Denise Levertov

Author(s):  
Dana Greene

Kenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923–1997) “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, ... and the most moving.” Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate. This book examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. This book is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms—lyric, political, natural, and religious—derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, the book represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Gordon L. Miller

American zoologists and herpetologists during the past fifty years have successfully deciphered the mating calls of frogs and toads with ever increasing precision and sophistication. However, the vocalizations most commonly termed “rain calls,” which typically occur beyond both normal breeding seasons and breeding sites, have remained a persistent puzzle. This article traces the gradual disappearance of rain calls, along with a corresponding decline in any mention of emotional states, from herpetological studies of anuran vocalizations in the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and examines the historical roots of this disappearance. This evaporation of rain calls is indicative of a much larger change in the scientific climate of the times involving the transition from traditional natural history to the Neo-Darwinian, adaptationist paradigm of contemporary biology. Rain calls thus increasingly became anomalous, thereby eliminating a possibly fruitful line of inquiry in the comparative study of human-animal communication, in this case with evolution's earliest vocalizers. The contours and benefits of a more encompassing paradigm, envisioned by some leading early twentieth-century zoologists, are briefly discussed.


Collections ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 155019062098103
Author(s):  
Shonda Nicole Gladden

As a scholar practitioner, a trained philosophical theologian, Methodist clergywoman, and social enterprise founder who is conducting oral histories as part of my doctoral internship in the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, my scholarly lens and methodological skills are being defined as I interrogate the COVID-19 archive. In this article I attempt to offer some preliminary reflections on my oral history curation focused on how Black and brown artists and activists, primarily based in Indianapolis, IN, frame their lived experiences of death, dying, mourning, and bereavement in the wake of COVID-19 utilizing critical archival practices: those practices that take seriously the methods of critical race theory, critical gender theory, Womanist, mujerista, and feminist methodologies, to name a few. The COVID-19 archive is a collection of oral histories, stories and artifacts depicting the times in which we are living, through the lenses of storytellers grappling with the pandemics of systemic racism, COVID-19, distrust in government, and various relics representing the idea of the United States of America in 2020, as such, I conclude with a brief exploration of how art emerges as both an outlet for creators and a mode of illumination for consumers.


Author(s):  
Lindsey Kahn ◽  
Hamidreza Najafi

Abstract Lockdown measures and mobility restrictions to combat the spread of COVID-19 have impacted energy consumption patterns. The overall decline of energy use during lockdown restrictions can best be identified through the analysis of energy consumption by source and end-use sectors. Using monthly energy consumption data, the total 9-months use between January and September for the years 2015–2020 is calculated for each end-use sector (transportation, industrial, residential, and commercial). The cumulative consumption within these 9 months of the petroleum, natural gas, biomass, and electricity energy by the various end-use sectors are compared. The analysis shows that the transportation sector experienced the greatest decline (14.38%). To further analyze the impact of COVID-19 on each state within the USA, the consumption of electricity by each state and each end-use sector in the times before and during the pandemic is used to identify the impact of specific lockdown procedures on energy use. The distinction of state-by-state analysis in this study provides a unique metric for consumption forecasting. The average total consumption for each state was found for the years 2015–2019. The total average annual growth rate (AAGR) for 2020 was used to find a correlation coefficient between COVID-19 case and death rate, population density, and lockdown duration. A correlation coefficient was also calculated between the 2020 AAGR for all sectors and AAGR for each individual end-user. The results show that Indiana had the highest percent reduction in consumption of 10.07% while North Dakota had the highest consumption increase of 7.61%. This is likely due to the amount of industrial consumption relative to other sectors in the state.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (87) ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Lukyanenko ◽  

The article provides an analysis of the presence of the American poet-laureate Natasha Trethewey in modern literary discourse. The publication emphasizes the need to combine the methods of linguistics and culturology, anthropology and everyday history in the study of the construction of everyday USA in the works of the poet. The author explains the relevance of certain topics in the work of N. Trethewey to understand the psychology of the African American population in the USA. The state of studying the work of the poet-laureate in domestic science is determined. Remarks were made on the specifics of the creative search for the master of the word. The article illustrates the problem of reflection and national (ethnic) consciousness through the prism of the poetic word. She became the poetic voice of black America in the early 21st century. The ambiguous African-American side of the history of the United States awoke in the pages of her collections. With the deepening equality movement that swept North America during Donald Trump’s reactionary presidency, the lines of her poetry condemning racism, showing the country's participation in the American nation's foundation, and the often painful diffusion of white and black worldviews sound rather poignant. America. These reflections gained special strength with the development of the Black Lives Matter public initiative. The author’s work is gaining weight with the emphasis of the world community on gender issues. During the existence of the award in its various forms, women struggled to fight for the right to be the face of American literature. Of the 30 poetry advisers in the Library of Congress (the award was named from 1936 to 1986), only 6 were women. Since the renaming of the award in 1986, an unprecedented wave of feminization has begun. In 2012, Natasha Trethewey became the sixth woman to work among the nineteen winners in this office at the Library of Congress since the late 1980s. The work was carried out within the framework of the research theme of the Department of Culturology of the Poltava National Pedagogical University named after V.G.Korolenko “Polylogue of the global and regional in the formation of the socio-cultural identity of the individual” (state registration number 0120U103840).


