
<p>If you like instapoetry, you’ve likely <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2019/03/why-are-we-so-worried-about-instapoetry">heard all the arguments</a> for why it’s an unserious sub-genre that shouldn’t be seen as “real” poetry. However, its popularity and its boost to overall poetry sales should be taken more seriously by the establishment – as should young people’s love of it. </p>
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<img alt="Quarter life, a series by The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/451343/original/file-20220310-13-1bj6csd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/quarter-life-117947?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">This article is part of Quarter Life</a></strong>, a series about issues affecting those of us in our twenties and thirties. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.</em></p>
<p><em>You may be interested in:</em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/setting-low-stakes-challenges-can-help-you-reach-your-bigger-goals-in-2024-220609?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">Setting low-stakes challenges can help you reach your bigger goals in 2024</a></em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/valentines-day-why-you-should-send-a-love-letter-not-a-text-with-help-from-some-of-englishs-greatest-writers-199813?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">Valentine’s Day: why you should send a love letter not a text – with help from some of English’s greatest writers</a></em></p>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/salman-rushdie-where-to-start-with-this-pioneering-and-controversial-author-188707?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=UK+YP2022&utm_content=InArticleTop">Salman Rushdie: where to start with this pioneering and controversial author</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>While it is hard to track down who created Instapoetry, most <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/20084">sources</a> agree that <a href="https://www.instagram.com/langleav/">Lang Leav</a>, a Cambodian-Australian writer, was the first success story. As she gained popularity online, Andrews McMeel Publishing closed a deal with her for her book <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Love-Misadventure/Lang-Leav/9781449456146">Love and Misadventure</a>, which has sold more than <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/71353-how-to-sell-nearly-a-half-million-copies-of-a-poetry-book.html">150,000 copies</a>.</p>
<p>Since then, Instapoetry has accumulated millions of followers across the web and beyond. Rupi Kaur has sold <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Rupi-Kaur/2119983854">more than 11 million copies</a> of her books and embarked on <a href="https://rupikaur.com/pages/world-tour">an 11-month world tour</a>. The success of Kaur and several other Instapoets <a href="https://www.thebookseller.com/news/poetry-summit-766826">has been linked</a> by the publishing industry to a general <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/24/poetry-sales-boom-as-instagram-and-facebook-take-work-to-new-audiences">increase in poetry sales</a>, driven partly by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/21/poetry-sales-soar-as-political-millennials-search-for-clarity">young people</a>.</p>
<h2>Poetry for the internet</h2>
<p>Key to Instapoetry’s appeal is its accessibility. Instagram enables direct communication between the author and readers, who use the comment section to express their responses to the poem and communicate with each other, creating a community – or at least the sense of one. </p>
<p>The community of Instapoetry-readers is fundamental for the poets. The more interaction their posts or poems receive, the more the content and artwork will be spread.</p>
<p>Instapoetry is no longer bound to the social media platform. <a href="http://electronicbookreview.com/essay/e-lits-1-hit-is-instagram-poetry-e-literature/">As one scholar has put it,</a> Instapoets can seamlessly “shift [their content] from digital to print”, making their work incredibly profitable. Traditional publishers like Penguin, Orion, and Simon and Schuster have added Instapoets to their catalogues. </p>
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<p>Poems can now be found not just in books but also on shirts, mugs and even inscribed into people’s skin. Kaur is more than a poet: she is a brand selling tattoos, clothing and prompts to “<a href="https://rupikaur.com/products/rupi-kaurs-writing-prompts-relationships">build more honest and fulfilling relationships</a>.” Instapoet Atticus has a dedicated <a href="https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17920983745260389/">card</a> on his Instagram profile to share photos of readers who have tattooed his poems. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, some Instapoets have been recognised by literary prizes. Nikita Gill has been shortlisted for the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-poetry-books-2019">Goodreads Choice Awards</a>, while Tommy Pico, a now multi-award winner, began his career writing on <a href="https://heyteebs.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>.</p>
<h2>What about tradition?</h2>
<p>Despite all of Instapoetry’s success, critics have discredited the subgenre for being lowbrow. </p>
<p>In their view, Instapoetry is not poetry, instead resembling “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lili-Paquet/publication/332428398_Selfie-Help_The_Multimodal_Appeal_of_Instagram_Poetry/links/619e9978f1d62445716821db/Selfie-Help-The-Multimodal-Appeal-of-Instagram-Poetry.pdf">positive affirmations given in self-help guides</a>”. This line of criticism states the subgenre’s flaws are in its insistence on writing based on the author’s experience.</p>
<p>Yet in dismissing Instapoetry as “read-and-feel-good” works, these critics miss a fundamental fact: the literary canon is primarily white, heterosexual and male. So when Instapoets such as Rupi Kaur and Nikita Gill write about migration, race, beauty patterns and rape culture, their words give voice to other women of colour who remain silenced. For this, Instapoetry should be celebrated.</p>
<p>Another common negative evaluation is that its success is a “<a href="https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10090">celebration of amateurism and ignorance in our poetry</a>,” as poet Rebecca Watts declared. For Watts and others, the issue with Instapoetry has to do with its lack of interest in playing with language, tradition and form. But must writers be forced into belated modernism, where rules are torn apart? Should every writer aim to be groundbreakingly novel?</p>
<p>In writing Don Quixote, the first modern novel, Cervantes drew on less serious genres like the chivalry romance to inaugurate tradition. Look at how that book is now considered part of “the canon”.</p>
<p>Critics must realise that Instapoetry has achieved something educators, “serious” poets and politicians have failed to do: renew younger generations’ interest in literature. Because adolescents are now buying books, they may stumble upon more traditional literature and consume it – something less likely if they are not walking into bookstores in the first place. Enjoying Instapoetry does not stop the reader from enjoying “the canon”. </p>
<p>Despite its clichés and excessive self-help style, Instapoetry has renewed interest in poetry, and for that, we should celebrate it. And, if you like these short poems, maybe I’ve given you a couple of arguments you can use when next faced with detractors. </p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222012/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rafael Mendes Silva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Literary critics and scholars need to take poetry that originated on social media more seriously.
Rafael Mendes Silva, PhD Candidate, Latin American Studies, Trinity College Dublin
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211279
2024-01-21T19:02:36Z
2024-01-21T19:02:36Z
Emily Wilson’s fluent new translation of the Iliad honours the epic poem’s power and beauty
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569955/original/file-20240117-29-h4ovvh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C5616%2C3368&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Menelaus holding the body of Patroclus – Diana Mantuana (1535-1587).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Menelaus_Holding_the_Body_of_Patroclus.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A new translation of the <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324001805">Iliad of Homer</a> is cause for a general celebration, especially when the translator is <a href="https://www.emilyrcwilson.com/">Emily Wilson</a> of the University of Pennsylvania. </p>
<p>Having turned her hand to translations of other Greek and Latin texts – notably Seneca, Euripides, Oedipus Tyrannos and Homer’s Odyssey – Wilson has moved on to the Iliad, joining an exclusive club of translators of this great work that includes <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richmond-lattimore">Richmond Lattimore</a> and <a href="https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/9310-fagles-robert">Robert Fagles</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Iliad – Homer, translated by Emily Wilson (W.W. Norton)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>This is an excellent publication where some bold decisions have been made to provide a sense of the sound and pace of the original text. As Wilson says in the translator’s note:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wanted to honor the poem’s oral heritage with a regular and audible rhythm, and with language that would, like the original, invite reading out loud, and come to life in the mouth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thus, when reading Wilson’s Iliad one senses something of the chant of Homer’s verse, even through the written word. </p>
<p>Wilson’s book is much more than a translation. It contains a detailed introduction to the nature and dating of Homeric verse, the historical and archaeological issues of the Trojan war, the code of honour within which the Homeric heroes operate, and the broader mythical context of the war. The book could be a whole course in itself, if you wanted to make it one. </p>
<p>We are reminded, for instance, in a discrete section of the introduction, that the Iliad describes the destruction of Troy and the fate of its women, raped and abused by the conquering Greeks. Wilson writes that the “silencing, rape, subjugation, kidnapping and enslavement of women in war are essential instruments for the construction of male honor”. </p>
<p>The more one engages with the Iliad, the more one sees that it is not just a poem of immense power and beauty. It cast such a spell over antiquity that poets and artists after Homer spent much of their time engaging with it. </p>
<p>The Roman poet Vergil, for instance, whose epic poem the Aeneid (written about 700 years after the Iliad) was also focused on the Trojan war theme, may have known the Iliad off by heart. When we pick up Wilson’s translation we realise what a task that must have been.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-virgils-aeneid-85459">Guide to the Classics: Virgil’s Aeneid</a>
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<p>One of the first things to note about Wilson’s translation is that it makes no attempt to offer line-by-line equivalence with the Greek text, as Lattimore does in his 1951 translation. Thus, the 24 books of the poem have both the original Greek line numbers and the line numbers of her translation. This means students of Homeric Greek will not find Wilson’s text such an easy point of reference to check up on their translations.</p>
<p>For Wilson, it was liberating to free herself from the same number of lines as the original Greek. “Once I understood that I needed more lines than the original,” she writes, “I realized I could sometimes use lovely long polysyllabic English words, echoing the original’s use of powerfully long, often compound words interspersed with many shorter connectives, verbs and particles.” </p>
<p>Inevitably, the plethora of names, and the Homeric penchant for repetition in a broader sense, caused Wilson plenty of hard thinking, not to mention the matter of the epithets – the formulaic phrases that appear throughout the poem. How would she deal with “swift-footed Achilles” rather than just “Achilles”, or “Phoebus Apollo”, or “rosy-fingered Dawn”? </p>
<p>Some of the most prominent and radical research in Homeric scholarship over the past hundred years or so (after <a href="https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/8998-parry-milman">Milman Parry</a>, who established that Homer’s poetry was most likely not the work of a single poet) has involved scholarly analysis of the epithets. Wilson’s response is to vary the use of Homeric repetition as determined by poetic considerations: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Like almost all modern translators, I have sometimes varied the phrasing of certain formulaic phrases, usually for sonic or rhythmical reasons. So, for example, Zeus appears in this translation both as “cloud-gathering Zeus” and as “Zeus who gathers clouds together”. Minor variations of this kind seemed to me in keeping with the poetic techniques of the original poem, in which epithets are often chosen for metrical reasons as much as anything. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such a statement will inevitably provide reassurance for textual purists. The epiphany of the goddess Athena to the Greek warrior Achilles, in the midst of Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon in Book 1, gives us a sense of how this plays out and shows what a fine translator Wilson is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But then Athena swooped down from the sky.<br>
She had been sent forth by the white-armed goddess<br>
Hera, who loved both men. Athena stood<br>
behind Achilles, son of Peleus,<br>
and grabbed him by his chestnut hair. She was<br>
invisible to everyone but him.<br>
Achilles, startled, turned and recognized Athena. She had bright, unearthly eyes.<br>
His words flew out.<br>
“Why have you come here daughter<br>
of Zeus, the god who holds the royal aegis?<br>
Was it to see the cruel violence<br>
of Agamemnon, son of Atreus?”<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In such a busy scene as this, with seven individuals mentioned, both deities and mortals – Zeus, Athena, Hera, Achilles, Peleus, Agamemnon and Atreus – it might have been tempting to take out some of the names. Nothing like this happens and the translation is a lot richer for it. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569771/original/file-20240117-21-vp9nh3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Wrath of Achilles – Louis Édouard Fournier (1881)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fournier_La_col%C3%A8re_d%27Achille.JPG">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Devotees of Book 6 will also note how the text flows with remarkable ease:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Hector finished speaking, Hecuba<br>
went in the house and shouted to her slaves<br>
to go through town and call the older women,<br>
and then she went inside her fragrant storeroom.<br>
In it, she kept her fine embroidered robes,<br>
Made by the women of Sidonia<br>
Whom godlike Paris Alexander brought<br>
to Troy across the wide back of the sea,<br>
on that same journey when he brought back Helen,<br>
the daughter of the mightiest of fathers.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Book 6 is one of the more poignant books of the poem. The Trojan warrior Hector returns to the city from the fighting and talks with the women in his family: Hecuba, Andromache and Helen. It loses nothing in the Wilson translation. The reader might also note reference to Paris as “Paris Alexander” – a rather brilliant way of engaging with the fact that both names (i.e. “Paris” and “Alexander”) are used to describe him in the Iliad.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=266&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/569959/original/file-20240117-29-bb72gg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=335&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hector’s body dragged behind the chariot of Achilles – John Flaxman (1895).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hector%27s_body_dragged_at_the_Chariot_of_Achilles.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-iliad-80968">Guide to the classics: Homer's Iliad</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>So on the one hand Homeric purists should not be concerned about the disappearance of certain names or traditions from the Wilson translation. But this is not always the case. </p>
<p>The final book of the poem tells of the ransom mission undertaken by the Trojan king Priam and an old attendant to retrieve the body of Hector from Achilles, who has refused to give it over. The presence of Hermes is crucial in this particular book of the Iliad, because he is the god who oversees reciprocity and exchange. He acts as guide to the two old men. </p>
<p>But more often than not in Book 24 (and elsewhere in Homer) Hermes is called “Argeïphontês” (11 times), rather than “Hermes” (nine times). The name Argeïphontês seems to mean “Slayer of Argos”. It refers to a somewhat obscure narrative set in earlier times, in which Hermes killed a monster called Argos by first putting him to sleep and then striking him. The name Argeïphontês, it seems to me, is important in various ways, and it is something of a pity that it is dropped from the poem – although Wilson does maintain the monster-killing tradition by calling Hermes “the giant-slayer”.</p>
<p>Another surprising passage from Book 24 is Hermes’s arrival at Troy and his encounter with the two old Trojan men, Priam and Idaeus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He reached the Hellespont and Troy. He touched down in a human guise.<br>
He looked like a young man, a magistrate,<br>
with beard first sprouting, the most handsome age.<br>
The humans drove beside the tomb of Ilus,<br>
then at the river made the mules and horses<br>
halt for a drink. Dark night already covered<br>
the earth. Idaeus looked around and noticed<br>
Hermes right next to them and said to Priam …<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This passage, when I read it, seemed to me a strange translation, not the least for the references to a “magistrate” (i.e. a youthful Hermes) and “the humans” who drive past the tomb of Ilus. A “magistrate” in Homer’s Iliad? I don’t think so. </p>
<p>I don’t know what Wilson was thinking at this point, but she is alert to the danger of anachronism, which needs “to be balanced against an equally pressing danger: that archaism or unidiomatic English risks suggesting that the Iliad is more alien and more simplistic in its values than it really is”.</p>
<p>My two quibbles about Book 24 don’t add up to much in the context of this big work. I offer them as something to reflect upon. What is important about Wilson as a translator is that she has an unequivocal love for the text, which dictates almost all that she does:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I first began reading Homer in high school, early in the study of Ancient Greek. I liked the Odyssey, but I loved the Iliad with a passionate devotion. I have now lived with this poem for some 35 years.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We may be thankful for her love for the Iliad, and the longevity of it, and her generosity in offering it up to readers with very different backgrounds.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211279/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Mackie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Reading Wilson’s Iliad, one senses something of the chant of Homer’s verse, even through the written word.
