Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry argues that American poets of the last hundred years use laughter to promote recognition of shared humanity across difference. Freud and Bergson argue that laughter patrols the boundary between in-group and out-group, but laughter can also help us cross or re-draw that boundary, creating a more democratic understanding of shared experience. Poets’ uses of humor reveal and reinforce deep-seated beliefs about the possibility of empathic mutual understanding among unlike interlocutors. These beliefs also shape poets’ senses of audience and their attitudes toward the notion that poets are somehow exceptional. When poets use humor to promote empathy, they make a claim about the basic ethical function of poetry, because humor and poetry share fundamental structures: both combine disparate subjects into newly meaningful wholes. Taking W. H. Auden and Marianne Moore on one side and Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot on the other as competing models of how humor can embrace, exclude, and transform, the book charts a developing poetics of laughter in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of Sterling Brown, Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt, Cathy Park Hong, and Lucille Clifton, among others. Poets whose race, gender, sexual orientation, or experimentalism place them outside the American mainstream are especially interested in humor’s potential to transcend the very differences it demarcates. Such writers increasingly replace mockery, satire, and other humorous attacks with comic forms that heighten readers’ understanding of and empathy with individuals, while revealing the failures of dominant hierarchical moral and logical systems.

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

The Paradigm of the Void: Louise Glück’s Post-Confessional Deadlock

Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Louise Glück emerges as one of the major and most important American poets of the late 20th and early 21st century. What does this centrality tell us about the trajectory that the American poetry has traced since modernism? I attempt to offer a critical evaluation of Glück’s post-confessional stylistic, developed between the debut Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), by setting it in contexts that are historical and, later in the paper, psycho-theological. First, I treat her formula as a double response – to the modernist legacy of T. S. Eliot and to the challenges of postmodernity. Faithful to Eliot’s urge to transcend the biographical by connecting it with the transcendental, Glück resists the skeptical thesis of the demise of grand narratives, and writes in defiance of the postmodernist poetics of such poets as John Ashbery. Not undermining the biographical foundation of the lyric – the way Ashbery has done in his linguistic excess – she strives to make it paradigmatic. However, in this heroic search for a paradigm, Glück proposes a deeply ambiguous modification of Eliot that I characterize in psycho-theological terms. Following Agata Bielik-Robson’s research, I characterize Glück’s metaphysics as a form of Thanatic Lacanian Gnosticism. At this level we confront the costs of Glück’s post-confessionalism: a serious impairment of all those aspects of the self that make it an embodied and gendered human being.

Bangla Translations of Latin American Poetry: A Critical Study

The aim of this study is to map the reception of Latin American Poetry within the corpus of the Bangla world of letters for three decades, from 1980 to 2010. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the influence and reception of Latin American Literatures in Bangla was reflected primarily in the introductions to translations, preludes, and conclusions of translations. During the late 1960s and the early 1970s Latin American poets like Pablo Neruda, Victoria Ocampo, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges had caught the attention of eminent Bangla poets like Bishnu Dey, Shakti Chattopadhyay, and Shankha Ghosh who started taking interest in their works. This interest soon got reflected in the form of translations being produced in Bangla from the English versions available. The next two decades saw the corpus of Latin American Literatures make a widespread entry into the world of academic essays, journals, and articles published in little magazines along with translations of novels, short stories and poetry collections by leading Bangla publication houses like Dey’s Publishing, Radical Impressions, etc. This period was marked by a proliferation of scholarship in Bangla on Latin American Literatures. By the 21st century, critical thinking in Latin American Literatures had established itself in the Bangla world of letters. This chapter in particular studies the translations of Latin American poetry by Bengali poets like Shakti Chattopadhyay, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Bishnu Dey, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Shankha Ghosh, Biplab Majhi among many others. The analysis relates to issues they focus on including themes like self, modernity, extension of time and space, political and poetic resonances, and untranslatability. Through a step by step research of the various stages of translation activities in Bengal and Bangla, it traces how translations of Latin American Literatures begin to take place on literary grounds that had already become sites of engagement with these issues. The chapter further explores the ways in which all these poet-translators situate their translations in relation to the issues of concern. In addition, it also addresses the question of what they hence contribute to Bangla literature at large. I first chose to explore the ways in which these issues are framed in the reflections and debates on translation in India and Bengal in the 20th century. Thereon I have tried to show how these translations of Latin American poetry developed their own thrust in relation to these issues and concerns.

Nostalgia and Alienation in the Poetry of Arab-American Mahjar Poets (Emigrant Poets): Literary Criticism to Stylistics

Nostalgia and Alienation are defined as the feeling that one has when he finds himself alone without connection with the people around him. He considers himself as a stranger in the society where he lives. This is due to leaving the people and homelands. This is what happened to Arab- American poets, (Emigrant poets) who leave their homelands and people. The current paper presents Arab- American poets’ longing, deep love, nostalgia and feeling of homesickness for their beloved countries in East. It also shows their adherence and alienation to their homelands by remembering the years and times they lived there. It emphasizes literary criticism of describing, analyzing and evaluating some of Arab- American poems.

An Interview with Joy Priest

Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2021 NEA fellow- ship and a 2019-2020 Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and has won the 2020 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from APR, and the Gearhart Poetry Prize from The Southeast Review. Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, ESPN, and The Undefeated, and her work has been anthologized in Breakbeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, The Louisville Anthology, A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South, and Best New Po- ets 2014, 2016 and 2019. Joy received her M.F.A. in poetry, with a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of South Carolina. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Searching for A Feminist Rights: A Postmodernist Analysis of Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of those American poets who left their thumbprints on early postmodernist writings in America. Though, she lived a short life concluded by a horrible suicide, she produced a large body of poetry whose importance could have competed with later postmodernist poetry such as that written by Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelo and Harriet Mullen. The form and content of Plath's poetry demonstrated a new way of writing in comparison to the modernist poetry that preceded her time. When postmodernism meant the ultimate end of previous metanarratives and philosophies of form and content of writing and when postmodernism advocated selfgeneration over self-understanding, Plath appeared as a newly generated poet with a feminist message. Her appeal for a feminist position found support in the rapidly developing public sphere, which America witnessed during 1960s, as well as in the artistic and literary postmodernist sphere that accompanied it. To make an account for Sylvia Plath's achievement in this respect, the researcher divides the present paper into an introduction, three sections and a conclusion: The introduction of the paper sets the background of Sylvia Plath's literary rise and significance in her posthumous literary American scene. Section One discusses Plath's fight for a feminist role as it started early inside her family. The researcher selects a couple of poems to define the different sides of this internal struggle. Section Two moves out to the larger social scene which Plath choses to confirm her feminist demand on an external level. Here, she re-introduces the images of the 'bee' and the 'spider' to support her feminist stand. Section Three sheds light upon the theme of suicide and how it allures Plath as a means to define her feminist self. The Conclusion sums up the findings of the paper.

On pain – Virginia Woolf and the language of poets and patients

Influenced by Virginia Woolf pain is traditionally believed to be a private object that defies language. However, our analysis of classical and contemporary works of British and American poets, in addition to our own clinical experiences, leads us to challenge this notion. In accordance with Wittgenstein we instead view pain as a concept and objective experience that should encourage interaction. Reasons why patients and healthcare providers often assume language to be insufficient to grasp the complexity of pain are manifold. Based on neuro-cognitive mechanisms we propose an important contributor might be that patients in pain speak a different language than their pain-free peers and doctors.