Climate Lyricism

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.

Poeta entre pintores

O ensaio trata da relação entre a obra poética de Frank O’Hara e a pintura, em especial com as vanguardas do expressionismo abstrato na cena artística da Nova York dos anos 1950 e 1960. O texto integra o terceiro capítulo do livro homônimo escrito pela crítica e ensaísta Marjorie Perloff, todavia inédito em língua portuguesa. Analisando as relações de O’Hara com artistas visuais no plano afetivo, intelectual, profissional e artístico, Perloff enfatiza as experimentações formais desse autor cuja poesia foi diretamente influenciada pela action painting, pelo happening e pela sua atuação como crítico e curador do MOMA. O ensaio apresenta ainda duas colaborações artísticas de O’Hara com os pintores Larry Rivers e Norman Bluhm, que Perloff denomina poemapinturas, dado o entrelugar formal que os caracteriza, poeta e pintor agindo simultaneamente sobre uma mesma superfície. Poesia e pintura revelam-se, na obra de O’Hara, partes de uma mesma matéria vivente. (Resumo e palavras-chave elaborados pelos tradutores).

The Presencing Tendency: French and American Avant-Garde Strategiesunder the Formal Subsumption of Art

Whether what we call the avant-garde in literature ended sometime in the last century or, conversely, persists to this day is an open question. But rather than coming down on one side or another of the issue, this essay concerns itself with what the avant-garde looks like when, in Bourdieusian terms, it feels its very position to be at stake in the field’s struggle for domination, both internally and externally, with the field of power. Either by historical coincidence or, more intriguingly, by something as nefarious as influence, both the French and the American avant-gardes of the 1950s and 60s witnessed the development of a similar aesthetic tendency in response to encroachments upon the restricted production of their respective literary fields by external forces. This tendency, which I call a “poetics of presence,” is a gambit for textual immediacy—what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht terms “presence effects,” as opposed to “meaning effects.” Through readings of theoretical works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, on the one hand, and poems by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, on the other, I demonstrate the character of the poetics of presence in the French and American contexts, concluding ultimately that in both cases such strategies function to preserve a formal subsumption of artistic labor under conditions of restricted production, as against the threading incursions of the real subsumption of that labor to which external forces—capital, politics—would subject it.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Frank O’Hara: a Reappraisal

The “New York School” refers to a group of poets and painters, mostly of the Abstract Expressionist movement, who congregated in New York in the first two decades following the end of the Second World War. They constitute a coterie that has been characterized as America’s “last avant-garde”. Among its most prominent members was Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). Like other members of the New York School of poets, he was strongly influenced by the French and Russian avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. He was particularly drawn to the works of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose persona and poetry are frequently referenced in his own oeuvre. The present study seeks to establish the origins of O’Hara’s interest in the Russian poet, the sources he consulted in familiarizing himself with Mayakovsky’s work, and the trajectory of references to Mayakovsky that documents how his avant-garde aesthetic both accommodates and distances itself from that of his Russian forebear.