Chris Mackie, Emeritus Professor of Classics, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217781
2024-01-11T19:10:08Z
2024-01-11T19:10:08Z
Sara M. Saleh’s memorable tales of exile, prejudice and resistance reflect the Palestinian experience
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566749/original/file-20231219-19-xrh4eu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C0%2C6221%2C4147&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nayef Hammouri/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.saramsaleh.com/">Sara M. Saleh</a> is a writer and human rights lawyer. She has won two of Australia’s most prestigious poetry prizes: Overland’s <a href="https://overland.org.au/prizes/overland-judith-wright-poetry-prize-for-new-and-emerging-poets/">Judith Wright Poetry Prize</a> in 2020 and Australian Book Review’s <a href="https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/prizes-programs/peter-porter-poetry-prize/2024-peter-porter-poetry-prize/47-competitionsandprograms/9227-2023-peter-porter-poetry-prize">Peter Porter Poetry Prize </a> in 2021. She has published extensively in literary and poetry journals, and co-edited <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781760785017/">Arab, Australian, Other: Stories on Race and Identity</a> with Randa Abdel-Fattah. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: Songs for the Dead and the Living – Sara M. Saleh (Affirm Press) & The Flirtations of Girls/Ghazal el-Banat – Sara M. Saleh (University of Queensland Press)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Saleh has recently published her second full-length collection of poems, <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-flirtation-of-girls-ghazal-el-banat">The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em></a> (she self-published <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Wasting_the_Milk_in_the_Summer.html?id=tYtBvgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Wasting the Milk in Summer</a> in 2016), and her first novel, <a href="https://affirmpress.com.au/browse/book/Sara-M-Saleh-Songs-for-the-Dead-and-the-Living-9781922848536/">Songs for the Dead and the Living</a>. </p>
<p>The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> is a rich collection filled with anger, sorrow, beauty, attitude, wit and humour. Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age story, kaleidoscopic in its formal and tonal variation, about a young girl named Jamilah Husseini and her family, spanning three countries: Lebanon, Egypt and Australia. </p>
<p>Palestine is ever-present in both books, which are marked by the enduring effects of the <a href="https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/#:%7E:text=The%20Nakba%2C%20which%20means%20%E2%80%9Ccatastrophe,ethnic%20and%20multi%2Dcultural%20society."><em>Nakba</em></a> of 1948, the continued struggle to exist in the shadow of Israel, and the impact of exile and prejudice on Palestinian people forced to flee their homeland. </p>
<p>Saleh’s gaze is unflinching. In her prose and her poetry, she renders unique and memorable the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, lose hope and faith – and sometimes become something other than they might have been. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-nakba-how-the-palestinians-were-expelled-from-israel-205151">The Nakba: how the Palestinians were expelled from Israel</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Poetics of exile</h2>
<p>In The Flirtations of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em>, Saleh depicts bodies and places as sites of division, violence, plurality, opportunity and negation. Her poetics are attuned to the price paid by migrants for leaving their homelands. The final lines of her poem You, An Effigy are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nobody told you<br>
the cost of entering was losing your way back.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like many of Saleh’s poems, You, An Effigy is formally inventive, assured and subversive. The “effigy” of the title – a woman who must figuratively burn – desires a home. Sensual and sexual, she wants to be held. But she is ultimately isolated on a shabby, sterile street not hard to recognise as Sydney. The poem transforms the woman from an object of sexual violence to an abrasive speaking subject who defies expectations.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566734/original/file-20231219-15-898zyt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The title of Flirtation of Girls/<em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> refers to an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flirtation_of_Girls">Egyptian film of the same name from 1949</a>, but in Lebanon <em>Ghazal el-Banat</em> can also mean fairy floss. The double-meaning is an indication of the vitality of Saleh’s poetry. </p>
<p>Resolute in her willingness to confront violence head-on, she retains the wit and the playfulness intrinsic to good poetry. Her poems are funny and perfectly improper. They describe the ways women and girls negotiate gender and sexuality, inside and outside of Islam, inside and outside of a broader societal misogyny and patriarchy. </p>
<p>The playfulness is also serious. Saleh’s commitment to poetry as political action is bound up with an aesthetic commitment to art. She deploys poetic forms such as the <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ghazal">ghazal</a> – a challenging form that originated in Persian poetry – with the same assuredness as she experiments with free verse and concrete poems. </p>
<p>Her writing makes evident the porousness of language, territory and history – and the way borders are policed. Arabic and Australian English are enmeshed. Lebanon, Egypt and Australia are overlaid. Histories and mythologies are interwoven. </p>
<p>English is defamiliarised by the inclusion of the many different “God have mercies”, from <em>alhamdullilah</em> to <em>hasbiyallah</em> to <em>inshallah</em>. Saleh also makes use of common Arabic words like <em>banat</em> (girls) and <em>bint</em> (girl/daughter) and phonetic spellings like “HANDRED BERCENT” (100%). </p>
<p>In this way, English is made to feel capacious. As the third most spoken language at home in Australia, Arabic speaks directly to a lot of people, but Saleh uses the Roman alphabet, so the Arabic words are accessible, either as a phonetic experience or via Google for translation. </p>
<p>Saleh’s prize-winning poem <a href="https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-242/poetry-judith-wright-poetry-prize-border-control-mediations/">Border Control: Meditations</a> subverts the usual identity questions asked at borders, in this case the King Hussein Border Terminal between Israel and Jordan. The questions in this poem are intimate, tender, searing and ultimately heartbreaking. The interrogative is replaced with the personal, evoking a human rather than a number or a problem. </p>
<p>In Reading Darwish at Qalandia Checkpoint, the violence of a checkpoint between the West Bank and Jerusalem is paralleled with Australian racial violence against </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cassius Turvey, fifteen-year-old Indigenous boy<br>
who was punched and stabbed for being Black.<br></p>
<p><s>The evidence</s> — REDACTED<br>
<s>His rights</s> — REDACTED<br>
<s>This childhood</s> — REDACTED<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The poems Punctuation as Organised Violence and CAPITAL deconstruct bureaucracy and grammar, drawing attention to the arbitrary fictions that determine </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Visa. Policy. Border.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In Orientalism, Edward Said writes of the “uniquely punishing destiny” of Palestinian people, who confront a “web of racism, cultural stereotypes, political imperialism, dehumanizing ideology”. Saleh’s poem Headlines provides examples of the prejudice Arabs and Muslims encounter in Australia:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘caliphate cutie’ / ‘towelhead’ / ‘sand n*gger’ / ‘stone thrower’<br>
On the bus, in class, at the movies<br>
‘they should sterilise you’ / ‘the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim,<br>
or a dead one’/ ‘don’t blow yourself up’<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In places, perhaps as only a lawyer can, Saleh writes with the precise awareness of someone who understands that the law is founded on a mythic violence, both arbitrary and exclusionary, but that it is also sometimes capable of delivering justice. </p>
<p>Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt and Australia figure in her poems as homelands and homes, as prisons and traps, as political and cultural realities. They are states of being and of mind – imagined and imaginary. </p>
<p>Cities are an important part of Saleh’s poetics. They are repositories of hopes and dreams, grief and loss. The various laws and languages, foods and streetscapes of Sydney, Cairo, Beirut and Nablus give form to memory. </p>
<p>Saleh’s vision and poetic sensibility is attuned to suffering and precarity. Her poems are about women, Palestinian fathers, a Noongar Yamatji boy, Ethiopian women trapped in the kafala system. She makes visible the suffering of those who pay a price for being something other, something more, than a citizen. </p>
<p>In this way, she is a diasporic writer, challenging the limitations and anachronisms of national borders and identities, which are neither adequate models nor accurate reflections of a world under global capitalism and a planet on the brink of climate catastrophe.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/orientalism-edward-saids-groundbreaking-book-explained-197429">Orientalism: Edward Said's groundbreaking book explained</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Displacement and dispossession</h2>
<p>Saleh is keenly aware of the double bind of people dispossessed – expelled from Palestine, yet never fully welcomed anywhere else. Home is political, the body is political, and the experiences of displacement and dispossession are understood as forms of material and existential violence.</p>
<p>This awareness is as much part of Saleh’s fiction as her poetry. Spanning generations and continents, Songs for the Dead and the Living incorporates the stories of multiple lives. The novel is divided into three parts: Beit Samra (1977-82), Cairo (1982-85) and Sydney (1984-86), with a short prologue and epilogue. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566246/original/file-20231218-15-z4cen1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Saleh draws on the historical, political and cultural contexts of Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt to tell the story of Jamilah, the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, her sisters, her paternal grandmother Aishah, and Lobna, an adopted orphaned cousin. </p>
<p>The novel follows the family as they flee their home in Lebanon for Egypt to escape the escalating violence of the <a href="https://www.worldhistoryblog.com/Lebanese-Civil-War.html">Lebanese Civil War</a>. The final part of the novel, set in Sydney, sees Jamilah married and learning to make her life as a migrant while her family remains in Egypt. </p>
<p>Saleh uses a traditional narrative form to write against the grain of history, and against the political and cultural context of a world determined to stereotype Muslims and erase Arab suffering. She covers a lot of territory and includes a lot of characters. </p>
<p>Here is a moment to consider the particular formal challenges the novel presents to a writer moving from poetry to prose. How many characters can be rendered effectively in a relatively short novel? What techniques best achieve the goal of capturing rich and storied lives? A more sustained development of Jamilah’s perspective would have strengthened the depiction of the multiple minor characters.</p>
<p>The novel opens with the family at home in Beit Samra, a town on the hills outside of Beirut, where the family comes closest to belonging. They have a house with a garden. Their father is building a business. Jamilah and Lobna attend school. And Jamilah has a first love – a boy with a Russian mother and Lebanese father. </p>
<p>Despite the fact that Jamilah’s mother is Lebanese and her father was born in Lebanon, the family remain Palestinian in the eyes of many Lebanese, who think of them as “a liability”, or more brutally as “bottom-feeders … ruining the country”. They face discrimination. The father is unable to pursue studies because of laws preventing Palestinians from holding certain offices. Even schooling is restricted for children with Palestinian parents, regardless of whether or not they were born in Lebanon. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-wretched-of-the-earth-9780141186542">The Wretched of the Earth</a>, Frantz Fanon identifies this kind of discrimination and inequity as “geographical compartmentalisation”, where depending on race or ethnicity, the same space is experienced differently. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/quotes-from-frantz-fanons-wretched-of-the-earth-that-resonate-60-years-later-173108">Quotes from Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth that resonate 60 years later</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>When Jamilah’s family are forced to flee, the discrimination continues. Their position is precarious. The possibility of hospitality is conditional. The novel is aware of the way time in narrative is connected to mortality and measured in bodies: it is only when Aishah is on her deathbed that the family learn of her experience of displacement during the <em>Nakba</em> of 1948. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We had a home, and then we didn’t.” That’s how Teta Aishah started it, as though it was some riddle they were supposed to solve. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A young newlywed in the early months of her first pregnancy, Aishah is woken in the night by an extremist militia, which had earlier gunned down seven people in the coffee house of her village. She flees on foot through the prickly pear trees that surround her house and joins a group of refugees to walk the miles to Lebanon, a country with its own history of colonisation, having only “prised itself out of France’s clutches a few years before”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ghassan-hage-is-one-of-australias-most-significant-intellectuals-hes-still-on-a-quest-for-a-multicultural-society-that-hopes-and-cares-206753">Ghassan Hage is one of Australia's most significant intellectuals. He's still on a quest for a multicultural society that hopes and cares</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Let it be a tale’</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/borders-identity-literature/">2020 article in Meanjin</a>, Jumana Bayeh asks “what is missing when we read literature as a reflection of national boundaries?” The question seems particularly pertinent to Saleh’s writing. </p>
<p>She dedicates her novel “To the people of ‘<em>kan yama kan</em>’” – the Arabic equivalent of “once upon a time”. The dedication is an invitation to think beyond nationality to what is shared: the telling of stories. Saleh’s literary influences are diverse, from Vladimir Nabokov to Mahmoud Darwish, Ocean Vuong to Anne Carson. The friendship Jamilah strikes up with a bookseller in Cairo leads her to Naguib Mahfouz. </p>
<p>The importance of literary antecedents is paramount; reading is to be eclectic. Language is political, but porous. French, Arabic, slang, profanity, phatic and poetic language are brought together through a universal grammar.</p>
<p>As I was finishing this review, Palestinian writer and academic Dr Refaat Alareer was killed in an Israeli strike. Only a month before, he had posted a poem on social media that concludes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I die<br>
Let it bring hope<br>
Let it be a tale<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The epigraph to Songs for the Dead and the Living is from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem <a href="https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/and-we-have-countries/">And We Have Countries</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… The exile tells himself: “If I were a bird<br>
I would burn my wings.”<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Between the universal human trait of telling tales – the once upon a time – and the burning of wings lies all the debris of history, with its wars, invasions, injustices and erasures. </p>
<p>In one of her more sorrowful, circumspect poems, City, Sitti of Grief, Saleh writes that in Arabic the word for human shares its root with the word for forgetting. But the recourse to the tale, to the story – the desire to produce a story that endures – is intrinsic to literature. It is all the more pressing for those who feel the precarity of existence daily, perhaps minute by minute. Saleh’s poetry and prose are urgent tributes to remembering.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217781/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Hamadache does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In her prose and her poetry, Sara M. Saleh renders unique the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, and lose hope and faith.
Michelle Hamadache, Lecturer, Literature and Creative Writing, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211287
2024-01-11T17:16:14Z
2024-01-11T17:16:14Z
Hedd Wyn: how the life of one of Wales’ most promising poets was cut short by the first world war
<p>The names Passchendaele, the Somme and Mametz Wood stand as grim sentinels, forever bound to the unimaginable carnage of the first world war. Almost 500,000 men were killed in three months at Passchendaele, the <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-third-battle-of-ypres-passchendaele#:%7E:text=Casualties%20were%20heavy&text=Casualties%20among%20German%20forces%20were,the%20Third%20Battle%20of%20Ypres.">third battle of Ypres</a>. On the first day of that battle, Wales lost one of its most talented poets. </p>
<p>Born on January 13 1887, Ellis Humphrey Evans was the eldest child of Mary and Evan Evans and one of 11 siblings. He became known by his bardic name, <a href="https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781784610425/cofiant-hedd-wyn">Hedd Wyn</a> (Blessed Peace). The family lived and worked at a remote farm outside Trawsfynydd in north-west Wales, called <em>Yr Ysgwrn</em>.</p>
<p>Evan Evans bought his son a book on the rules of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-welsh-developed-their-own-form-of-poetry-73299">strict-metre Welsh verse</a> when Hedd Wyn was 11 years old. He read the book with passion and enthusiasm, and soon mastered the difficult and intricate rules of strict-metre verse, known as <em>cynghanedd</em>.</p>
<p>He wrote his first ever <em>englyn</em> (a short four-lined poem in strict-metre) before his 12th birthday. Soon after, he began competing at local <em>eisteddfodau</em>, Welsh cultural festivals which showcase literary and artistic endeavours.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn spent most of his short life at home. He received little formal schooling. His education was spasmodic and he was frequently absent from school when the weather was bad, as there was a substantial distance between the school and his home.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn was an inept farmer and shepherd, but he loved looking after the sheep out on the mountain pastures, though only because the solitude and silence gave him ample opportunity to meditate and to write poetry.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="An old black and white photo of a man wearing a suit." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=896&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567888/original/file-20240104-26-q5itn3.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1127&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hedd Wyn was 30 years old when he was killed.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Conscription</h2>
<p>And then came war. Hedd Wyn’s fate, along with thousands of others, was sealed when parliament passed the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1916/104/contents/enacted">Military Service Act</a> in 1916. This new legislation imposed conscription and was aimed at unmarried men or widowers. </p>
<p>Hedd Wyn had no choice but to enlist. He joined the 15th battalion of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and by July 1917, he was stationed at Fléchin, a small village in northern France. </p>
<p>He and thousands of other soldiers were to participate in one of the major engagements of the war, the third battle of Ypres, otherwise known as the battle of Passchendaele. British troops were to occupy the village of Pilkem on Pilkem Ridge, and the marshlands to the east of Ypres before advancing towards Langemarck. Capturing the village of Pilkem and Pilkem Ridge, and holding both positions, was one of the main objectives of this enormous campaign. </p>
<p>It was during a period of intense fighting on Iron Cross Ridge on July 31 that Hedd Wyn was mortally wounded. </p>
<h2>The National Eisteddfod</h2>
<p>For a Welsh poet, winning the coveted chair at the <a href="https://eisteddfod.wales">National Eisteddfod</a>, an annual festival celebrating arts, language and culture, represents the <a href="https://blog.library.wales/the-chairing-of-the-bard-3/">pinnacle of achievement</a>. The chair is awarded to the winning entrant in the competition for the <em>awdl</em> – poetry written in strict-metre <em>cynghanedd</em> . A crown is awarded separately to those writing in free verse.</p>
<p>Chairing ceremonies are presided over by the archdruid, who reads the adjudicators’ comments before announcing the nom de plume of the winning bard. Nobody knows the true identity of the poet until the archdruid asks them to stand. </p>
<p>Before enlisting, Hedd Wyn had started working on an <em>awdl</em> for the chair at the 1917 National Eisteddfod. Due to the war, the Eisteddfod that year was held in England, in Birkenhead near Liverpool. Hedd Wyn had almost won the chair the previous year in Aberystwyth.</p>
<p>While stationed in France, he finally completed his <em>awdl</em> titled <em><a href="https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/manuscripts/modern-period/yr-arwr-hedd-wyn">Yr Arwr</a></em> (The Hero) and posted it to Birkenhead under his nom de plume, <em>Fleur-de-lis</em>. He was working on the poem until the last possible minute.</p>
<p>A packed crowd was watching the chairing ceremony in Birkenhead in early September, and among them was the prime minister at the time, David Lloyd George, himself a Welsh speaker. Without knowing he had died of his wounds several weeks earlier, the adjudicators had unanimously awarded the chair to Hedd Wyn. </p>
<p>As is customary, the archdruid called out <em>Fleur-de-lis</em> three times. But nobody stood up. Then he solemnly announced that the poet had been killed in battle six weeks earlier. The empty chair was draped in black in front of an emotional crowd. The 1917 eisteddfod became known as <em>Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu</em> (the Eisteddfod of the Black Chair). </p>
<h2>Hedd Wyn’s legacy</h2>
<p>A volume of Hedd Wyn’s poetry, entitled <em>Cerddi’r Bugail</em> (The Shepherd’s Verses), was published a year later. The first 1,000 copies were sold in five days. Eventually every copy of the 4,000 first edition was sold. </p>
<p>In 1923, a statue, depicting Hedd Wyn as a shepherd, the work of artist L. S. Merrifield, was unveiled by his mother in Trawsfynydd. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lAU8frR8GiA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Hedd Wyn was the first Welsh film to be nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars in 1993.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On St David’s Day 2012, Wales’ then first minister, Carwyn Jones, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-north-west-wales-17221011">announced</a> that Hedd Wyn’s home, <em>Yr Ysgwrn</em>, had been bought for the nation, to secure and safeguard the poet’s legacy. Two years later, it was renovated and turned into a <a href="https://yrysgwrn.com/en/">museum</a> by the Eryri (Snowdonia) National Park.</p>
<p>Hedd Wyn was a highly talented poet who wrote exquisite work. His <em>englyn</em> in memory of his friend, Lieutenant D. O. Evans of Blaenau Ffestiniog, for example, became an elegy for all the young men who had fallen on the killing fields of the Great War: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ei aberth nid â heibio – ei wyneb</p>
<p>Annwyl nid â'n ango</p>
<p>Er i'r Almaen ystaenio</p>
<p>Ei dwrn dur yn ei waed o.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It can be translated as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>His sacrifice was not in vain, his dear</p>
<p>Face will always remain,</p>
<p>Although he left a bloodstain</p>
<p>On Germany’s iron fist of pain.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211287/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan Llwyd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.
