The word among stones

Author(s):  
Peter Barry

In this chapter Peter Barry explores poems about stones, on stones and as stones. He shows how our ancestors had a special regard for stones particularly those that seemed out of place, such as glacial erratics. The Ringing Stone on Tiree is one such, bearing numerous cup marks from Neolithic times. He considers how poems have been placed in the environment on trails and paths, sometimes with a didactic purpose as part of an environmentalist interpretive scheme. Some of these have taken advantage of the expressive potential of the stones themselves, and of letter carvers who blend this with their own artistic heritage. Collaborations between carver and poet can make best use of the space between the words that come closest to Barry’s interest in avant-gardeorneo-modernist poetry(especially ‘concrete’ and ‘visual’ poetries). Barry also considers poems in urban settings, in projects involving close collaboration with councils, NGOs and communities, where the words have been incised on bridges, monuments, paths, or pavements, as by Alyson Hallett in Bath, Lemn Sissay in Manchester, Bill Herbert near Darlington, and Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke in Tonypandy.

STORIA URBANA ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 47-67
Author(s):  
Claudia Lamberti

- The essay compares the images of the city defined by the Expressionist movement and the city images in the films of the time. Expressionist architects discovered that film-set design gave them a chance to experiment with their artistic skills. At the same time, film studios could not shoot outdoors easily and so were forced to rely on constructed sets. All this worked out as an incentive for architectural invention. Sets became an apt proving ground for the new expressiveness of the architects as well as a way to experiment with the use of space without limits and constraints. This essay examines the cases of 6 films whose elements are specifically and directly attributable to the Expressionist culture. Here the case of the city encompasses both set design and the urban atmosphere in films linked with the avant-garde movements. The essay also provides a filmography of the most important films with urban settings shot by German artists in the 1920s and 1930s.


Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock

Chapter 4 focuses on the work of Charles Howard Hinton, author of the first Scientific Romances and the least well-known yet most influential theorist of higher space of the late nineteenth century. ‘Hinton was an important mediating figure,’ writes Steven Connor, ‘because, like some of the physical scientists who investigated Spiritualism, his grasp of scientific principles was extensive and subtle.’ Indeed, his work fed into the literature of occult groupings, avant-garde art, Modernist poetry and fiction, and also back into geometry and orthodox science. ‘Cubes’ give a detailed account of Hinton’s work, highlighting his acknowledged and implied sources, Kepler, Kant, and his father, before focusing on his invention of a system of cubes for training the subject in the visualization of higher space. This set of cubes are read as ‘quasi-objects’, things that make fluid the distinction between thinking thing and thing thought on, between mind and material object.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
William Scott

In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a “genotext” and a “phenotext.”  Reading the “genotext” of any given poem might start by “pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm)”; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration “the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features.” This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking (arbitrarily) as its primary example the first of the book’s eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen’s poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the “polyvocal” and “polymorphous” nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-83
Author(s):  
Elena V. Kapinos

The article deals with the first poetry book by S. Tretyakov “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) published in Vladivostok in 1919 but prepared for publication earlier in Moscow – in 1915–1917. “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) belongs to rare and little investigated books for which the approach used in the article with respect to poetics is topical. The author analyzed the key texts of the first and second parts of the books: “The Match Box” (“Spichechnaya korobka”), “You in Darkness Read, Like a Cat” (“Vy v temnote chitaete, kak koshka”), “Carpet” (“Kover”), “Allegro Trills” (“Treli allegro”), “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”). All these poems are interconnected not only by common motifs, but also by verbal construction; they are characterized by intensive word dynamics and geometry, numerous metonymic substitutions, high-level sematic concentration and complicated rhythmic and phonetic patterns. Special attention in the article is paid to the undertones of the enigmatic poem “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”) depicting some scenes of aggression, violence, “brutality” under the semblance of a festive event with fireworks. The poem’s underlying idea displays traces of works by V. Khlebnikov (“The Star Alphabet”), by V. Mayakovsly (“The War and the World” poem) and by poets belonging to the Vladivostok creative group “Tvorchestvo”. Lyrical plots of the poems assembled in the book “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) are not original; they are traditional for avant-garde poetry and in a broader sense – for modernist poetry. However, Tretyakov vitalizes traditional lexical repertory of modernist poetry giving it occasional meaning and using all lexical units to achieve complex phonics and rhythmic structure. Except that the article offers the implications review of the key poems of “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”), “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”), just like the entire book “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”), is read by the article author in presence of the Far-Eastern publicism and criticisim from newspapers and magazines published at the turn of 1920s by various Far-Eastern political and literary entities. The article bibliography includes rare 1918–1922 editions of the Far East: newspapers “Echo” («Ekho»), “Vladivo-Nippo”, “Far Eastern Review” (“Dalnevostochnoe obozrenie”), “Manchurian Life” (“Manzhurskaya zhisn’”), journals “Creation” (“Tvorchestvo”), “Biruch”, “Lel’”, “Yun’”, “Week” (“Nedelya”), etc.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-297
Author(s):  
Raphael Ingelbien

