Of Mimicry, Birds, and Words: The Technology of Starling Song in European, American, and Indonesian Poetry

This chapter explores a technology of starling song in comparative linguistic and global cultural perspective by focusing on three references to starlings in poetry—from Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin; from the poetry of Jorie Graham (and by extension Wallace Stevens); and from Putu Oka Sukanta’s The Song of the Starling. Each example allows for a probing of three hypotheses: 1) that starling song is a technology that repeatedly crosses over species; 2) that starling song tracks its trans-species effects across a gobal history of language; and 3) that this global history (of species and language) emerges in para-linguistic effects, in between the sensory, linguistic, and ecological systems of birds and humans.

The Word and the Wheel: Navigating the Incarnation in Twentieth-Century Literature

This essay maintains that an incarnational aesthetic often privileges the concrete over the abstract, transcends the dichotomy between the secular and the sacred, and offers a glimpse into the intersection of time and eternity, as evidenced in the works of Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L’Engle, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham, though such themes are given particular resonance in the non-linear narrative technique of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. Greene seeks to represent the simultaneity of past, present, and future in the cyclical technique of his novel, which offers the unreliable narrator a redemptive entrance into God’s wheeling story of eternal love. The revelation of Christ’s Incarnation and a revaluation of corporeal presence stand at the heart of this novel, underscoring how human intimacy is a window into divine intimacy.

The Manipulation of History and Memory in Contemporary American Poetry: A Study of Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Jorie Graham

Ekphrasis enables poets to invade the most difficult and sensitive areas of thought without the pressure of direct expression. Ekphrastic poetry has a tendency to draw together contradictions; the work of art acting as intermediary between points of opposition, tension and contrast. The presence of the ekphrastic object in a poem is an acknowledgement of the unbridgeable hermeneutic gap between poetry, history and the real, indeed it often acts as the marker that exposes this gap. Also in a practical way, through both its critical and art-historical backgrounds, the practice of ekphrasis is located very firmly within arguments of a temporal nature; it is important to remember that paintings have a material history as well as a conceptual one, and that contemporary poetry is increasingly taking into account, and even seeking to replicate in some cases, the space of the museum itself as well as the paintings within it. Therefore, the present paper aims at affording a new study of the poetry of the contemporary American poetess Jorie Graham through illuminating the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, which is meant to verbally represent what is already represented visually, and its relation to presentations of the most perplexing concepts in modern and contemporary literature in general and poetry in particular, namely, memory and personal history. The paper is an attempt to investigate how Jorie Graham uses images from painting, photography and films in her poems to manipulate time and represent personal history through memory which, in turn, leads to a consideration of how she uses ekphrasis to approach the ethics of representing public history, and how she uses the different temporal conventions of each genre to write about the past