Alan Llwyd, Professor of Welsh, Swansea University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217357
2024-01-05T13:46:39Z
2024-01-05T13:46:39Z
Literature inspired my medical career: Why the humanities are needed in health care
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564561/original/file-20231208-17-e51tzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1998%2C1494&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Medicine is as much about the human experience as it is about biology.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/two-hands-connected-by-a-dramatic-graph-royalty-free-image/545248093">Jonathan Knowles/Stone via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>While there is a long history of doctor-poets – one giant of mid-20th-century poetry, <a href="https://poets.org/poet/william-carlos-williams">William Carlos Williams</a>, was famously also a pediatrician – few people seem to know this or understand the power of combining the humanities and medicine.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://www.tremblingpillowpress.com/orogeny">published poet</a> and <a href="https://med.virginia.edu/biomedical-ethics/people/irene%E2%80%8B-mathieu/">scholar of the health humanities and ethics</a>, I have a foot squarely planted in each field – or perhaps more accurately, I stand in what I perceive as the overlapping field of healing and poetic practices.</p>
<p>Literature has had a large role in helping me define the kind of physician I strive to be – one who is not only empathetic and a good listener but also a fierce advocate for changing the sociopolitical forces that affect my patients’ lives. I think literature can do this for other health care providers, too.</p>
<h2>Narrative competence in medicine</h2>
<p>Despite having physicians for parents – or perhaps because of it – initially I had no interest in medicine. It seemed too clinical, too sterile. The work stories my parents shared over the dinner table were intentionally devoid of the personal details that would have interested me.</p>
<p>I was preoccupied with characters in the books I read – who lived in conflict zones, who as children were working instead of playing, who had struggles I couldn’t imagine – and wondered why I had my life and not theirs. What intangible forces shaped their lives in ways different from my own? Now I can directly trace my early infatuation with the written word to my chosen career as a pediatrician and public health researcher.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0a5WYClw3dw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Medicine is a confluence of scientific and literary thinking.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Narrative medicine is the practice of close reading and reflective writing to build <a href="https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.15.1897">narrative competence</a>. Physician and narrative medicine scholar Rita Charon describes narrative competence as “the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret and act on the stories and plights of others.” </p>
<p>Narrative competence, then, could inspire a person to pursue a career in health care and possibly make them a better clinician. In fact, studies of narrative medicine programs have demonstrated that they tend to not only increase students’ <a href="https://doi.org/10.3352%2Fjeehp.2020.17.3">empathy and communication skills</a> but also their <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-017-4275-8">tolerance for ambiguity and self-confidence</a>. They also improve their <a href="https://doi.org/10.3390%2Fijerph17041135">open-mindedness, ethical inquiry</a> and <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-031568">perspective taking</a>.</p>
<p>Books introduced me to the breadth and diversity of human experiences and perspectives, as well as to searing inequalities in life outcomes. I wanted to positively change those outcomes in some way – a desire that led me into the arms of medicine, despite my initial misgivings about it.</p>
<h2>Using the humanities to address health inequity</h2>
<p>Might narrative competence also expand clinicians’ understanding of health disparities and urge them to act in ways that lectures full of statistics couldn’t?</p>
<p>The burgeoning field of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0000000000002871">critical health humanities</a> theorizes that stories and art can help clinicians understand the unequal realities of different people’s lives and make clinician-patient relationships more therapeutic. It can do this by cultivating clinicians’ awareness of the power differences and structural forces that affect their patients and themselves.</p>
<p>Defining features of this field are collaboration between disciplines – such as between medicine and literature – and a broad understanding of narrative medicine beyond the clinical encounter. Understanding not only human biology but also fields like the history of medicine, queer and disability studies, critical race theory and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1097/acm.0000000000002871">other forms of knowledge</a> can inform and improve clinical practice. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Clinician in scrubs sitting on a table between library shelves, reading a book" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564566/original/file-20231208-15-3bb3il.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Medical trainees often aren’t given the space to engage with the humanities.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/female-intern-finds-quiet-spot-in-library-to-study-royalty-free-image/1434731417">SDI Productions/E+ via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For example, a clinician might turn to research from the social sciences to learn about the experiences of people with disabilities. This could lead her to make her practice <a href="https://adata.org/factsheet/accessible-health-care">more accessible to her patients</a> – an action that would improve equity in health care for people with disabilities.</p>
<p>Before ever meeting my first patient, I gained an expanded knowledge of the diversity of human experience from the books I read. It made me curious about my patients’ stories. And when I felt this curiosity flagging because of stress, exhaustion or burnout, refocusing on the stories seemed to help.</p>
<p>However, medical students are inundated with information about the human body in their training and <a href="https://www.aamc.org/news/medical-schools-overhaul-curricula-fight-inequities">barely have time</a> to learn about the nonmedical aspects of patient experiences. This negates the fact that disease and health happen in varied and disparate social, cultural and political contexts.</p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.2337/dci20-0053">diabetes is a very different illness</a> for a patient experiencing homelessness and racism compared with a wealthy patient who doesn’t experience racism. A patient’s access to resources and their <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-racism-in-us-health-system-hinders-care-and-costs-lives-of-african-americans-139425">interactions with health care staff</a> affect their ability to get the care they need and the degree to which their basic needs are being met. Rarely are these nuances discussed in a medical school’s endocrinology lecture about diabetes.</p>
<h2>Fitting in health humanities education</h2>
<p>I believe that physicians must find ways to practice their humanity – perhaps using the humanities – if they wish to be effective healers. But how might they actually do this? </p>
<p>There are ways to fit in more health humanities in all the busyness and bustle of notoriously grueling medical education. As a senior resident, I often distributed poems to my team, printing and posting them above the computers in our cramped hospital workrooms or attaching them to email updates about patient care. Once, during a rare quiet moment in the pediatric ICU, with permission from my colleagues, I read a couple of poems out loud. I remember watching my colleagues’ eyes close and their bodies visibly relax as the words washed over them.</p>
<p>Since then, I have shared poems – my own and others’ – in talks at my institution and across the country. I’ve also led other health care providers in creative writing exercises during workshops, lectures and classes. Many institutions host book clubs, story slams, film screenings and other opportunities for medical learners to engage with the humanities.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Clinician holding stethoscope over the chest of a toddler sitting in the lap of their parent" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/564571/original/file-20231208-23-vpq5kw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Exposing clinicians to the breadth of human experience through the humanities can help them better understand where their patients are coming from.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/male-nurse-examining-baby-girl-with-stethoscope-in-royalty-free-image/1309071117">The Good Brigade/Digital Vision via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While poetry can be intimidating to some, many contemporary poems provide approachable emotional experiences.</p>
<p>Pieces like Safiya Sinclair’s “<a href="https://www.triquarterly.org/issues/issue-150/notes-state-virginia-ii">Notes on the State of Virginia, II</a>” viscerally illustrate how a place that seems innocuous or even beautiful to some can be haunting and traumatic for others. </p>
<p>Monica Sok’s “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/144805/abc-for-refugees">ABC for Refugees</a>” powerfully paints a portrait of a young child caught between languages and cultures – a reality that many pediatric patients face. </p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/155120/ode-to-small-towns">Ode to Small Towns</a>” by Tyree Daye upends common assumptions about rural life and demonstrates the meaning of place in hymnlike vernacular. </p>
<p>In “<a href="https://verse.press/poem/medical-history-7786213513888859947">Medical History</a>,” Nicole Sealey shares a many-layered patient perspective on a part of health care that, for many of my students and colleagues, has been reduced to a series of check boxes on a computer screen. </p>
<p>These and other poems – not to mention short stories, novels, personal essays, films, podcasts and comedy shorts, among other genres of storytelling – provide fertile ground for enhanced understanding of the human condition, as well as inspiration for a clinician’s own potentially transformative reflective writing.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="A square box with the words 'Art & Science Collide' and a drawing of a circle surrounding a lightbulb with its wire filament in the shape of a brain." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/567788/original/file-20240103-23-yg479z.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Art & Science Collide series.</span>
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</figure>
<p><em><strong><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/art-in-science-series-2024-149583">This article is part of Art & Science Collide</a></strong>, a series examining the intersections between art and science.</em></p>
<p><em>You may be interested in:</em></p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/art-and-science-entwined-this-course-explores-the-long-interrelated-history-of-two-ways-of-seeing-the-world-210250">Art and science entwined: This course explores the long, interrelated history of two ways of seeing the world </a></p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/art-illuminates-the-beauty-of-science-and-could-inspire-the-next-generation-of-scientists-young-and-old-168925">Art illuminates the beauty of science – and could inspire the next generation of scientists young and old</a> </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/visualizing-the-inside-of-cells-at-previously-impossible-resolutions-provides-vivid-insights-into-how-they-work-195873">Visualizing the inside of cells at previously impossible resolutions provides vivid insights into how they work</a></p>
<hr>
<h2>Melding literature and medicine</h2>
<p>The possibilities for collaboration between literature and medicine are wide open. In a country that <a href="https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/oct/high-us-health-care-spending-where-is-it-all-going#">spends more per capita on health care</a> than economically similar nations yet continues to have extreme inequalities in outcomes, it’s clear that the U.S. needs to do things differently. </p>
<p>I believe <a href="https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-023-00149-1">all clinicians have a role</a> in recognizing and grappling with how everyone has been shaped by an inequitable society. The history, sociopolitical context, imaginative perspective and reflective practices the humanities offer may improve the practice of medicine.</p>
<p>Through understanding others’ experiences and reflecting critically on their own, every clinician can move closer to being the kind of healer they intend to be.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217357/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Irène Mathieu, MD, MPH is an iTHRIV Scholar. The iTHRIV Scholars Program is supported in part by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers UL1TR003015 and KL2TR003016.</span></em></p>
While medical school may teach students about how the body works, it often neglects the social, political and cultural factors that determine health and disease. The humanities can help.
Irène Mathieu, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Virginia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219289
2024-01-04T16:21:58Z
2024-01-04T16:21:58Z
I research the therapeutic qualities of writing about art – here are three steps for trying it yourself
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565166/original/file-20231212-23-dggg63.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C32%2C5503%2C3839&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/young-person-photo-frame-write-digital-2218186707">Sorapop Udomsri/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>What do we learn about ourselves when we write creatively about an artwork? I asked myself this question during my creative writing PhD, where my focus was on writing a collection of poems in response to modern and contemporary art.</p>
<p>While the early phase of my research involved sitting in galleries and museums, viewing images and objects in the flesh, during the pandemic I had to retreat home and recalibrate how I could access these visual prompts. I made use of books and postcard reproductions of artworks and also looked online, using resources such as Google Images and virtual gallery tours. </p>
<p>Lockdown had an impact on my mental health, and the poems I produced during this time went beyond straightforward descriptions of the artworks. They explored my thoughts and feelings – with the artwork aiding in uncovering parts of myself I was not aware of, or helping to warp or disguise personal content that would have left me feeling exposed if written about directly.</p>
<p>The idea of using images as a therapeutic tool has been a long-term interest of mine. When I ran creative writing workshops at the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Museum, I asked participants to select an image or object and write something in response, incorporating aspects of their own identity or sense of place.</p>
<p>During lockdown, however, I was led to reflect not only on how art galleries and museums are often inaccessible (due to illness or disability, for example), but also how environments like this can feel intimidating or exclusionary for some people. And I reflected on how it’s possible to nurture a love of art and creativity despite such feelings of marginalisation.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman writing in notebook" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565169/original/file-20231212-24-5wjpjt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Artwork can aid in uncovering parts of yourself.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/thoughtful-young-woman-eyeglasses-writing-do-749819029">GaudiLab/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Having also observed a shortfall in provision for mental health conditions, I wanted to develop techniques that would enable people who don’t have prior knowledge of art history or a particular artist’s intentions to write about issues that affect them, through the prism of an artwork. </p>
<p>What might we see in a late Rothko, for instance? Or in J.M.W. Turner’s final and often considered “unfinished” seascapes? Is there something in the obscurity or formlessness that chimes with something buried in our psyche? Perhaps trauma and depression require (at least at first) an image to serve as a metaphor between that which is unspeakable and more direct language?</p>
<p>Maybe creative writing – and particularly writing that makes use of artworks – can perform this function, and even work as a precursor or complement to psychotherapy. This is a process whereby things we can’t name are brought to light and find expression. Often when this occurs, it’s healing.</p>
<p>So, here are three steps I have found to be effective when using an artwork as a prompt to “write therapeutically”. </p>
<h2>1. Choose your artwork</h2>
<p>The first decision to make is your choice of prompt. People often say a piece of art “resonates” or “speaks” to them. See if you can allow an image to find you in this way. It doesn’t need to be an artwork in a museum or gallery – any image you feel a connection with is a good choice.</p>
<p>Then, ask yourself why it resonates with you. Does the image evoke something that you associate with? Is it a distorted portrait of yourself? Or is it a surface on which to project your own reality?</p>
<h2>2. Embrace ‘slow looking’</h2>
<p>Next, I suggest trying the exercise of “slow looking”, where your attention is deliberately focused on the image for an extended period of time (say, a few minutes). As you do so, analyse the image and try to notice as much as possible.</p>
<p>This may contrast with most of our more accustomed way of looking, where we glance at an image for a few seconds and make a snap judgment about it – often deciding that we like it or we don’t. What do you see? Or what do you think you see? </p>
<p>It can be useful to test out a kind of “naive looking”, making the most of your subjective and idiosyncratic perceptions (those we have conjured up ourselves but which others struggle to relate to). This kind of attention involves looking around the entire artwork, without assuming that some parts are more important than others. Instead, try to treat everything as though it’s of equal significance (at least initially). </p>
<h2>3. Try uninhibited writing</h2>
<p>Follow your slow looking exercise with some uninhibited and uncensored writing. This can either be done while still looking, or you may choose to work from your memory. As you work, consider adopting a particular mode of writing in response to the image.</p>
<p>One option is to just describe what’s there. Another is to imagine what you think you see, or what could be occurring out of your vision in the blind field beyond the frame. And another option: how about writing from the position of one of the figures in the picture? There are many alternatives – you could even try writing poems about the artwork.</p>
<p>Whatever your approach, have patience and experiment with different ways of seeing and writing – especially those that run counter to our fast-paced visual culture, and might provide fresh insights into ourselves and the world. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick Wright received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. </span></em></p>
I want to help people without prior knowledge of art history write about issues that affect them – through the prism of an artwork.