Seen in the broader context of European modernism, British modernist literature stands out through the limited role of collective avant-gardes and the conservative or reactionary politics of the writers who make up the canon of modernist poetry. This article explores how these peculiarities are replicated in the use of traditional poetic forms (metres in particular) in the works of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). As modernist (rather than avant-garde) writers, those poets rejected or backed away from free verse and simultaneously cultivated forms that harked back to older and less insular poetic traditions than the ones that dominated mainstream English poetry in the Victorian period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2021-1) ◽  
pp. 52-62
Author(s):  
Višnja Kačić Rogošić

In their 1979 manifesto, the independent experimental theatre collective Kugla glumište (Zagreb, 1975–1985) claims: “Kugla discovers images, symbols and stories that wish to be the promise of community.” The article explores the repercussions of those neo-avant- garde community efforts on the contemporary Zagreb non-institutional scene by analysing four inclusive performances which differ in motivations, aesthetic aims, production levels and participatory modes. In The Love Case of Fahrija P (2017), the ex-members of Kugla and additional co-authors stage a polylogue with the artistic heritage of the deceased Kugla glumište member Željko Zorica Šiš (1957–2013) and the inclusive procedures they devised during the 1970s. The community project 55+ (2012) by the production platform Montažstroj gathers the participants who are over 55 in workshops, public debates, celebrations, protests and a documentary to provide visibility and voice to that neglected generation. In the trilogy On Community (2010–2011), the production platform Shadow Casters tests different mechanisms of creating temporary aesthetic communities, from learning an a cappella group song to sharing secrets, on its recipients. Finally, the atmospheric inclusion of the subtly associative performance Conversing (2019) by Fourhanded offers an almost elitist opportunity of co-existing in the intimate world of private tensions. However, what they all have in common is a physically non-invasive form, emotional and/or intellectual engagement and an emphasised personal commitment that can oblige audiences to reciprocate while they join the community of experience.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Roman Tkachenko

The relevance of the selected inquiry is in the need for urgent understanding of the ways of Ukrainian literature development, in particular, of poetry development, at the turn of the 20–21th centuries. It is no secret that art recreates the spiritual atmosphere of the time, but even more valuable is its ability to respond to subtle changes in the mood of contemporaries and form a spiritual picture of the future. In this sense, the study of contemporary art will be useful not only to literary critics. The subject of research is the typological and idiographic parameters of M. Bidenko’s poetry, its immediate artistic context, unique features of poetics, education and ideological and thematic direction. We understand the problem statement as an attempt to outline the first approximation of the role and place of M. Bidenko’s creative heritage in the context of Ukrainian literature of the late 20 — early 21th centuries. The study used mainly typological method, as well as principles of hermeneutics in the interpretation of key images. The purpose of this article is to outline the aesthetic and typological parameters of the artistic heritage of M. Bidenko, its unique features and features, consistent with the artistic context, based on the analysis of formal means and conceptual principles. As the result of the study Bidenko’s poetry is outlined mainly in the aesthetic coordinates of avant-garde and belongs to the environment of the Kyiv school of poets (verlibre, autotheliality of the word, avoidance of rhetoric, etc.), but in worldview he is more radical, skeptical and paradoxical than “kyivans.” In our view, Bidenko's dominant reception is a paradox. Pain as one of the key images of Bidenko's poetry, is metaphysical. Against such pain, the poet invented a “cure of death.” We see the novelty of this exploration in the definition of the dominant technique and our own interpretation of key images in Bidenko’s poems. Promising for future research are the nature of Bidenko’s verlibrium, features of the author's syntax or the nature of visual flavor.


Author(s):  
Tintti Klapuri

The Finland-Swedish and Finnish Translation History of Russian Modernist Poetry, 1918–1930 This article examines the arrival of Russian modernist and avant-garde poetry in Finland in the 1920s by mapping its translation history. The material employed in the article consists of translations into Swedish and Finnish that were published in anthologies or in journals (such as Ultra, Nuori Voima, Quosego, and Tulenkantajat), translation bibliographies, and translators’ personal archives. The article shows that Finland-Swedish translations are considerably earlier than the Finnish ones, which are also very few. Moreover, some of the Finland-Swedish translations are early also in comparison with translations into other European languages. This concerns the anthology Sånger i rött och svart (1924, “Songs in Red and Black”) in particular, which introduced poets that have never been translated into Finnish or that have been translated only decades later. The anthology also introduces poetry that has not been translated into European languages. The article further demonstrates the significance and influence of individual translators in mediating Russian literature into Finland and Scandinavia. The controversial translator Rafael Lindqvist’s position is particularly important, since his early translations of radical Russian avant-garde poetry were published also in Sweden. Furthermore, mostly due to Edith Södergran’s efforts, the ego-futurist Igor Severyanin was translated into Swedish earlier than Blok, Mayakovsky and Esenin, i.e. the poets who were usually the first ones to be translated elsewhere in Europe.


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