2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 81-104
Author(s):  
Meghan Nealis

AbstractBritish perceptions of the United States in Indochina between 1957 and 1963 were cautious and constructive. This article examines the perceptions of policymakers in Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's government and public opinion as expressed in the Times of London. British policymakers had basic doubts regarding American policy in Indochina, but Britain remained involved in the region after 1954 and agreed with the United States on defining the problem and on the broad methodological approach to the crisis. London wanted to ensure that Washington pursued the “right” policy in Indochina, that Britain utilized its expertise in post-colonial and counter-insurgency, and that the Anglo- American alliance maintained its importance for both countries. The study of these perceptions reveals some concerns which we would anticipate, but also shows that Britain respected the United States as a leader in the region and that it agreed with the United States on core issues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Sean Hildebrand, PhD ◽  
Brandon Waite, PhD

The purpose of this special issue of the Journal of Emergency Management is to assess the state of disaster preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article adds to this discussion by examining the results of a national survey of emergency managers in the United States regarding the social media platforms they use to communicate information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, how proficient they feel using them, and what value they see in these technologies during the times of crisis. The authors’ findings help make sense of government responses to the pandemic, as well as contribute to the body of literature on communication and emergency management more broadly. Furthermore, their findings have important implications for emergency management practitioners and educators. 


2020 ◽  
pp. 16-45
Author(s):  
Sarah Meer

This chapter introduces precursors to the claimant—the theatrical Yankee and his vehicle the trip play, in which Britons travelled to the United States, or Americans to Britain. The trip plays cast light on Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, and on Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes. In Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, a trip play involves a claimant, inaugurating patterns evident in the structure and characterization of subsequent claimant texts. The chapter relates mid-century transatlantic tensions to the creation and staging of Our American Cousin, as reflected in Great Exhibition dramas and the newsprint duels of The Times and the New York Herald. It also suggests that the play drew on a pedagogical relationship between Tom Taylor and an American student at Cambridge, Charles Astor Bristed.


Author(s):  
Lynne Conner

One of the first full-time newspaper dance reviewers in the United States, John Martin wrote for The New York Times from 1927 to 1962 and was often referred to as the dean of American dance critics during his 35-year tenure. Martin used his bully pulpit at the Times to launch a discourse within the dance community surrounding the aesthetics of modernism in dance as well as to educate and rally a new audience. In the process he helped to establish dance reviewing as a specialized field of arts reporting and commentary and not just a subgenre of music criticism, as it had been treated before 1927. A vocal defender of the legitimacy of an American modern dance as defined by New York-based practitioners such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, Martin was among the first theorists of it, outlining a poetics of its form and function while introducing a new vocabulary. His prolific output includes thousands of essays and reviews for the Times and other periodicals, seven books, and a series of highly influential lectures given at the New School for Social Research, Bennington School of the Dance, and in the latter part of his career at the University of California-Los Angeles.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Daniel Erker ◽  
Ricardo Otheguy

Abstract This study examines the behavior of 331 Spanish speakers, 269 immigrants to the United States and sixty-two native-born individuals, through questionnaires and sociolinguistic interviews. Results show that increased US life experience correlates with expanded use of English in both private and public domains of life. Additionally, greater use of English co-exists with maintenance of fine-grained patterns of structured linguistic variation in Spanish, such that US-born speakers demonstrate remarkable similarity to the immigrant generation in their usage of three variables: (i) subject pronoun presence vs. absence, (ii) grammatical subject position, and (iii) syllable-final /s/. The co-occurence of increased use of English, on one hand, and intergenerational structural continuity in variable linguistic behavior in Spanish, on the other, challenges two misconceptions about Spanish in the United States: that (a) Spanish-speaking immigrants and their US-born children are unwilling or unable to learn English, and (b) regular use of English entails attrition and/or failed acquisition of Spanish. Neither of these views finds empirical support in our data. (Spanish in the United States, comparative variationist linguistics, subject personal pronouns, grammatical subject position, syllable final /s/, bilingualism)


2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharvi Dutt ◽  
K. C. Garg

News items on science and technology in English-language newspapers published in different parts of India during January-December 1996 were analyzed. Results indicate that the greatest proportion of newspaper space was devoted to nuclear science and technology, followed by defense, space research, and astronomy. The Pioneer, The Hindu, and The Times of India were the newspapers that together devoted about 23 percent of the total space to items on science and technology. The sources for most of the articles (97 percent) on policy issues originated from within India, while for other stories foreign sources, including those from the United States and the United Kingdom, also contributed. Many of the items were supported by illustrations such as photographs and diagrams. The study indicates that, on average, Indian newspapers devoted far less than one percent of the total printed space to articles and stories related to science and technology.


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