Patrick Wright, Associate Lecturer in Arts and Humanities, Open University, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/220251
2023-12-27T09:10:47Z
2023-12-27T09:10:47Z
Seamus Heaney: ten years after his death, the generosity and warmth of his rich poetic voice endures
<p>The English war poet Wilfred Owen once wrote, “Celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.” Killed in France at the age of 25, unpublished and unknown, “celebrity” for Owen was a posthumous phenomenon. By contrast, celebrity status for the Irish poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/seamus-heaney">Seamus Heaney</a> – “Famous Seamus” – came early in his life.</p>
<p>The eldest of nine children raised on a small farm called Mossbawn in County Derry – which was so crucial to his imaginative development – his first collection, <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/death-of-a-naturalist/seamus-heaney/9780571230839">Death of a Naturalist</a>, was accepted for publication by Faber when he was just 26.</p>
<p>Thirty years later, he became the fourth Irishman to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/summary/">win the Nobel Prize for Literature</a>, following <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1925/shaw/facts/">Shaw</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1923/yeats/biographical/">Yeats</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1969/summary/">Beckett</a>. By the time of his death in 2013, Heaney’s books accounted for some <a href="https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poet/seamus-heaney/">two-thirds of the sales</a> of contemporary poets in the UK.</p>
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<p>Always conscious of Owen’s example, as well as Yeats, Frost or the Romantic poets, Heaney shares with them all the unusual capacity to reach a much larger audience than poetry generally enjoys.</p>
<p>Readers <a href="https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/i-grieved-for-my-husband-not-seamus-heaney-the-poet-says-widow-marie/35043954.html">felt his death in 2013 as a personal loss</a>, bereft as they were of a familiar and intimate voice that had accompanied them through half a century’s life of writing, with Heaney’s own story woven into the turbulent story of Ireland.</p>
<h2>A life in letters</h2>
<p>The recently published edition of <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-letters-of-seamus-heaney/seamus-heaney/9780571341085#:%7E:text=Spanning%20his%20early%20days%20in,from%20a%20titan%20of%20poetry.">Heaney’s letters</a>, edited by poet Christopher Reid, is a marvellous addition for an audience always hungry for more Heaney.</p>
<p>Beginning with his “new life” in 1965 – marriage, house-buying in Belfast, manuscript acceptance – it bears witness to what Reid calls “the sheer outward-facing busyness” of Heaney’s life. It was a busyness that brought, alongside celebrity, increasingly obvious pressures on a poet always generous with himself, his time and his work.</p>
<p>It’s unsurprising that as his fame grew, so too did the demands made on him. And as writer Bel Mooney <a href="https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition/books/329937">noted recently</a>, although “all of us who wanted a piece of him could have been fobbed off”, he was “just too nice”. The letters – abundant and revelatory, evidencing, as Reid puts it, Heaney’s “delight in his own fertile rhetoric” – are a treasure trove of delights for the reader.</p>
<p>But they prove Owen’s point about the challenges of celebrity, too: “Excuse the stationery … this jotter is to hand”; “Please forgive me for not being in touch”; “Please excuse the pencil, I’m on the plane …”; “You deserved to hear from me before this”; “Hurriedly, with love – Seamus”.</p>
<p>The generosity and warmth of the poet as a public figure is, of course, one of the reasons why he was and is beloved by many – not least those who, in huge numbers, encountered him in person through a lifetime of lectures, readings, workshops and launches. He once joked that one day his unsigned books would be more valuable.</p>
<h2>Faith in poetry</h2>
<p>That warmth and generosity came at a cost to Heaney personally, as he struggled to protect from public scrutiny those “whole areas of one’s life that one wants to keep free from the gaze of print”. He wanted to shield as well those elements of his “remembered soul landscape” that were the source of his inspiration – what Wordsworth termed “the hiding-places of my power”.</p>
<p>Protect them he did since it is, in the end, the imaginative generosity of the poems themselves, not the personal generosity of the man, that ensures his legacy. It does so in part because of Heaney’s faith in the poem – as answering to no agenda other than its own being, operating as its own “vindicating force”, undiminished by, and existing outside of, the noise and “busyness” of life.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/lecture/">1995 Nobel lecture</a>, Heaney spoke of poetry’s “gift for telling truth” – and beyond that, its capacity “to be not only pleasurably right, but compellingly wise”. It might even be “a retuning of the world itself”.</p>
<p>Few contemporary poets have devoted so much time to writing a defence of poetry as Heaney; fewer still have done so in terms so protective of poetry’s autonomy. Irish poet Leontia Flynn <a href="http://leontiaflynn.com/irish-university-review-radically-necessary-heaney/">writes</a> of finding herself “nearly as grateful for his defence of poetry as … for his poems”. </p>
<p>Heaney’s capacity to “credit marvels” in the world around him is, quite literally, the gift that keeps on giving. As he writes in his poem <a href="https://www.poetryireland.ie/publications/poetry-ireland-review/online-archive/view/fosterling">Fosterling</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Me waiting until I was nearly fifty</p>
<p>To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans</p>
<p>The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,</p>
<p>Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In one of his finest lyrics, <a href="https://genius.com/Seamus-heaney-the-harvest-bow-annotated">The Harvest Bow</a>, the “throwaway love-knot of straw” plaited by his father is echoed in the intricate weaving, “twist by twist”, of its harvest bow of words.</p>
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<p>Its “golden loops” are a gateway to the past, and as we follow Heaney’s “homesick” memory of walking peaceably with his father, the beautifully crafted love-knot encircles and cradles an entire community and a way of life. The bow is a still a “frail device”. Like poetry, it is both transformative and under threat; but most importantly, it endures.</p>
<p>A decade after his death, Heaney’s voice, like the harvest bow, is “burnished by its passage, and still warm”.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fran Brearton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The great Irish poet left a legacy of astonishing poems that speak to new readers with their deep wisdom and quietly devastating imagery.
Fran Brearton, Professor of Modern Poetry, School of Arts, English and Languages, Queen's University Belfast
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217656
2023-12-13T20:53:51Z
2023-12-13T20:53:51Z
I’m your man: How Leonard Cohen’s life, poetry and song make him a prophet of love in a particularly dark midwinter
<iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/im-your-man-how-leonard-cohens-life-poetry-and-song-make-him-a-prophet-of-love-in-a-particularly-dark-midwinter" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Leonard Cohen is hardly the first name that comes to mind as a spokesperson for “the true meaning of the holidays.” </p>
<p>As a religious studies scholar <a href="https://theconversation.com/life-of-brian-terry-joness-legacy-of-a-surprisingly-historical-jesus-130582">specializing in the history of earliest Christianity</a>, and a <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2279666243993">Cohen fan from a Christian background</a>, I recognize that “festivity” is simply not a word that sits with Cohen — who was always more slyly depressing than holly jolly.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a-conversation-with-matthew-r-anderson/id1650272494?i=1000637487270">the beloved and late Jewish poet, novelist, and singer-songwriter from Montréal does talk about light, and profoundly so</a>. His words bring a certain bitter-sweetness to the shortest, darkest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, days which coincide with religious festivals involving light. </p>
<h2>Exterior, interior darkness</h2>
<p>Despite wide differences in their celebrations and what they commemorate, <a href="https://theconversation.com/hanukkahs-true-meaning-is-about-jewish-survival-88225">Hanukkah</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/apocalypse-booze-and-christmas-an-ancient-abc-172014">Christmas</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/yule-a-celebration-of-the-return-of-light-and-warmth-218779">Yule</a> and earlier in the year, <a href="https://theconversation.com/diwali-a-celebration-of-the-goddess-lakshmi-and-her-promise-of-prosperity-and-good-fortune-191992">Diwali</a> all feature candles and twinkling lights. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-blaze-of-light-in-every-word-vale-leonard-cohen-68690">A blaze of light in every word: vale Leonard Cohen</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Whether or not these festivals were made for this purpose, they help people cope with short days, exterior darkness and even increased <em>interior</em> darkness accompanying <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/sad-science-why-winter-brings-us-down-but-won-t-for-long-1.2981920">seasonal affective disorder (SAD)</a> and other stresses as the nights get longer headed towards winter solstice.</p>
<h2>This year feels gloomier</h2>
<p>However, while violence never ceases, this year feels even gloomier, with a sharp rise in <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/hate-crime-record-levels-toronto-1.7037413">hate crimes</a>, <a href="https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/03/controlling-misinformation">polarizing disinformation</a> — some spread by <a href="https://www.routledge.com/American-Evangelicals-for-Trump-Dominion-Spiritual-Warfare-and-the-End/Gagn/p/book/9781032415680">“Christian” nationalists who deny democracy</a> while seeking to <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-christian-rights-efforts-to-transform-society-120878">remake North American society in their image</a> — <a href="https://theconversation.com/violent-and-disturbing-war-images-from-the-mideast-can-stir-deep-emotions-a-ptsd-expert-explains-how-to-protect-yourself-and-your-kids-from-overexposure-216405">and with war</a>. (Now we’re starting to sound more like Cohen.)</p>
<p>In reaction to the Israel-Hamas war and its global effects, instead of embracing festivals of light, some are choosing to downplay them. The city of Moncton, New Brunswick <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/moncton-city-hall-menorah-hanukkah-francis-weil-1.7046813#">decided not to display their traditional menorah and nativity scene</a>. But the decision provoked a strong negative response <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/moncton-menorah-mayor-dawn-arnold-statement-1.7048461">across Canada and globally, occasioning a speedy reversal</a>. </p>
<p>Cohen’s frequent mentions of failure, regret, suffering, violence and mortality make him far more <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6WnnZRSKYs">blue, than Christmas</a>. But I can identify at least four ways Cohen’s life and poetry make <a href="https://www.mqup.ca/prophets-of-love-products-9780228018643.php">him a prophet of love</a> who illuminates these dark times, based on my recent research on religious imagery in his poetry and music.</p>
<p><strong>1. Cohen wasn’t afraid to lean into the fact that, worldwide, people are religious, and religious symbols have power.</strong> Remove religious allusions from Cohen’s writing and you’d lose most of his work. His book titles, from the first <em>Let Us Compare Mythologies</em> (1956) to final <em>The Flame</em> (2018), show just how aware of <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2016/11/leonard-cohen-the-christ-haunted">the near universal symbolic currency of religion</a> Cohen was. </p>
<p>Religion was a handy way for Cohen to talk about sex. But equally true is that sex offered a device for him to talk about religion. For him, these insights were entwined with the sense that each person reflects the Divine. He observed, “I think that everybody leads a spiritual life… in touch… <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">with their own deep pools of divine activity</a>.”</p>
<p><strong>2. Cohen never caricatured religious traditions. He pointed to the richness of many faiths while stating his own positionality.</strong> Cohen knew that understanding others starts with understanding oneself. “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">I would never say anything else but that I am a Jew</a>,” he repeatedly insisted. Cohen’s maternal grandfather was a noted scriptural scholar and his paternal <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/9707000/shaar-hashomayim-celebrates-century-in-westmount/">great-grandfather helped found Montréal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim</a>. Yet as deeply rooted as he was in Judaism, Cohen’s knowledge of other faiths was both profound and wide-ranging. </p>
<p>In my research I show <a href="https://atlanticbooks.ca/stories/im-your-saint-cohen-and-st-paul-studied-in-prophets-of-love/">how important Jesus was to Cohen</a>, without making the mistake of claiming he was Christian. I explore the profound impact of Catholicism on his childhood. I also note how interwoven through Cohen’s corpus is his decades-long practice of Zen Buddhism, his readings in Sufi mysticism and his study of Hinduism. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/oct/17/how-leonard-cohen-mined-sacred-texts-for-lyrics-to-his-songs">Jewish tales from the Mishnah and Talmud</a>, <a href="https://www.heyalma.com/leonard-cohens-rabbi-reveals-the-jewish-theology-behind-the-music/">kabbalistic philosophy</a>, ancient Christian legends, poetry from Federico Garcia Lorca and Rumi, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2016/10/21/498810429/leonard-cohen-on-poetry-music-and-why-he-left-the-zen-monastery">Zen reflections on longing</a>, attachment and nothingness all combine in his work. </p>
<p>As a poet, writer and thinker Cohen abhorred cliché, while leaning into religious complexity and diversity.</p>
<p><strong>3. Cohen respected faith and spirituality but called out religious hypocrisy.</strong> In 1984 he remarked: “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Leonard_Cohen.html?id=s8RbAgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">There’s always the possibility of mystification and manipulation</a> …. There are evil forces in the world ready to imperialize religion but I’m confident the forces of good are stronger.” </p>
<p>These words seem optimistic for the man who also wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Give me Stalin and St. Paul / I’ve seen the future, brother / It is murder” (“The Future,” from Stranger Music). </p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LYzPVKg3wyo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Future.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cohen himself was not immune to abusing the power that comes with being revered. He was fortunate in successfully transforming his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201211115215/https:/www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/article-leonard-cohens-tales-of-seduction-look-different-through-a-metoo/">seemingly misogynist relations with women</a> into lyrics rather than litigation, partly by the complicated and disarming ways he wrote about regret, apology and forgiveness, and partly <a href="https://sharpmagazine.com/2018/11/06/how-do-we-come-to-terms-with-leonard-cohens-legacy-in-the-metoo-era/">through age and death</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/marianne-and-leonard-a-new-film-tells-us-little-about-the-woman-fixed-in-the-role-of-musicians-muse-128112">Marianne & Leonard: a new film tells us little about the woman fixed in the role of musician's muse</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>4. Most importantly, Cohen used religious stories and images to find common cause with and give courage to others in dark times.</strong> His most famous lines are perhaps from his song <em>Anthem</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Ring the bells that still can ring / forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Harry Freedman, in <em><a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/leonard-cohen-9781472987273/">Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius</a></em> finds multiple Jewish religious references behind <em>Anthem</em>. I’ve discovered even more. Cohen took on the mantle (importantly, for him a <em>biblical</em> mantle) of recognizing and lifting up the light that can be discovered in, despite, and through human suffering. As I have written elsewhere, “<a href="https://www.mqup.ca/prophets-of-love-products-9780228018643.php">A crack in everything means especially a crack in human beings</a>.”</p>
<p>In his last years Cohen lived into his name <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/cohen">of cohen (priest)</a>. Friends and colleagues of mine who attended his final concerts, some religious, but many <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-spiritual-87236">“spiritual but not religious,”</a> described them as sacred spaces.</p>
<p>Cohen’s lyrics dwell on human failure, regret and violence. Yet according to his musical collaborator Sharon Robinson, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/sharon-robinson-reflects-on-touring-with-leonard-cohen-194281/">touring became “a type of meditation” for Cohen</a>, and his final concerts ended with him blessing the crowd. Typically for Cohen, who never let a line have only one meaning, the title of the album <em>You Want It Darker</em> refers to both his fans and his God. There is <a href="https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2315/darkness-and-light-leonard-cohen-and-the-new-cantors-a-playlist-for-the-high-holidays/">both a challenge to the Divine, and acceptance of an end</a>, in it.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v0nmHymgM7Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Leonard Cohen’s ‘You Want it Darker.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Cohen’s ominous passing, ongoing relevance</h2>
<p>Cohen’s 2016 death on <a href="https://lithub.com/cohen-dies-trump-wins-and-we-will-sing-about-these-dark-times/">the eve of a sharp turn toward hate politics when Donald Trump was elected</a> seems doubly ominous seven years after the passing of the <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/leonard-cohen-remembering-the-life-and-legacy-of-the-poet-of-brokenness-192994">poet of brokenness</a>. </p>
<p>Knowledgeable of many faiths, but observant above all of the human condition; daring the Divine to answer humanity’s sorrows: this is what makes Cohen an unlikely but fitting spokesperson for another dark midwinter season. </p>
<p>My own vote for a <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/douglas-todd-leonard-cohen-may-help-us-find-hope-in-today-s-holy-broken-world/ar-AA1izeLe">Cohen holiday favourite</a> might be <em>Come Healing</em>. It’s why Cohen, a man about whom surely no Hallmark festive movie will ever be made, just might be this year’s answer to the darkness: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And let the heavens falter / Let the earth proclaim / Come healing of the altar /
Come healing of the name.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Robert Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Leonard Cohen, a man about whom surely no Hallmark festive movie will ever be made, dared the Divine to answer humanity’s sorrows.
