Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Philip Coleman
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Broad View ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.

Commentary: What Technical Writers Must Learn from the History of Programming

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edmond H. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Computer Programs ◽  
Technical Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Getting Lost ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

Complicated documents often affect readers the way computer programs affect computers; technical writers are prone to many of the same serious errors that plague programmers. Among the many principles that writers can learn from programming are: 1) Models save money: it is far more economical to develop detailed outlines and mockups than to improvise from a vague outline. 2) Quality demands maintainability: every complicated document will need frequent revision, and only documents designed for ease of change will be kept current. 3) The trouble is in the interfaces: the procedures and tasks in a manual are not as error-prone as the rules for moving from part to part of the book itself. 4) Readers are subject to the laws of physics: many publication economies produce documents that defy the physical powers of the reader. 5) Communication is control: readers must be prevented from getting lost.

scholarly journals Lettuce Entertain You: Floral Agency in Ralph Knevet's Rhodon and Iris

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Ashley Howard
Keyword(s):  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Floral Characters ◽  
The Way

This essay investigates the performativity of plants in Ralph Knevet’s Rhodon and Iris, a play that was written and performed for a feast held by the Norwich Society of Florists in 1631. The play explores at least two forms of performativity: the first is the act of staging plants for a theatrical performance, where vegetables present their virtues through floral allegories that are enacted by human players. The second form is the way plants affect and are affected by their environments, particularly as theorized by Michael Marder and Mel Y. Chen. In Rhodon and Iris, these two dimensions work together to produce a form of floral agency that decenters the human. The essay explores how floral agency collaborates with literary narratives when beings perform for plants (within a history of floral celebrations), as plants (embodying plants as allegorical figures), and with plants (floral characters using plants as ingredients in cosmetics, poisons, and antidotes). Knevet uses literature to articulate a unique plant philosophy that challenges divisions between art and nature and among literature, philosophy, and science. Rhodon and Iris thus illustrates the many ways that theatrical performances and printed playbooks, and even printed herbals and herbaria, responded to and shaped the performativity of plants.

Avant-Folk: Small Press Poetry Networks from 1950 to the Present

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Hair
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Small Press ◽  
Lorine Niedecker ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Avant-Folk is the first comprehensive study of a loose collective of important British and American poets, publishers, and artists (including Lorine Niedecker, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Jonathan Williams) and the intersection of folk and modernist, concrete and lyric poetics within the small press poetry networks that developed around these figures from the 1950s up to the present day. This book argues that the merging of the demotic with the avant-garde is but one of the many consequences of a particularly vibrant period of creative exchange when this network of poets, publishers, and artists expanded considerably the possibilities of small press publishing. Avant-Folk explores how, from this still largely unexplored body of work, emerge new critical relations to place, space, and locale. Paying close attention to the transmission of demotic cultural expressions, this study of small press poetry networks also revises current assessments regarding the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the regional and between avant-garde and vernacular, folk aesthetics. Readers of Avant-Folk will gain an understanding of how small press publishing practices have revised these familiar terms and how they reconceive the broader field of twentieth-century British and American poetry.

Response

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The Real ◽  
Initial Deviation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Counterfactual History ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This reply to the critiques by Daniel Woolf, Cass R. Sunstein and Daniel Nolan of my book Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Brandeis University Press, 2013), takes each of their contributions in turn, and reasserts the centrality to counterfactual history of positing definite, long term alternative timelines rather than a vague claim that things might have turned out differently to the way they actually did (for example, if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, slavery might still exist in the usa). Such alternate timelines have no claim to either truth or utility since they ignore the many possible contingencies that would most likely have taken place following the initial deviation from the real timeline of history.

