Exordium

As an introduction to Charles Bernstein's first poetry collection in Spanish, his translator traces a genealogy of linguistic procedures in American poetry and other theoretical and artistic sources relevant to the Language poets as well as to those influenced by them. This article offers a contextual and critical companion to each of Bernstein's publications throughout more than four decades. The special attention in the first half to a varying range of conceptual strategies in his books and rhetorical figures in his poems echoes in the arguments set in the second half for the selection and translation decisions made by the author in order to bring Bernstein's work into the Hispanic world.

Shaping the Lyric: Blank Space in the Poetry of Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong

Emily Berry and Ocean Vuong have each written about their fascination with the physical and linguistic arrangement of a poemon the page, and yet their poetry has typically been read as purely confessional, concerned primarily with emotion and the revelation of personal experience, rather than an attempt to interrogate the nature of language itself. This article examines Emily Berry’sStranger, Baby and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds,analysing their use of blank space in these collections, and the way in which they use this space, in its physical, linguistic and metaphorical forms, to emphasise the constructed nature of their poems, to evoke a sense of absence, distance or detachment, presentingus with the emotional complexities of grief, abandonment and dislocation, whilst also demonstrating these emotional states to the reader. It will propose that this use of blank space creates, ineffect, a new form of lyric poetry, one which combines the experiential focus of the confessional lyric with the self-analysis of the Imagists and Language poets, so that Berry and Vuong interrogate the inevitable failure of their own poems, emphasising theimpossible gap between traumatic experience and its articulation through language.

„Weltpoesie allein ist Weltversöhnung“

The Franconian Friedrich Rückert is not only one of the most productive German-language poets of the 19th century, but also one of the most important mediators between the literatures of the Orient and the Occident in Europe because of his numerous translations. He was able to read a total of 44 languages. In the study of languages, he discovered a way to open up foreign cultures. Until now, literary studies have paid little at-tention to this enormous cultural achievement. This volume, which summarises the results of the Schweinfurt Symposium 2016, therefore addresses a research desideratum. With contributions by Hannah Berner, Ralf Georg Czapla, Sabine Gruber, Reinhard Gruhl, Lutz Hagestedt, Iris Hermann, Arne Klawitter, Karl Josef Kuschel, Stephan Lesker, Sascha Monhoff, Reinhold Münster, Peter-Arnold Mumm, Gunnar Och, Karin Rhein, Jessica Riemer, Torsten Voß, Claudia Wiener and Klaus Wolf.

Prose Poetry, Rhythm, and the City

The chapter examines the rhythms of prose poetry, which are different from those found in metered verse, and vary, too, from the rhythms of free verse. The main differences relate to what has sometimes been understood as a deficiency in prose poetry — namely, that prose poets do not have meter or the poetic line when they try to achieve effects of cadence or musicality. But because of the English language's grammatical flexibility, these resources allow for an almost infinite rhythmic variety in prose poems. Such variety is a crucial part of the prose poetry tradition, notwithstanding the deliberately fractured rhythms or flat tonality of some works. William Wordsworth wrote lineated poetry, but in expressing a view that prose and poetry ought to be written in the same kind of language, and in repudiating what he understood to be “poetic diction,” Wordsworth opened the way for English-language poets to explicitly recognize the connections between poetry and prose. In other words, he helped to lay the ground not only for English-language free verse but for English-language prose poetry, too.

Long Poems about Everything: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016

This chapter discusses the use of dictionaries and books of reference as a motif and a formal device in American poetry, particularly in the avant-garde stream, from Zukofsky to the Language poets, with special reference to the work of Ron Silliman and Tina Darragh. It distinguishes long poems in the Whitman tradition, which attempt to comprehend the world in the form of lists and extended descriptions, often using alphabetical orderings or other kinds of organisation similar to dictionaries, and smaller works of visual poetry able to subvert the notion of definition in a dictionary.

Unchanging Struggle in a Changing World: Unmasking the Social Mechanism in Female Verses

Despite the prevalence of gender-based theories of feminism and women language after 19 th century, several female scholars emerged from the Sangam era and sowed the seeds of this idea. The lists of the female poets are Avvaiyar, Perunkopendu, Andal, Karaikalammaiyar and present women language poets. With the changing times and the voices of various feminist rebellions, the social texture that is limited to women has not only changed, but the plight of women has increased on a daily basis. In particular, the definitions of women in the two different contexts of home and work are still unchanged. Although women are projected to have created a free space for education and economic quality, there are still women who accept subjugation as on unwritten rule. This paper is a study of women language verse, which has recorded this constant dehumanization as a weapon of language and provoking social conscience as feminism.

The No-Prospect Poem

This chapter argues that, to bring the Anthropocene into a specifically poetic language, poets have recalled and revised the tradition of the loco-descriptive poem and the prospect poem. J.H. Prynne, Kofi Awoonor, Natasha Trethewey, and Juliana Spahr use the hill as an imaginative location for staging the dilemmas of the putative “global citizen” examined at length in chapter two. Far from offering spectatorial mastery to the poet, however, the hill is transformed into the ground and habitation of precarious life. The hill thus makes visible an alternative trajectory of contemporary subjectivity in which the poem’s “I” emerges from and is shaped by the collective immiseration of global capitalism.

Barthes in America

This chapter considers how Barthes was read in America, among a far wider range of poets than in Britain. It starts with a brief consideration of Robert Duncan’s essay on the ‘kopoltus’, and then looks at the poets gathered in Ron Silliman’s 1975 anthology ‘The Dwelling-Place’, New York School writers such as Bernadette Mayer, and other ‘Language poets’, closing with a more in-depth consideration of the importance of Barthes to Lyn Hejinian. Links are established between these writers’ poetics, which are varied but all describable as ‘language-centred’.

Celan, Paul (1920–1970)

Paul Celan (a pseudonym of Paul Antschel) is one the most distinctive German-language poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Born in 1920 in Czernowitz in the Bukovina (today Ukraine), into a German-speaking Jewish family, he grew up in a multicultural society where German, Rumanian, Ukrainian and Yiddish were spoken. In 1941 Czernowitz was occupied by the fascist Rumanian ‘National Legionnaire’ government, which started deportations. Celan’s parents died in 1942 in a Nazi labor camp. After the war Celan moved via Vienna to France, where he married the graphic artist Gisèle de Lestrange and worked as a lecturer in German. His reputation as a poet was established by the poem ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which recounts the experience of the death camps. His poems would, however, rapidly evolve into a darker, almost reticent style struggling with the possibility of representing the Shoah. Most of his poems are fairly short and are forced to revisit and reshape the German language after its moral destruction by the Nazis. Celan was awarded the most important German literary prize, the Georg Büchner Prize, but never felt comfortable in the German literary scene and was unnerved by neo-fascist activism. He translated a vast amount of poetry and prose from different languages into German and saw this achievement as equal to writing poetry. Seven volumes were published at the time of his death by suicide in Paris in 1970.