Matthew Robert Anderson, Adjunct professor, Theological Studies, Concordia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211102
2023-11-13T01:44:53Z
2023-11-13T01:44:53Z
Eyewash, irreverence and a Bruce Springsteen concert: on the road with a pioneering performance poet
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551991/original/file-20231004-17-3upb68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C0%2C6491%2C4337&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/white-bus-driving-on-road-towards-552011011">Sondem/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/pi-o-the-tour/">The Tour</a> is Pi O’s verse diary about a small group of Australian poets who take their wares on the road in North America in the mid-1980s, sponsored by the Literature Board and the Guggenheim Foundation. This came to be known as “The Dirty T-Shirt Tour”, because Pi O’s dress and personal hygiene were questioned by the other members of the group, including the tour organiser. </p>
<p>According to Pi O’s account, the motivating factors in this singling out were race and snobbery, or race-snobbery – compounded by a sneering attitude towards performance poetry, of which Pi O was a pioneer. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: The Tour – Pi O (Giramondo)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Even before leaving Australia, Pi O is conflicted: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>so</strong> what’s a nice Anarchist Greek Poet like me doing (going<br>
to the States) on Guggenheim money????<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s a question that needed asking.</p>
<blockquote>
<p> When i told Jas about it,<br>
he said it was a two-prong problem: If you…. don’t<br>
make it, all you’re doing, is <strong>catering to</strong> an Elite i.e. Bohemians… etc<br>
an’ if you do, then you’ve SOLD OUT! <strong>Damned</strong> if you do<br>
and <strong>damned</strong> if you don’t.<br></p>
<p> AMERICA: You’re becoming a headache!<br>
Hope Ronald Reagan dies before i get there!<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is not Pi O’s only pre-tour concern. He needs to apply for a passport, which, when it arrives, does so in an envelope that contains </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a pamphlet from the Australian Tourist Commission<br>
entitled: MAKING FRIENDS FOR AUSTRALIA.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t think The Tour nominates the year of the tour for which it is named, but the pamphlet and its contents are straight out of 1984. The propaganda is astonishing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… it listed all the things i could tell the Americans<br>
e.g. the kinds of facts one absolutely ((((((needs)))))) to know;<br>
that there are 136 million sheep in Australia and 95 million head of<br>
cattle; And on the touchy Question of our 1.2% of<br>
the population (that just happen to be BLACK) i was to say (assuming<br>
anyone was listening) that the “transition from Tribal past<br>
to political and social equality was accelerating”.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following the result of the Voice referendum on October 15, one suspects that offering such self-appraisals while overseas will be met with derision. The notion that Australians should ((((((trumpet)))))) untruthfulness remains offensive. </p>
<p>To misquote a line from Seinfeld: “that eyewash just ain’t making it”.</p>
<h2>Page and stage</h2>
<p>Pi O is also worried about the exchange rate. The Australian dollar, floated in 1983, is performing badly against the greenback (it drops “to an all-time low … from 67.45c to 64.1)”, a circumstance with which those travelling from Australia to the United States in 2023 will be familiar. </p>
<p>There are other striking historical coincidences between then and now. Before leaving his beloved Melbourne, first for Sydney and Wellington, and then onwards to Los Angeles, Pi O attends a Bruce Springsteen concert, coming to the realisation that</p>
<blockquote>
<p> Ronald Reagan<br>
may have sent Bruce & the Boys over to placate us (over<br>
New Zealand’s anti-Uranium policy and our resistance to the MX<br>
missile project) – Who knows?! – (I wouldn’t put it<br>
past ‘em!)<br></p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=850&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551332/original/file-20231002-23-55pavu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1068&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bruce Springsteen is rumoured to be touring Australia soon. Will he be here as an emissary of Joe Biden’s, sent to placate us over AUKUS? It seems unlikely, ridiculous even, but, as we are all aware, conspiracy theories trip easily from the tongue. </p>
<p>In that vein, I’d like to know what Pi O thinks of Taylor Swift’s impending tour, or if not thinks exactly, then what fun and truth he could make of it. It’s a question of soft power, certainly, but also of Pi O’s catapulting energy.</p>
<p>Which brings me to “page” and “stage” poetry, and the extent to which a distinction might obtain, or be thought to persist. </p>
<p>It’s clear that for Pi O, the “page” poets with whom he was on tour in the mid-1980s are largely bores. Their poetry is “lousy”, he tells us. On more than one occasion, he is called upon to “wake up” their unfortunate audiences with one of his “magic” performances. Rather cartoonishly, Pi O comes on and saves the day. </p>
<p>But the portrayal of the other poets is unsatisfactory. Not knowing their identity allows Pi O to position them as privileged Anglo-Australians. They are not just bores and boring poets, it is being asserted, but casual and even overt racists. Strong accusations, but done rather weakly. Why not tell us who they are?</p>
<p>Claims of boring poetry prove ironic given how much dull, lineated prose The Tour contains. The following is representative:</p>
<blockquote>
<p> On the wharf, there were<br>
lots of street stalls, selling bags, beads, chic<br>
paintings, and SAN FRANCISCO T-shirts.<br>
I bought some badges with pictures of “cats” on them<br>
to send back to Olga, in Melbourne (Karen’s friend).<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are many sections like this one and they contrast poorly with quotations from Pi O’s “actual” poems – that is, the ones we’re told he reads at the readings.</p>
<blockquote>
<p> <strong>Ockers</strong><br>
Australia<br>
[in the 1970s] had the<br>
“Libido” of a gang-bang<br>
the<br>
brains of a “Bunyip”<br>
&<br>
“the finesse of a rugby-team<br>
booze Up”<br>
it<br>
lived on:<br>
tomato sauce,<br>
the “Sporting Globe”, terrace houses,<br>
galvanized-iron<br>
bushfires<br>
&<br>
a cyclone.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here Pi O’s wit, talent and spiky irreverence are obvious. “Ockers” works on the page, just as surely as it would in performance. The poem is rich with the more conventional qualities of poetry – sound patterning, rhythm, compression, enjambment – and its visual arrangement on the page teaches us how to read, which is to say, “hear” it. In short, the formal qualities of the poem carry the sardonic commentary; it’s a triumph. </p>
<p>On the basis of these quoted poems and fragments, one hopes for another Selected Poems, preferably with an accompanying record. (Pi O spends much time and money while on the tour buying poetry records; I’d buy his.)</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AWONaKt6vlo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/poetry-goes-nuclear-3-recent-books-delve-into-present-anxieties-finding-beauty-amid-the-terror-203899">Poetry goes nuclear: 3 recent books delve into present anxieties, finding beauty amid the terror</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Happenings</h2>
<p>Pi O’s self-acclaim is amusing, but not unserious. For instance, when he hands out his “Famous Poet” cards, which read </p>
<blockquote>
<p>i wish to hell<br>
i was born 100 years<br>
from now<br>
to read myself <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>we assume that he means it, but mostly doesn’t. There are few occasions to laugh out loud when reading poetry, but this is one. </p>
<p>Pi O establishes himself as entertainer, raconteur, performer, of which the anarchism and reflexive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism are part and parcel. He is “ogre” and “villain” to his fellow touring poets, he suggests, but a hero to those who “get it”. </p>
<p>It’s a simplistic, binary world: whose side are you on? Are you down with it, man? Such bromides are commonplace in our adversarial political system, but when poetry goes there without its formal qualities, it gets dull rather quickly. </p>
<p>Guess what, it says to readers who are already converted to the cause: racism is bad! Poorly read poems are … also bad. Naughty naughty capitalism! It isn’t that these sentiments are wrong, but one senses they are being prosecuted in an insulated cell; their urgency is elsewhere.</p>
<p>Australia “has her madness and her weather still”, as Auden writes of Ireland in his great poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”. The poem continues with these famous lines:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives<br>
In the valley of its making where executives<br>
Would never want to tamper, flows on south<br>
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,<br>
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,<br>
A way of happening, a mouth.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That seems right, and it seems to validate Pi O’s commitment to poetry’s oral traditions. Poetry readings, book launches, slam poetry, performance poetry: events are happening all around us, in small and larger venues, affording opportunities to work on our snobbery. Mine remains a work in progress. (“My name is Craig Billingham, and I’m a page poet. Boring? How very dare you.”)</p>
<p>If you know an executive, and preferably an executive with children, or in fact any person whom you suspect has not recently or ever engaged with poetry, why not make arrangements to go along? </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Correction: an earlier version of this article mistakenly said Bruce Springsteen had toured Australia earlier this year.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211102/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Craig Billingham has previously received funding from The Literature Board of the Australia Council for The Arts.
Defne Huzmeli, a past student at UNSW, works for WORD Travels and also hosts the West Side Poetry Slam in Parramatta. She tells Craig he should attend more events. He thinks she's probably right.</span></em></p>
Pi O is known for his wit and irreverence. His anarchism, reflexive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism are all part of the deal.
Craig Billingham, Lecturer, Creative Writing, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/216162
2023-10-24T03:45:14Z
2023-10-24T03:45:14Z
A light touch, a feel for drama and a generous nature: author Alex Skovron wins the Patrick White Award
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555474/original/file-20231024-17-wk6ce7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alex Skovron, centre, and at a book launch at Collected Works on right. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Perpetual Group, author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you have ever been to the launch of a small-press poetry book at <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/poetry-bookshop-collected-works-reaches-its-final-stanza-20181019-h16ujt.html">Collected Works</a> bookshop (now defunct), or at one of the Readings bookstores, or at a bar or café in Melbourne, you may have seen a small, fit-looking, bespectacled man. He has a ready grin and eyes that invite you in – often to a conversation you’ll remember for its warmth, intelligence, wit and passion for literature. </p>
<p>You will have encountered Alex Skovron, who has this year won the Patrick White Literary Award for his achievements in poetry and prose and his lifelong support for writers and writing in Melbourne and beyond. </p>
<p>This prize is awarded to a writer who might not have received the recognition that is due when that writer’s full contributions and achievements are considered. Writers do belong to a community, even if it is fractured, fractious, garrulous and competitive at times. The community is best characterised, though, by acts of generosity towards each other, and Skovron has been a behind-the-scenes master of generosity towards other writers. </p>
<p>Author of seven books of poetry and three works of fiction, Skovron has previously won the Anne Elder and Mary Gilmore awards for a first book of poetry, the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for poetry (twice), John Shaw Neilson Poetry award (twice) and Australian Book Review (now Peter Porter) Prize for a single poem. His novella, The Poet, was co-winner of the Christina Stead Prize in 2005. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Skovron's book The Poet." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555477/original/file-20231024-23-5qzsz6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1163&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Skovron worked as an editor for two Australian encyclopedia projects during the 1970s, then from 1980 with publishers Macmillan, Hutchinson, Dent and finally, Houghton Mifflin. Alongside this work, his quiet and sustained impact on poets and poetry in Melbourne has been immense. </p>
<p>Hundreds of poets, especially the young and emerging, have been edited, mentored and encouraged by Skovron. It is common to pick up a new book of poetry in Melbourne and find his name there on the acknowledgements page. He has offered reliable and consistent support to others for decades. </p>
<p>Born in Poland in 1948 and arriving in Australia via Israel as a ten-year-old, Skovron’s cultural and intellectual reach has always been global. </p>
<p>His work has been translated into French, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, Czech, Macedonian and German. He has worked with his Czech translator, Josef Tomáš on book-length translations into English of two 20th-century Czech poets and his latest book, <a href="https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/letters-from-the-periphery/">Letters from the Periphery</a>, includes his translation of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-dantes-divine-comedy-84603">Guide to the Classics: Dante’s Divine Comedy</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>It is a shame poetry is not more widely read, enjoyed and appreciated in Australia. Skovron’s poetry has been wonderfully enriching, entertaining and provocative to its readers since his first published book, The Rearrangement, in 1988. His poems work attentively with shifts in tone and attitude, surprising line endings, pauses and rushes of thoughts and connections always towards an elegance toughened by life experience. </p>
<p>One poem, chosen almost at random, showcases these qualities: </p>
<p>For Light<br></p>
<blockquote>
<p>If one is to be awoken by a cliché <br>
the clatter of breakfast dishes is as good <br>
as any, or the aroma of coffee <br>
freshly brewed, or that uncanny mood <br>
of holiday immensity, when the world<br>
was twelve, or a summer’s garden when the world<br></p>
<p>was good. Worst is the midnight<br>
phonecall, or the way the disentangled mind<br>
can brood a black density into being – <br>
in the darknesses before seeing, lusting for light. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from <a href="https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/towards-the-equator-new-selected-poems/">Towards the Equator: New & Selected</a>)</p>
<p>His touch is light, his material is the experiences he knows and we do too and his feel for the drama lying in store for the most ordinary of us (living our clichéd lives) is somehow both seriously disturbing and finally settling. </p>
<p>He has been a poet who appreciates the largely unappreciated and passed-over aspects of workplaces, homes, marriages, streets and minds. So it is perhaps fitting he has now been recognised with a national award at 75. Perhaps at that moment in a life when a poet might think he has already passed unrecognised from most people’s view. </p>
<p>His poetry and his fiction surprisingly often turn to the Kafkaesque figure of an isolated everyman living slightly desperately but with an almost limitless potential for irony and humour. </p>
<p>One more poem offers a witty glimpse of this figure:</p>
<p>Homo Singularis </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He would drive his car on the wrong side<br>
of the seat, tried to obtain a licence to kill<br>
time, at work he displayed considerable skill<br>
at incompetence, at home he had to hide<br>
the dismissal notes under the mattress he screwed<br>
to the carpeted floor with nails. Rude<br></p>
<p>he was to a fault, nosey to boot,<br>
inconsiderate to snails, he locked himself into books<br>
of stamps and common prayer, funnelled his looks<br>
into singles bars and hardly ever stepped foot<br>
inside a song. Even his poems were too long. <br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>(from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-city-sonnetinas-Alex-Skovron/dp/0864185766">Infinite City: 100 Sonnetinas</a>) </p>
<p>To add to the detailed fun Skovron has with his compositions, we might notice the last line of this poem is its eleventh – in a book devoted to ten-line poems. </p>
<p>I would like to read, one day, Alex’s poem about this man receiving an award such as this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216162/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin John Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Melbourne writer Alex Skovron has been recognised with a national award at 75. Alongside his own work, Skovron’s quiet impact on poets and poetry in Melbourne has been immense.
Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/215659
2023-10-17T12:19:37Z
2023-10-17T12:19:37Z
Louise Glück honed her poetic voice across a lifetime to speak to us from beyond the grave
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554065/original/file-20231016-15-9jajn2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1620%2C1079&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Louise Glück was photographed outside her home in Cambridge, Mass., after being named the 2020 Nobel laureate in literature.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/photo-gallery/">Daniel Ebersole/Nobel Prize Outreach</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When asked what her response was to being awarded the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html">Nobel Prize in literature in 2020</a>, Louise Glück replied that she was “completely flabbergasted.” She said she had thought it “extremely unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life.”</p>
<p>Glück, who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/10/13/louise-gluck-dead/">died on Oct. 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 80, may have been taken aback that she was granted this exalted honor, the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/louise-gluck-prize-winning-poet-of-terse-and-candid-lyricism-dies-at-80">first American poet</a> to win since T.S. Eliot in 1948. But her win was far less surprising to those who know and love her work, and who now mourn her loss. </p>
<p>The Nobel Committee for Literature selected Glück for this literary achievement to <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2020/gluck/facts/">honor her</a> “unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1062252">poet and professor of writing</a>, I have long been an admirer of Glück’s spare and striking work. Her lyric voice still reverberates after her death, in part because of how consistently she turned her attention to questions of mortality.</p>
<h2>A cruel clarity of vision</h2>
<p>Glück said, in the same interview about her Nobel win, “I’ve written about death since I could write.” Her work turns again and again to the human story, those elemental facets of life that unite people. She went on to say, “I look for archetypal experience, and I assume that my struggles and joys are not unique.” </p>
<p>What’s common to humanity characterizes her work: Her focus on lasting themes of family and heartache and loss has earned her a wide audience and lasting acclaim. Before being awarded the Nobel Prize, Glück won the <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/people/louise-gluck/">National Book Award</a> for “Faithful and Virtuous Night” in 2014 and the <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/louise-gluck">Pulitzer Prize</a> for “Wild Iris” in 1992, among other accolades. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Louise Glück reads selected poems.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Though well received, Glück’s work is not always inviting. It can have an icy abruptness; she often writes speakers who have a cruel clarity of vision. In her poem “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49601/mock-orange">Mock Orange</a>” she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not the moon, I tell you.</p>
<p>It is these flowers</p>
<p>lighting the yard.</p>
<p>I hate them.</p>
<p>I hate them as I hate sex </p>
</blockquote>
<p>which she goes on to describe as “the low, humiliating / premise of union.” As the poem ends, her speaker asks, “How can I be content / when there is still / that odor in the world?” </p>
<p>The lyric “I,” the first-person speaker of Glück’s poems, is rarely content. Though Glück wrote in the voice of many characters and from many perspectives, woven throughout her work is a perspective that tends to find the world – and the self – wanting. </p>
<p>It may be surprising, then, how strongly readers have responded to her still, spare, often quietly devastating work. It attends to daily human struggles as if from a distance, what the critic Helen Vendler described as “almost through the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/159665/poetry-louise-gluck">wrong end of a telescope</a>.” As in the old adage about what poetry can do, Glück <a href="https://theworld.com/%7Eraparker/exploring/tseliot/works/essays/andrew_marvell.html">made the familiar strange</a>, which is perhaps what continues to draw readers to her work: It renders the close-up experiences of heartbreak and hope from a new perspective.</p>
<h2>Ancient voices speaking to the everyday</h2>
<p>Glück also made the strange familiar, especially the distant world of myth. She brought ancient figures down to a human level by exploring everyday dramas through their voices. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Poster with an image of a young Louise Glück leaning against a brick wall, promoting a reading at the Poetry Center of the Museum of Contemporary Art" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554070/original/file-20231016-25-r0pb7x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster promotes a Louise Glück reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago on Jan. 21, 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://archive.poetrycenter.org/2015/07/21/gluck-louise-1977-2004/">The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She wrote often of families and the ways they fail each other, though slantingly, as when Glück explores strained dynamics between mothers and daughters via the Greek goddesses <a href="https://poets.org/poem/persephone-wanderer">Demeter and Persephone</a>. She makes vivid the challenges of marriage through the characters of Homer’s “Odyssey” in her 1996 book “Meadowlands.” A poem from that work, “<a href="https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/gluck/Telemachus.html">Telemachus’ Detachment</a>,” envisages the son of Odysseus and Penelope reflecting on his parents’ union as “heartbreaking, but also / insane. Also / very funny.” Her register was wide: Though Glück wrote with a kind of detachment about even the most intimate of emotions, it was often via characters who spoke wryly, abruptly, with gallows humor and a gimlet eye for human frailty.</p>
<p>Failure and loss frequently gave rise to her work: Her fifth book, “Ararat,” published in 1990, arose after her father’s death; her 1999 book, “<a href="https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/louise-glucks-nine-lives/docview/231943493/se-2">Vita Nova,</a>” emerged from the dissolution of her marriage. Even her titles exemplify the dense literary references that characterize her work:
“Ararat” echoes the story of Noah’s flood, and “Vita Nova” is named after Dante Alighieri’s poems on the death of his beloved. In “Vita Nova,” the way we fail those we love is explored via the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. </p>
<h2>Contact even at a distance</h2>
<p>“Wild Iris,” one of Glück’s <a href="https://poets.org/poet/louise-gluck">most honored works</a>, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and The Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award, is exemplary of her style. A book of poems written after a <a href="https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/louise-gl%C3%BCck">paralyzing period of writer’s block</a>, it is the voice of flowers, of prayers, of the soul beyond death and of God speaking back through her poems. Even when talking to God, the speaker remains acerbic and questioning: The <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49758/vespers-once-i-believed-in-you">first line of one poem</a> to God begins “Once, I believed in you … .” </p>
<p>The title piece of the collection speaks in the voice of a flower emerging in spring and as a speaker from beyond the grave, “whatever / returns from oblivion returns / to find a voice.” Another poem in the voice of “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49760/the-silver-lily">The Silver Lily</a>” says “We have come too far together toward the end now / to fear the end.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Louise Glück reads from ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Louise Glück’s poems can feel like they come at the drama of life from a distance: The voice in her poems has been described as <a href="https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/poems-louise-gl-ck/1120357967">vatic</a>, <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/159665/poetry-louise-gluck">divinatory</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/books/louise-gluck-nobel-prize-literature.html">Delphic</a> and <a href="https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3407600191/GVRL?u=usocal_main&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=9003490a">haunting</a>, evoking a ghost speaking across time, able to narrate its own story with a dispassionate disinterest. </p>
<p>In the end, it was this carefully crafted, piercing observation of what is core to our human struggle that continues to animate Glück’s work for so many. If ever a poetic voice was honed across a lifetime to speak to us from beyond the grave, it’s Glück’s.</p>
<p><em>This article was updated to clarify that Glück was the first American poet to win the Nobel Prize in literature since T.S. Eliot.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215659/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Cannon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A celebrated poet and Nobel laureate, Louise Glück wrote about mortality, broken families and human frailty with devastating wryness and quiet beauty.
Amy Cannon, Associate Professor of Writing, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/215029
2023-10-06T10:57:38Z
2023-10-06T10:57:38Z
Pat Arrowsmith’s legacy - the antinuclear activist was a peace poet too
<p>Pat Arrowsmith, the British peace activist and notable figure in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, passed away last week at the age of 93. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/pat-arrowsmith-obituary">Obituaries</a> have <a href="https://cnduk.org/cnd-mourns-the-loss-of-pat-arrowsmith/">celebrated her commitment to the peace movement</a>, noted her one-day marriage (despite being a lesbian, Arrowsmith married a man to fulfil the terms of her father’s inheritance) and mentioned the numerous prison sentences she served for protest action. </p>
<p>These facts of Arrowsmith’s life are part of the record. However, there is another aspect of her legacy which has been largely overlooked – her poetry.</p>
<p>Arrowsmith clearly valued and enjoyed writing. Her poetry was circulated in antinuclear publications and anthologies and compiled in pamphlets and books. She wrote in prison and also <a href="https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/pat-arrowsmith/1270850/">published novels</a> and a memoir called I Should Have Been a Hornby Train (1992). </p>
<p>Her poems are sometimes deeply personal, as she considers the pressures of life as an activist. Thematically, the poetry is anti-war, anti-nuclear and environmentally aware – themes which have a renewed resonance for readers today. The poems go beyond protest songs – there is skill and craft to them.</p>
<h2>The themes of Arrowsmith’s poetry</h2>
<p>The same core messages spanned Arrowsmith’s poetry and activism. In both word and deed she argued that people in Britain are not protected from a nuclear strike. </p>
<p>In Greenhouse, a poem written in 1968 and republished in the peace poetry anthology Doves for the Seventies (1969) and in Arrowsmith’s collections On the Brink (1981) and Nine Lives (1990), she describes a greenhouse paradise which shelters its inhabitants from the world. </p>
<p>Glass of course is a fragile material, and the greenhouse roof is no defence against the “hail of silver bullets” which strike the panes. In the lines “how thinly screened we are; / how soon our shelter may be shattered”, the poem invites us to imagine our own vulnerability in the face of war. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The papers of Pat Arrowsmith at LSE.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Similarly, following the circulation of the civil defence pamphlet <a href="https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/protect-and-survive">Protect and Survive</a>, in 1980 Arrowsmith followed its advice and wrote to her landlords, Haringey Council, to <a href="https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/guardian-diary/docview/186207505/se-2">request that they provide a nuclear shelter</a> for residents of her building. This tested the protocols laid out in Protect and Survive, but she recieved no response. </p>
<p>Arrowsmith responded directly to Protect and Survive in her creative work too. She reused its illustrations of a man building a shelter in On The Brink (1981), alongside On Winning One’s Half Century (1980), a poem which ridicules nuclear defence advice broadcast on BBC television show Panorama.</p>
<p>Arrowsmith’s environment-focused antinuclear poems were ahead of their time. The 1980s <a href="https://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/modern-and-contemporary/daniel-cordle-late-cold-war-literature-and-culture-the-nuclear-1980s/">brought greater interest</a> in the environmental (and health) impact of bomb testing and nuclear waste. Jonathan Schell’s <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/02/15/the-fate-of-the-earth-the-choice">The Fate of the Earth</a> (1982) articles, originally published in The New Yorker, were particularly influential. </p>
<p>Arrowsmith’s poem Rock Pool (1970) raises similar concerns, a decade before. The poem mentions “strontium”, alluding to the impact of atmospheric nuclear testing and the radioactive strontium-90 isotope (a component of fallout from nuclear testing now present throughout the environment and in our bodies). </p>
<p>Her other poems from this period blur the line between human cities and animal habitats, suggesting a shared vulnerability between humans and the natural world.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1707764175710138603"}"></div></p>
<h2>Arrowsmith’s reflections</h2>
<p>In my research in British antinuclear poetry, I have identified recurring images of glass in Arrowsmith’s poetry. Glass screens, lenses, mirrors, windows and glass-like watery surfaces appear again and again. They form fragile boundaries, both there and not there. They frame and warp what is seen, inviting the reader to question their perspective. </p>
<p>In particular, reflective glass windows act as screens where a view and reflection are brought together to create ghostly collages around moments of self-reflection. In Coach Journey, the final poem in the collection Dark Light (2009), Arrowsmith is starkly introspective as she acknowledges the motif:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Bewitched window-panes,</p>
<p>Semi-transparent images,</p>
<p>Phantom scenery,</p>
<p>Are emblematic of my life,</p>
<p>Where truth is often overlaid, confused,</p>
<p>By partial falsehood,</p>
<p>Self-deception.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a startling moment of self-doubt for someone whose sense of conviction in her cause was so public, perhaps showing her discomfort with the public-facing role she had acquired. In Self View, published in Drawing to Extinction (2000), she likened watching herself on television to seeing “someone I once saw or met or knew”, separating her private self from the public activist.</p>
<p>In Poet in 1983 (1983), Arrowsmith questions the value in writing poetry when there is so much injustice and suffering to be put right: “When the fate / of humanity is at stake / who cares”. But in his introduction to her collection On the Brink (1981), fellow poet <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/21/adrian-mitchell-obituary">Adrian Mitchell</a> drew a comparison between Arrowsmith and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/wilfred-owen">Wilfred Owen</a>. </p>
<p>He saw them as peace poets whose work is a warning to readers: “Pat has continually warned us of the dangers we’re in and the new dangers we’re creating … she emphasises how the human race threatens itself and nature too”. </p>
<p>Arrowsmith’s poetry not only adds to her legacy as an activist, it builds on the tradition of peace poetry too.</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Isobel Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The poems go beyond protest songs – there is skill and craft to them.
Isobel Cook, PhD candidate in English, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213602
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
2023-09-19T12:15:09Z
This course uses ‘climate fiction’ to teach about the perils that a warming planet faces
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548581/original/file-20230915-35026-le1o7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Storytelling can be an effective way to impart lessons in science.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/global-warming-royalty-free-image/157419001">imagedepotpro/E+ Collection/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>“Climate Change Literature”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>After reading many fiction books that featured themes of climate change, I felt compelled to create a course that would allow students to do the same. The idea was to have students learn about our planetary crisis by exploring how it’s portrayed in literature.</p>
<p>At John Carroll University, students are required to take paired courses that are tethered together from two different departments. I approached a colleague who teaches a biology course about climate science to see if he wanted to link his course to mine. Students must co-enroll in both of our courses during the same semester. The combined courses give students both a scientific and literary view of climate change. In my colleague’s class, students learn about <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/co2-emissions-in-2022">carbon dioxide emissions</a> and the like. Then, in my class, they study how fiction writers and poets incorporate concerns about the effects of rising temperatures into their work.</p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>The major work of fiction we read is Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/flight-behavior-barbara-kingsolver?variant=32206054916130">Flight Behavior</a>,” about a low-income family in Appalachia. Millions of monarch butterflies become confused by warming temperatures and accidentally overwinter on the family farm, setting off much conflict. We also read lots of poetry and short fiction with themes of the impacts of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/13/global-heating-more-accurate-to-describe-risks-to-planet-says-key-scientist">planetary heating</a>. We read some fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Tommy Orange, Olivia Clare, Jess Walter and more. Poets include Matthew Olzmann, Nickole Brown, Ross Gay, Dante Di Stefano and Craig Santos Perez. </p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>By reading climate fiction and poetry, students learn how overreliance on fossil fuels overlaps with issues of <a href="https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5632/">economic injustice</a>, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9363288/">racial disparities in climate impacts</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/15/magazine/climate-crisis-migration-america.html">climate migration</a>. We explore narrative voice, structure, imagery, plot, dialogue, style and other textual concerns in creative works influenced by living in the <a href="https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/anthropocene/">Anthropocene</a> – or the period, according to some scientists, when human activity began to significantly affect the planet’s climate and ecosystems. <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/when-did-the-anthropocene-actually-begin/">That period</a> is thought by some climate change experts to have <a href="https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/the-human-epoch-when-did-the-anthropocene-begin">begun in the 1950s</a>. Through classroom discussion, we share the collective experience of engaging with characters who navigate a threatened world.</p>
<p>To integrate the biology and English classes, the students’ final projects are pitches for a Hollywood movie that portrays a changed world due to planetary heating while also getting the science right. The assignment is harder than it sounds: Students must understand the harmful results of carbon emissions and craft a compelling story.</p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>Climate change is an existential crisis <a href="https://www.wri.org/insights/2023-ipcc-ar6-synthesis-report-climate-change-findings">affecting us all right now</a>. Many students do not study Earth science in high school; their first, and possibly only, exposure to evidence-based climate change happens in college. Authors address consequences such as warming temperatures, ocean acidification, desertification and sea-level rise. Thus, literature has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate disruption.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>Literature helps us feel the immediacy of what’s at stake in a climate-changed world. The storytelling in fiction and poetry teaches us much that scientific and policy reports, charts, graphs and forecasts cannot. While data can predict rising sea levels, for example, a short story such as <a href="https://lithub.com/new-jesus/">Tommy Orange’s “New Jesus” </a> shows us how it feels to live in a submerged town where residents’ feet are always wet. Climate researchers predict the increasing desertification of the American Southwest. Through <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/325/tamarisk-hunter-Bacigalupi">Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story “The Tamarisk Hunter,”</a> readers experience what it looks like to see towns abandoned due to the lack of water, and golf courses where sand traps no longer exist because the entire course has turned to sand.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>Analyzing fiction and poetry sharpens students’ critical interpretive skills and prepares them to think originally and creatively as they enter a workforce altered and threatened by climate change. For example, pre-health majors will see the impacts of climate change on the human body. Business majors will need to know how to operate when extreme weather and disrupted supply chains affect the bottom line.</p>
<p>Our two paired courses combine science and literature to equip students with expansive ways of asking questions about their role in the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213602/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Debra J. Rosenthal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Poetry and prose are prominent features in this course about how climate change is affecting the world.
Debra J. Rosenthal, Professor of English, John Carroll University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/209298
2023-08-08T12:29:05Z
2023-08-08T12:29:05Z
Rhyme and reason – why a university professor uses poetry to teach math
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537945/original/file-20230718-29-l0wtv9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=29%2C65%2C3971%2C3737&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Math problems take on new meaning in this class that combines rhymes and verse with math instruction.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/books-on-vintage-background-with-math-formulas-royalty-free-image/1170503197?phrase=poetry+and+math&adppopup=true">ra2studio via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course:</h2>
<p>The Ways Math and Poetry Can Open Your Eyes to the World</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>I have always enjoyed writing poetry. As a high school mathematics teacher, I recall telling my students that everything is and can be connected to math, even creative writing. Then, as a graduate student, I read about people using <a href="https://www.nga.gov/content/dam/ngaweb/Education/learning-resources/lessons-activities/self-portraits/i-am-poem.pdf">“I am” poem templates</a> for young people to express who they are through a series of “I am” statements, and I thought to myself, where is the “I am” math poem template? So I <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QSYyTAv0DcVYTQnITsECYAkvgwn24xcO/view">created one</a>.</p>
<p>I then started working on what I call problem-posing poetry, which are poems connected to a social issue and that can be used as alternatives to traditional math word problems. Working with <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/yousef-kara-1454971/news">Yousef Kara</a>, who is a poet studying to become a teacher, we learned to see poetry as a way to understand the real world before connecting to math learning. We also began to use poetry to reflect on prior math learning. After using math poetry with high schoolers and teachers, it became apparent it should be a part of my math methods courses for future teachers.</p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>The course explores the idea of poetry as a rich experience before, during and after math learning connected to real-world issues.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QSYyTAv0DcVYTQnITsECYAkvgwn24xcO/view?usp=sharing">“I am” math poem template</a> is an example of poetry before math. The prompts used in the template allow the teacher to incorporate students’ interests when learning math in the future. For example, the last prompt shows what students are passionate about, and teachers should use that interest in their teaching of math. </p>
<p>Problem-posing poems like <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/16c5lFhePvWUZws1yyYxgtgK2FBZ1-ZjwJG6K-bFJ2WU/edit?usp=sharing">“Number Sense,”</a> written by Ricardo Martinez, show how a poem can use actual data to become a math problem for students to solve. Poetry after math learning can best be captured by Yousef’s poem <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v590OpScLOECC6su6LvPEbhNVgggn-kZLf4Wpou9qPM/edit?usp=sharing">“The Wrong Bathroom, Continuously,”</a> a reflection on trans identity related to functions that model relationships between two quantities.</p>
<p>This poem demonstrates concepts of math through exploring different types of continuous functions in calculus. Functions that oscillate, approach opposite infinities and disjointed functions, all of which make it impossible to find the exact value of a limit. Hence the line, “You cannot pin me down to a single point.”</p>
<p>Here is an excerpt from the poem:</p>
<p><em>I am a continuous function.</em> </p>
<p><em>I oscillate</em>
<em>My gender, in constant motion,</em>
<em>And I don’t care if I am unrecognizable to you</em></p>
<p><em>I approach both infinities</em>
<em>From the left and the right</em>
<em>Expanding with each self discovery.</em>
<em>Expanding far beyond your comprehension</em></p>
<p><em>I am disjointed</em>
<em>Deconstructed and decolonized.</em>
<em>I teleport between and beyond genders</em>
<em>You cannot pin me down to a single point</em></p>
<p>It shows how learning more about math expands our vocabulary and understanding of what we experience. </p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>The beauty of using poetry is that it makes math more exciting and allows it to connect to any topic or idea. Math poetry becomes even more critical today as people need an outlet to communicate their truths about societal injustices like trans people’s rights, bans on Black history or Islamophobia. Math and poetry create new metaphors that allow people to better understand societal issues along with themselves and others.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>A key takeaway from the course is that math is a vital part of each person, and poetry can help people see that math is all around us.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>By exploring math and poetry, I believe they, as aspiring teachers, will begin to question how they were taught – for example, the use of timed tests and learning with no real-world connections. A lot of people say they don’t like math, when, in truth, they have never knowingly experienced math connected to their culture, values, desires and dreams. Math and poetry work to reclaim how we all see, experience and live with math every day.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ricardo Martinez does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A math professor explains how he prepares future teachers to use poetry in their math instruction.