‘The history of Ireland he knew before he went to school’: The Irish Tom Raworth

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 158-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Cummins
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Biographical Information ◽  
English Poet ◽  
Poetic Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The 1960S

In an interview in 1971 Tom Raworth states ‘I don't really see any reason for a term like “English poet”’ and throughout his career Raworth has resisted such simple national classifications. His work is often discussed in relation to the strong relationship he fostered with American poets and poetics. Raworth, for many, exemplifies the transatlantic conversation that flourished during the 1960s onward. He was influenced by numerous schools of American poetry and would in turn act as an influence to many American writers. As Ted Berrigan states ‘he's as good as we are, & rude a thing as it is to say, we don't expect that, from English poets today, (I wonder is he better?)’. However, considering Raworth's mother was Irish and that since 1990 Raworth himself has travelled under an Irish passport this simple duality of British / American does not go far enough in exploring Raworth's complex national poetic identity. Using a combination of contextual and biographical information alongside close readings of a number of collected and uncollected poems this essay explores the influence Ireland, its culture, religion and history, has had on Raworth's upbringing, his sense of national identity and his poetry.

'Gentry Society

1953 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 588-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin G. Pulleyblank
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Events ◽  
Subsequent Publication ◽  
History Of ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

Wolfram eberhard's recent A History of China has attracted great interest. Reviewers have praised it for its readability and broad sweep and for the way in which it goes beyond a mere chronicle of political and cultural events and tries to penetrate to underlying causes. At the same time they have noted many errors of detail and have expressed surprise and incredulity at the many new generalizations presented with an air of established finality. It was, of course, impossible for Eberhard to present detailed evidence or argumentation in support of his views in a brief general history. The subsequent publication of Das Toba-Reich Nordchinas and Conquerors and Rulers has enabled us to form a better judgment of the value of at least a part of his work.

Diversity: Religions and the Study of Religion

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 199-218
Author(s):  
Gerhard Van Den Heever
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn this essay an overview of the theoretical issues pertaining to the collection of essays assembled is given. Addressing the issue of dizversity in religions and in the study of religion the argument is made that religions as lived phenomena constitute discursive formations in which diversity as a problem is an index of encounter. However it is especially the way this strategy of reducing the many to the one in the history of theorising religion that comes in view. In this context, the political nature of religion as discourse and the discourse of the study of religion is discussed with particular reference to the history of Christianisation of South Africa, religion in education, and the history of theorising religion.

scholarly journals Antiquarian attitudes. Changing responses to the past in the museum environment

1970 ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Arthur MacGregor
Keyword(s):  
Design Quality ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of Collecting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Museum Environment ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way ◽  
Common Components

Of the many attributes that may deem an object worthy of inclusion in a museum, that of antiquity is one of the most potent - in a sense the most powerful of all, for other considerations such as beauty of form, originality of design, quality of workmanship or historical association may all be glossed over in the presence of extreme age. While antiquities have formed common components of museums throughout the history of collecting, striking changes have taken place in the significance attributed to them, not merely in the light of better understanding but more fundamentally in the way in which perceptions of antiquity itself have been repeatedly revised and reinterpreted within the museum context. These twin considerations of expanding understanding and changing perceptions of the past within the museum programme will form the basis of my paper. 

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

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Trousdale
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Lucille Clifton ◽  
Sterling Brown ◽  
Shared Humanity ◽  
Competing Models ◽  
American Poets

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.

Building the "Soviet Detroit": The Construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod Automobile Factory, 1927-1932

Slavic Review ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kurt S. Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Soviet Society ◽  
Automobile Factory ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
High Politics ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Revolution

Recent literature on interwar Soviet society is changing the way we view the "Revolution from Above." Instead of focusing on high politics, the authors of this literature have cast their analytical nets more widely and have revealed a remarkably dynamic society that was anything but clay in the hands of Kremlin potters.' The history of the massive automotive complex at Nizhnii-Novgorod adds weight to the conclusions growing out of this scholarship and sheds light on the origins and implementation of the larger plan to industrialize the Soviet economy; it shows in microcosm the many problems that often bedeviled and sometimes defeated the grand designs dreamed up in Moscow.

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