Ricardo Martinez, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education, Penn State
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206087
2023-07-30T20:08:15Z
2023-07-30T20:08:15Z
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/528165/original/file-20230525-30-j3q7rp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1868%2C1243&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ali Cobby Eckermann.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jalaru Photography/Magabala Books</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>By any objective measure – publications, sales, recognition – the literature of First Nations peoples in Australia is undergoing a resurgence. At the forefront in poetry has been Yankunytjatjara poet, <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A96913">Ali Cobby Eckermann</a>. Magabala Books, the Broome-based independent Aboriginal publisher of Eckermann’s latest book <a href="https://www.magabala.com/products/she-is-the-earth">She is the Earth</a>, has also played a large part in this revival. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Review: She is the Earth – Ali Cobby Eckermann (Magabala Books)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In a story that has become literary legend, Eckermann was living in a caravan on unemployment benefits when she heard in 2017 that she had won the international <a href="https://windhamcampbell.org/festival/2017/recipients/eckermann-ali-cobby">Windham-Campbell Prize</a>. She was only the second Australian to win this prestigious award, following Helen Garner, and the first author from any Indigenous group in the world to receive this honour.</p>
<p>Forcibly removed from her family, as one of the stolen generation, she was raised by adoptive parents on Ngadjuri country in South Australia’s mid north. While her parents were loving, her childhood was filled with trauma. Eckermann endured sexual abuse, schoolyard racism and feelings of alienation. Later, while living in the Australian Outback, she was a victim of domestic violence. She was pressured to give up her child for adoption. </p>
<p>Throughout her life, Eckermann was curious about her Aboriginal heritage. The final chapters of her memoir see her, in her mid-30s, reconnect with her mother and discover her Aboriginal kin. Around this time, she also reunited with her 18-year-old son. These details are helpful in understanding She is the Earth.</p>
<h2>Author identity</h2>
<p>The <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/new-criticism">New Critics</a> who were ascendant in postwar Anglo-American literary criticism recommended approaching a literary work as a watertight container that would admit no additional information in its interpretation. A reader was to be guided by the text alone; authors, and their intentions, were irrelevant. </p>
<p>The literary theories that gained traction from the 1960s, which gave us concepts such as Roland Barthes’ “<a href="https://interestingliterature.com/2021/10/barthes-death-of-the-author-summary-analysis/">death of the author</a>” and Michel Foucault’s “<a href="https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en/">author function</a>”, did not overturn these conventions. </p>
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<p>More recently, there has been a tendency to foreground an author’s identity. It is not difficult to see why this is the case in the field of Indigenous literature. Any assertion that suggests an author’s identity is peripheral to their work is potentially an erasure of difference. In Eckermann’s case, the truth of her identity has been hard won and it is central to her work. </p>
<p>She is the Earth, Eckermann’s first book in eight years, is presented as a verse novel. It is a poetry of the elements. The nouns that commonly recur – “water”, “air”, “sky”, “earth”, “rock”, “light”, “moon” – appear alongside “birds” and variants of the word “breath”. There is also a broadening of the lexicon from previous works to accommodate scientific, Latinate and French vocabularies, but relatively few words are used from Aboriginal languages. </p>
<p>The book’s 90 short lyric poems chart a journey towards inner truth. Eckermann recently <a href="https://thegarretpodcast.com/ali-cobby-eckermann/">explained in an interview</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I believe that we know all the answers inside us, and that’s sort of what life is about. I think life is about the challenge to know who we are, so there’s much wisdom inside us and it’s the external that squashes that. The more time we can spend with our internal, we’ll find that voice. I’ve chosen to call it spirit voice – that guiding voice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The speaker in these poems is both child and mother, pupil and teacher. References to children and motherhood abound. Initial images of disconnection, anxiety and trauma give way, in later sections, to wholeness and calm. </p>
<p>But the journey is not linear: hope is present from the earliest sections and trauma haunts the closing pages. Healing is presented as an ongoing process that is projected beyond the poem. </p>
<p>The 11th lyric in the sequence is illustrative of some of Eckermann’s strategies: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in silence is blankness<br>
a creation without birth<br>
even nature is absent<br></p>
<p>the vacancy of flora<br>
is a starkness endured<br>
as if a slaughter<br></p>
<p>the truancy of fauna<br>
is a separation endured<br>
as if a beheading<br></p>
<p>the void in my heart<br>
listens for any vow<br>
for the inclusion of me<br> </p>
<p>my scream is silent<br>
yet reverberates<br>
around the world<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The imagery is marked by absences – “silence”, “blankness”, “vacancy”, “starkness”, “truancy”, “void” – and the omission of punctuation reinforces the lyric’s bluntness. The poem is pared back, and yet it relies on repetition of structures and sonic devices (such as assonance and consonance) for its effect. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=155&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=155&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539444/original/file-20230726-19-ii0clw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=195&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Island Lagoon, South Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Morton/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/enraged-tragic-and-hopeful-alexis-wrights-new-novel-praiseworthy-explores-aboriginal-sovereignty-in-the-shadow-of-the-anthropocene-202827">Enraged, tragic and hopeful: Alexis Wright's new novel Praiseworthy explores Aboriginal sovereignty in the shadow of the anthropocene</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Minimalism</h2>
<p>Eckermann’s oeuvre is characterised by ellipsis and a general brevity. There has always been a pull towards minimalism in her work, but the lyrics in She is the Earth are even sparser than in previous collections. </p>
<p>European minimalism arose after the horrors of Auschwitz. It aimed for a boiled down, unadorned truth-telling, free of the beautiful lies of metaphor and music. While Eckermann’s art is highly metaphorical – and it is often musical – her work has an affinity with this philosophy. In 2016, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02690055.2016.1145440">she spoke</a> of</p>
<blockquote>
<p>wanting to write poems using the least amount of words so people can’t play around with or misinterpret what I’m trying to say in the poem. I wanted it to be really concise and clear, because most of my life had been a misinterpretation of the life and the person that I believe I was born to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The poems in She is the Earth use even spacing, most commonly the unrhymed couplet, the tercet (as in the example above) or the quatrain, with plenty of white space surrounding the poem. The short lines and stanzas slow the reading down. </p>
<p>Eckermann generally employs a parsing line, so the phrase remains intact and reading is not overly disrupted by line breaks. These features aid the poetry’s meditative purposes and create a sense of interiority. </p>
<p>The poems in She is the Earth burn with the intensity of Judith Wright’s late spare lyrics. They are charged with a searching spirituality that never quite comes to rest: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I walk distorted<br>
less sway<br>
</p>
<p>I talk distorted<br>
less smile<br>
less safe<br></p>
<p>I pray distorted<br>
what to<br>
who with<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Eckermann has spoken and written of the salvific power of poetry. This sequence, which is a love song to Country, is also a work of psychological and spiritual healing. Nature is personified from the title and the dedication to the book’s closing pages. It is the natural world (“the earth”) that provides restoration. </p>
<p>The speaker’s transformation is prefigured in multiple images of metamorphosis: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is a moment of praise<br>
</p>
<p>this chorus salvation<br>
observe it<br></p>
<p>[…]<br></p>
<p>wood turns serpent<br>
in my hand<br></p>
<p>together we walk<br>
rewinding the land<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>These lyrics are metaphorical terrain, mindscapes and dreamscapes. Despite their metaphysical concerns, the theme of ecological crisis remains present: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a porcupine offers quills<br>
from his dying body<br>
confronted I accept<br></p>
<p>gently he reassures<br>
when death is near<br>
we must give our beauty<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The speaker is neither wholly apart nor at one with her surroundings. Cobby Eckermann’s exquisite control of imagery, which was much praised in her earlier volumes, is displayed again here. Take her description of the Milky Way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when the moon is asleep<br>
the Milky Way talks<br></p>
<p>stars raise me up<br>
singing their names<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>In She is the Earth, Eckermann’s use of rock imagery – so prominent in Inside My Mother – becomes more specific (“shale”, “mica”, “haematite”). Avian imagery again abounds, as in the sticky punning of this lyric:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am bowerbird<br>
building a nest<br></p>
<p>magnetic<br>
majestic<br></p>
<p>monogamous<br>
polygynous<br></p>
<p>I am caught<br>
courting myself<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most important of these birds is the owl:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>from behind the moon<br>
a shadow form flies<br></p>
<p>a silhouette of an owl<br>
its wings surround me<br></p>
<p>the ground turns neon<br>
as the owl swoops down<br></p>
<p>my aura is shifting<br>
observing listening<br></p>
<p>dark eyes hold me<br>
I am mesmerised<br></p>
<p>the owl is talking<br>
the owl is teaching<br></p>
<p>I learn the night<br>
I learn the journey<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Claiming an affinity with this bird, the speaker later exclaims:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>this is my totem<br>
this is my song<br></p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539449/original/file-20230726-19-yb1l39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Masked owl (Tyto novaehollandiae)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Benjamint444/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Aboriginal stories are interspersed with Christian imagery, and the work finds commonalities with the traditions of Zen Buddhism, Gnosticism, Islamic and Christian mysticism, and other Indigenous traditions. There are the tropes of knowing through unknowing and insight through blindness, leading to embodied truth: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>if you peer you will see<br>
if you are deaf you will hear<br></p>
<p>if you are blind you will feel<br>
legends inscribed here<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>While the poetry in She is the Earth is distinctly local, it is also internationalist. In this way, the work reflects the travel the author has undertaken in the last decade, and the growing consciousness of a global community of Indigenous writers. It acknowledges that the present is complex and entangled, that there is no way back to a precolonial state. </p>
<p>Yet it also longs for the erasure of the past 235 years. There is no mention, for example, of Western technology, and the inclusion of “referendum” in the final poem might be the only hint of any colonising institution. </p>
<p>She is the Earth might be charged with quietism, or criticised for its lack of activism. The accusative “you” from Eckermann’s earlier work is absent. Yet the political is clearly present, even if it is not so overtly expressed. The body is also the body politic; the scars are personal and corporate, but the correspondence between the two is never exact, or allegorical, nor neatly reducible. </p>
<p>The tone of the book is urgent. The final line of the opening and closing lyrics, “not quite genesis”, suggests both continuity and the ongoing nature of the struggle. There is still personal healing to be experienced, and reconciliation is incomplete:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ahead my future<br>
fills with colour<br>
my referendum<br></p>
<p>my hope crosses<br>
from the previous<br>
to the prophetic<br></p>
<p>in our creation<br>
I am one page<br>
not yet sanctified<br> </p>
<p>I am one page<br>
in a sanctified story<br>
not quite genesis<br></p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/minimalist-poet-antigone-kefala-wins-the-patrick-white-award-for-her-contribution-to-australian-literature-195194">Minimalist poet Antigone Kefala wins the Patrick White Award for her contribution to Australian literature</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A verse novel?</h2>
<p>The verse novel has proved as popular a form for poets in Australia as anywhere. Through the 1990s, <a href="https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-668_Porter">Dorothy Porter</a> in particular achieved major success with titles such as Akhenaten (1992) and The Monkey’s Mask (1994). Publishers thought that the form could capture more readers than poetry collections, and it often proved the case.</p>
<p>Fewer authors writing for adult audiences have attempted the form in the second decade of the 21st century, but verse novels have been written for the young adult (YA) market. Many appear on school syllabi and are book-listed by schools. <a href="https://www.magabala.com/products/bindi-softcover">Bindi</a>, written by First Nations author Kirli Saunders and published by Magabala Books, is a recent success in this category. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/539446/original/file-20230726-25-4rzyn1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eckermann herself is well established in this genre. His Father’s Eyes (2011), published by Oxford University Press, was commissioned to explain the Stolen Generations to upper primary and lower secondary students. <a href="https://www.magabala.com/products/ruby-moonlight">Ruby Moonlight</a> (2012), a historical verse novel set in South Australia in the late 19th century, collected a number of awards and shortlistings, including the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year.</p>
<p>It is unsurprising, then, that Magabala has marketed She Is the Earth as a verse novel, but it seems to stretch the definition too far. Unlike Eckermann’s previous verse novels, the volume is not driven by a plot and, beyond the speaker, has no conventional characters. Readers looking for something similar to Ruby Moonlight are likely to be disappointed. </p>
<p>But She is the Earth is not a collection of short lyrics either. It is a sequence or long poem – and a brilliant one at that. </p>
<p>It was announced in January that Australia <a href="https://theconversation.com/australia-is-to-have-a-poet-laureate-how-will-the-first-appointment-define-us-as-a-nation-198769">will appoint a Poet Laureate</a>, prompting discussions about who it might be and what the role might entail. Ali Cobby Eckermann’s name will surely be raised in these discussions, and more so for the achievement of these lyrics. </p>
<p>She is the Earth is unlike any other book in Australian literature. Of the works Eckermann has written to date, it could well prove her most enduring.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206087/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aidan Coleman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Ali Cobby Eckermann’s first book since winning the Windham Campbell Prize may well prove her most enduring.
Aidan Coleman, Senior Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, Southern Cross University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/203899
2023-06-28T20:01:33Z
2023-06-28T20:01:33Z
Poetry goes nuclear: 3 recent books delve into present anxieties, finding beauty amid the terror
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526743/original/file-20230517-28-phmt6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=22%2C7%2C4877%2C3232&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frederic Paulussen/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It seemed to me for many years that thoughts of nuclear catastrophe were anachronistic. Was that ignorance and complacency on my part? Probably. After all, there were always rumblings about proliferation, Iran and North Korea, India and Pakistan and Israel. But they did not feel like existential threats to those of us living in Australia. </p>
<p>Am I alone in feeling this way? Was it less a question of the tyranny of distance than anaesthetising privilege? Terrorism, yes – domestic and international – but not nuclear catastrophe.</p>
<p>Three recent books of Australian poetry – Lisa Gorton’s <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/lisa-gorton-mirabilia/">Mirabilia</a>, Greg McLaren’s <a href="https://puncherandwattmann.com/product/camping-underground/">Camping Underground</a>, and Shastra Deo’s <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-exclusion-zone">The Exclusion Zone</a> (as well as the Sydney Theatre Company’s forthcoming adaptation of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/on-the-beach-9780099530251">On the Beach</a>) – suggest that the nuclear question is back. </p>
<p>The most obvious and important reason would seem to be the war in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s bellicosity, but AUKUS and Australia’s plans to acquire nuclear-powered submarines and renascent debates about nuclear power more generally are also relevant. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>The Exclusion Zone – Shastra Deo (University of Queensland Press); Mirabilia – Lisa Gorton (Giramondo); Camping Undergound – Greg McLaren (Puncher & Wattmann).</em></p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=852&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526705/original/file-20230517-17-a10oqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1071&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Gorton, McLaren and Deo all speak to this context. Their books are concerned with “apocalypse” in both the common and the more specific sense of the word. Broadly, their shared theme is (to cite the OED definition) “a disaster resulting in drastic, irreversible damage to human society or the environment”. Their shared purpose is to uncover or disclose – to reveal – something about our present circumstances and anxieties. </p>
<p>McLaren’s book is a verse novel with an overarching narrative, whereas Gorton’s and Deo’s are collections of individual poems and sequences, and therefore have a wider variety of preoccupations and tones. But another important distinction, and perhaps one we don’t think about enough when we think about poetry, is that Camping Underground is a work of fiction, while Mirabilia and The Exclusion Zone are not. </p>
<p>That may sound banal, but I believe this distinction is crucial to the power we ascribe, or want to ascribe, to contemporary poetry. I want to say that non-fiction poetry and lyric poetry – autofiction with the “meh” wrung-out? – hit the mainline in this regard.</p>
<h2>Staging the end of the world</h2>
<p>Camping Underground brings the apocalypse to the south-east coast of Australia:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cessnock. Where else<br>
would you stage<br>
the end of the world?<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>McLaren’s lines allude to a wisecrack attributed to Ava Gardner, one of the Hollywood stars of the film adaptation of Shute’s novel: “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.” </p>
<p>Such wry humour is typical of Camping Underground, and it is always pointed. For instance, having been told of </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Foxtel Dawn Service,<br>
led by the VB Governor-General,<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>it’s fair that readers later assume the Governor-General to be the victim of a shooting “at Yarralumla”. The jokes have a satirical purpose: the culture is on trial, not just our politicians.</p>
<p>Structurally, Camping Underground alternates between sections titled “Before” and “After”. It tracks the life and reflections of Kelly Edwards, who is implicated in unforgiving (and perhaps unforgiveable) acts of political violence. She is variously on the run or hiding out – or rather in, for the title refers to an abandoned mine in the Hunter Valley.</p>
<p>In the “After” sections, there isn’t much left of Sydney. There are rumours of “people coming down from the north”, landings of Chinese or Indonesian ships, and “boats full / of people escaping nuked Iran.” No one is sure what is happening; post-truth survives, if not fuels, the apocalypse. We learn that law and order have broken down, that terrorism and anarchy prevail. There are atrocities aplenty: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The truck bomb at Lucas Heights<br>
was a feint,<br>
the clever stupid bastards<br>
just as the AFP went into Kirribilli House.<br>
Another squad of the Blue Cross went in<br>
as the Mack went up, wearing burqas.<br>
They blew the shit out of the reactor<br>
and left only their shaky live feed<br>
and a bloated ellipse of suburbs dusted<br>
by the unexpected southerly.<br>
The thefts from oncology departments<br>
at RPA and John Hunter: that was them too,<br>
so they said – that stuff found its way<br>
into dirty bombs along the eastern seaboard<br>
those long three days after.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucas Heights, we remember, is the site of Australia’s only nuclear reactor. To imagine it falling prey to a terror attack is appalling; we are grateful this is fiction. Still, it is desperate stuff, and though it may seem incongruous to alight on such a striking phrase as “a bloated ellipse of suburbs”, to do so heightens the awfulness of those suburbs being “dusted” with the fallout.</p>
<p>The beauty of the phrasing, as with the moments of humour, speak to humaneness under duress, but resisting. This is an important point, for in the apparent disconnect between aesthetics and subject matter, we are reminded of literature’s singularity; it does not mimic resistance, but becomes it.</p>
<p>Another example: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The clouds, their small<br>
crackling fissures of light –<br>
opening like an ice sheet.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>How to balance such lyrical moments with the dirty bombs, including one </p>
<blockquote>
<p>in the maternity tent<br>
of the internment camp.<br>
Another clip<br>
of kids’ feet<br>
poking out from under tarps.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a shocking image, all too familiar to anyone who reads or watches the news; we have seen this, and we know we will see it again. And yet elsewhere McLaren admits some light. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I try to learn a place by watching<br>
what birds do above it.<br> </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this gallows beauty? After all, don’t birds circle above dead animals? Yes, and yet the image hints at redemption. After all, “I try to learn”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know why<br>
you wouldn’t believe in the redemptive<br>
power of literature, or doubt<br>
its real-world applications.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This brings me back to the relative merits – the “real-world applications” – of non-fiction and lyric poetry, as opposed to poetry that is (more) overtly fictional. On this point, I would say there is a continuum, or a spectrum, from non-fiction to fiction, rather than two entirely separate buckets. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=873&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526708/original/file-20230517-17-fhpzvb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1098&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We might ask, then, what is the “real-world application” of Camping Underground? It cannot be witness or consolation, for its apocalypse – the disaster it invents, or “stages” – is a fiction, a speculation, and one cannot be consoled pre-emptively.</p>
<p>Are we being prepared or warned? It seems facile to label Camping Underground a cautionary tale. Do we need 180 pages of verse novel to ward us off anarchy and disaster, or tell us that the culture is in trouble? McLaren’s book has other virtues, but on the point of literature’s “real-world applications”, which he himself raises, I can’t help feeling that the overt fictionality lessens its effectiveness.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530800/original/file-20230608-19-7jgap1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shastra Deo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kate Lund/University of Queensland Press.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/adam-aitken-a-forensic-poet-with-obsessive-resolve-176549">Adam Aitken: a forensic poet with obsessive resolve</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An urgent need</h2>
<p>The matter and materials of science and history are important to Shastra Deo’s The Exclusion Zone. The first section refers regularly to the nuclear disasters at Fukushima and Chernobyl, which creates a more chilling effect than if fictional counterparts had been invented. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526709/original/file-20230517-22-1bru81.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The titles of the poems are wonderful, evocative things. Here is a selection, which I may try to publish as a cento: Fukushima Soil, Canto for Sumitomo Bank (Hiroshima Branch), Pavlovsk Station, Undertakers of the Atom, Przewalski’s Horses Are Back in Belarus, View of the Sky from an Imagined Lake in June. </p>
<p>That final title belongs to a visual or concrete poem that creates a constellation of star symbols and corresponding footnotes to convey its meaning. It is terrific, and worth the cost of admission. But this first section is complicated and, at least for me, somewhat undermined by Aubade (Earth-TRN688), which apparently has something to do with Marvel (the comic universe, not Andrew). </p>
<p>It is not the subject matter of Aubade (Earth-TRN688) that is the problem, but rather its being uncommunicative for those outside the know. What do we do when we encounter such a poem? Perhaps if I hadn’t been writing an essay, I would have skipped it. Having said that, I will test my impatience by setting the poem on an undergraduate creative writing course to see if students, several of whom are gamers, have a better sense of it.</p>
<p>One of the The Exclusion Zone’s two epigraphs comes from Wilfred Owen: “All a poet can do today is warn.” With due respect to Owen, and to Deo, I think the collection does more than this. It is not just a warning when one writes about the horrors of the past, but also an act of testimony and respect. To remember is an urgent need.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I mean to say is here<br>
you must forget a thing to kill it.<br></p>
<p>What I meant to say was everything<br></p>
<p>oh<br></p>
<p>everything lives.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the collection’s central claim. It is both an ethics and an intellectual idea. The suggestion – and I think it is persuasive – is that the past remains alive. It needs our care and attention, both actual and imaginative. Only in weighing the materials she has to hand can the poet go to work on them.</p>
<p>These lines are from Search History:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The story of matter is this: nothing dies.<br>
Patterns of information, electricity<br>
and biochemicals, deep web of nerve and neuron, limb<br>
and stem, remake to microbe and geosmin. Leaf litter<br>
of an ever-season. Smell of soil after rain. The<br>
matter of matter is this: nothing<br>
is storyless, not even the dead.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I found this beautiful, but confess I had to look up geosmin. Google’s top response, from the American Chemical Society, made things perfectly clear: “a natural bicyclic terpene with an earthy odor.” (I’ll do as McLaren did and borrow from <a href="https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-12291_Forbes">John Forbes</a>: “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”) Deo tells us as much – “Smell of soil after rain” – which raises the question as to why the word geosmin was necessary. </p>
<p>It’s for the sound, I suspect, and the rhythm. And yes, it does sound cool. Still, it is the first and last lines of the stanza – if we include “nothing” from line six – where the meaning is made.</p>
<p>As with Camping Underground, there are hopeful gestures throughout The Exclusion Zone, none more so than in Poem for My Son in the Years of a Hot War: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every day the wash of light<br>
over bedcovers. Your hand. Your<br>
cheek. Your eyelid, lifting.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>McLaren and Deo are not afraid of love; they insist upon it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530798/original/file-20230608-22-qnbkz0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lisa Gorton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Giramondo Publishing</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/photo-poems-and-bathroom-abstractions-in-the-book-of-falling-david-mccooey-offers-a-series-of-psychological-snapshots-200539">Photo poems and bathroom abstractions: in The Book of Falling, David McCooey offers a series of psychological snapshots</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Wondrous, terrible things</h2>
<p>The author’s note that accompanied my copy of Lisa Gorton’s Mirabilia is enormously enlightening, and I wish it could have been included in the Notes section of the book. I can understand why publishers don’t do this – it adds to the cost, doesn’t it? – but it is a pity for readers to miss out on the poet’s musings. </p>
<p>This, for example, is Gorton’s reflection on the stunning title poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrote the title poem in one of Melbourne’s lockdowns – a poem about pangolins, the most-trafficked mammals on earth, implicated in the evolution of Covid-19; they die in captivity […] “Mirabilia” is written in Fibonacci syllabics to imitate how a pangolin spirals up into itself; also, as a lament for that pattern of growth and return, which has lived in the background of poetry’s images for so long.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this left out of the book but provided to reviewers so that people like me can look smarter than we really are? (“Fibo-what? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”) Gorton’s take on her various themes and poems is fascinating. I liked the house having extra windows; it gave the book more oxygen, more life.</p>
<p>Mirabilia is comprised of three sections – Muse, Tongue, and Great World Atlas – each alive to the unwritten, or unheralded, people and experiences of history. Muse and Tongue contain ekphrastic poems and poems concerned with the figure of the female muse. On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers is both funny and scathing. As a reader of Baudelaire, Rilke, Rimbaud and Larkin, one cringes at their narcissism and petulance, their cruelty.</p>
<p>It is Great World Atlas, the final part of Mirabilia, in which Gorton tackles the theme of nuclear testing and its cover-up. These poems are also ekphrastic, in that they were written to accompany the work of artist <a href="https://www.izabelapluta.net/">Izabela Pluta</a>. There are only five poems in the sequence, but in total they run for some sixteen pages. Here is an excerpt from the second poem, The Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas 1961 (1962):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Between the time of its publication and fourth revise they<br>
exploded the bomb they called Vanya over Novaya Zemlya –<br>
its fireball five miles wide hung a second sun over the<br>
island – its cloud rose into the mesosphere – black rain over<br>
the Kara Sea, Barents Sea, Alaska, Norway, Finland, Ukraine,<br>
northern Canada … Between the time of its publication and fourth<br>
revise they exploded the bomb they called Starfish Prime off<br>
Johnston Atoll over French Frigate Shoals, high inside the<br>
thermosphere – Its aurora – a blinding white flash, green<br>
sphere of light, vast cloud outflung in turning arcs, in circles<br>
sweeping outwards … Between the time of its publication and<br>
fourth revise they exploded plutonium over the saltbush<br>
scrub of Maralinga, at Taranaki, north of the straight train<br>
line across the Nullarbor, in secret trials they had named<br>
Operation Tims and Operation Vixen – its plumes, a<br>
hundred miles long, drifted on the wind – They had taken<br>
the sacred objects, trucked the people south across the rail<br>
line to the coast of Yalata – She said, “Where are we going?<br>
We are going to a place we have never been to –”<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I found this poem profoundly affecting, much in the way of reading Natalie Harkin’s <a href="https://vagabondpress.net/products/natalie-harkin-archival-poetics">Archival Poetics</a> (2019). It is a litany of actual horror and misdeed, of experiment and consequence and appalling indifference. </p>
<p>In her author’s note, Gorton says that she was “thinking about the nature of historical memory, which lets a few images stand in the place of what has been forgotten, or concealed”. I think, for now and not finally, that this is where the power of contemporary poetry resides – in the blood of the actual – and that, perhaps, is a vital sign.</p>
<p>Reading Great World Atlas, having read Harkin – and Ali Cobby Eckermann, Evelyn Araluen, Ellen Van Neerven, and others – one wonders, finally, to whom does Gorton’s “they” refer? </p>
<p>One knows one is one of them, but wishes to demur.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203899/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Craig Billingham has previously received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Izabela Pluta is a fellow employee of UNSW.</span></em></p>
In speaking to the moment, poets are bringing the apocalypse to Australian literature.
Craig Billingham, Lecturer, Creative Writing, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205695
2023-05-22T17:13:36Z
2023-05-22T17:13:36Z
Curious Kids: who was the first person to speak English?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527535/original/file-20230522-25-475xbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C270%2C2696%2C1932&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Anglo-Saxon village re-enactment event in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, 2008.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/wirksworth-derbyshire-uk-07262008-anglo-saxon-1127082854">Simon Annable/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>Who was the first person to speak English? – Grace, aged eight, Belfast, Northern Ireland</strong></p>
<p>The first speaker of English did not sound like you or me. That’s because language changes all the time. You have probably noticed that the language of your grandparents differs from yours. You can imagine then how very different English was when it was first spoken in Britain many centuries ago. </p>
<p>The earliest speakers of English spoke Old English. I am using the word “speakers” because there must have been more than one speaker: after all, we use language to talk to others. </p>
<p>Old English developed in a turbulent period of British history. This was just after the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zqtf34j/articles/z2dr4wx">Romans had left Britain</a>, around 1,600 years ago. The Romans had colonised Britain but they abandoned the country in the fifth century because the Roman empire was collapsing all around them. </p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282267/original/file-20190702-126345-1np1y7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=368&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/curious-kids-36782">Curious Kids</a> is a series by <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk">The Conversation</a> that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to <a href="mailto:curiouskids@theconversation.com">curiouskids@theconversation.com</a> and make sure you include the asker’s first name, age and town or city. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our very best.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>The Romans who ruled Britain spoke their language, Latin. But most of the people who lived in Britain when the Romans were there – and before that too – spoke <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/language_romans.shtml">a Celtic language</a>. This Celtic language was rather like Welsh, but again much older than the present-day Welsh language. </p>
<p>After the Romans left Britain, Germanic tribes who were on the move throughout Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries invaded. These tribes were the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/anglo-saxons/articles/who-were-the-anglo-saxons">Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes</a>. The language they spoke is known as <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/413007">North Sea Germanic</a>. </p>
<h2>The first English speakers</h2>
<p>Once they settled in Britain it became <a href="https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/old-english">Old English</a>, which is also sometimes called “Anglo-Saxon”. From the Angles comes the word “English” and from the Angles and Saxons together comes the word “Anglo-Saxon”. I teach Old English to students of English at university. </p>
<p>So Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the oldest form of the English language that was spoken and written in England in the early Middle Ages, the period from roughly 450 to 1050. Very few Celtic words were taken over into Old English. The word “brock” (meaning “badger”) is one of the rare exceptions. </p>
<p>Do we know the names of the first speakers of Old English? Two names are mentioned in ancient legends that tell the story of how the Angles and the Saxons arrived in Britain. </p>
<p>According to these legends, the British (when they were still Celtic speakers) asked two Germanic leaders, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zxsbcdm/articles/z23br82">Hengest and Horsa</a>, to come to Britain to help protect the country after the Romans had left. </p>
<p>Hengest and Horsa arrived in Britain with lots of other people from their tribe and conquered the land. We have no way of knowing if these legends are true, but if they are we have here the names of the two chieftains who brought their language to Britain. </p>
<h2>An Old English poet</h2>
<p>There is one other name that deserves to be mentioned, and <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-story-of-caedmons-hymn">that is Caedmon</a>. He is the first poet in English whose name is known. The story of his life is told by the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/bede">monk and historian Bede</a>, who lived in the north of England from around 673 to 735.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Manuscript in Latin and Old English" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=222&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527532/original/file-20230522-21-q2jmje.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A section of folio 129r of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 43: a page from Book IV, chapter 24 of Bede’s Latin Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, with an Old English text of Cædmon’s Hymn added in the lower margin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/7850a308-0dd6-4d9a-b5b5-cbd6085b18dd/">© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bede not only tells the story of Hengest and Horsa, but he also tells us <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/whitby-abbey/history-and-stories/caedmon-poetry/">about Caedmon</a>, who was a cowherd. Bede wrote that Caedmon could not read or write and received the ability to compose beautiful poetry as a gift from God. The first poem that Caedmon was inspired to create is a poem in praise of God. The first two lines of this poem will give you a taste of Old English:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Nu sculon herian heofonrices Weard,
Metodes mihte and his modgeþanc
</code></pre>
<p>In modern English, this means: “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the Ruler’s might and his plan”. </p>
<p>You might think this is not really English at all. But we still use some of the words used in Old English – “and” and “his” are both in these two lines of poetry. Other words have survived too, though we often spell and pronounce them differently. See if you can spot the Old English words for “might” and “now” in these lines from Caedmon’s poem.</p>
<p>Caedmon looked after the cattle in a monastery in Whitby in Yorkshire. One of my university students studying Old English comes from Whitby and she told me that her school is named after our first named English poet: Caedmon College. His legend lives on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ad Putter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hundreds of years ago, people spoke Old English – but it is very different to English today.
Ad Putter, Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Bristol
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.