Poetry: The Experience of Listening

As a verbal art, the “specifica poetica ” of poetry is incontestably its peculiar rhythmic and sound patterning. Regarded as a ‘twin-sister’ of music, as it originally was meant to be sung, poetry offers a different experience of language and the world. Reciting a poem, reading it ‘aloud mentally’, or simply listening to someone else’s recitation is not a trifle experience. It may prove unsettlingly significant in the light of recent philosophical treatments, inscribed into Heidegger’s existential thought based on his multi-dimensional notion of temporality intrinsic in Being/Dasein, notably, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and Jacques Derrida. In the present essay, I shall primarily focus on Nancy’s compelling conception of the act of listening which he expounds in his book Listening. Drawing upon a plethora of philosophers, such as, Heidegger, his friend Lacoue-Labarthe and others, Nancy elaborates a forceful understanding of the act of listening beyond the meaning-bound, message-focused one. With a challenging, rich philosophical verve, Nancy probes the experience of listening to music, (poetic) rhythm and even to mere human voices’ timbre and links it to our own awareness of our own subjectivity, as well as perceiving subjects engaging with the world surrounding us. Listening mirrors our own selves. It makes reverberate our silent, inner depths whose essence lies beyond the meaning-loaded constructs which define our existence. Being fundamentally temporal, the subject’s economy is perceived, from this temporally existential view, as governed by an unremitting mimetic deferral, continuity and inception, or in rhythm’s logic, repetition and spacing . Poetry, like music, sets (rhythmic, sound) expectations and is perceived as an experience of immanence. The act of listening to a poem being recited or simply ‘reading it aloud mentally’, echoes the subject’s very economy and the perpetual, inceptive deferral underlying its formation, while at the same time reinforces it. What Nancy calls “to listen with all its being” (35), is what Whitman seems to exhort his reader to perform in his exhilarating work Song of Myself to which I refer in the second part of the present essay.

Analyzing Tagore's Emotion With the Passage of Time in Song-Offerings

The emotions of humans can be observed through tears, smiles, etc. The emotion of poets is reflected through poetry/songs. The works of a poet give philosophical insights about the beauty and mystery of nature, socio-economic conditions of that era, besides his personal state of mind. In the proposed work ‘Song- Offerings': A collection of poems and songs composed by Rabindranath Tagore, for which, Tagore received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, has been analyzed. Earlier, most of the research work on Song-Offerings was based on Zipf's law or bibliometric laws. This article analyzes the changes in Tagore's emotion in Song-Offerings with the passage of time (1895-1912). Emotions are analyzed based on the Arousal-Valence Model. To analyze the arousal state, ‘Plutchik's' emotion model has been employed and to find the valence, a Fuzzy-based model has been engaged. The work reveals that the emotions of the poet gradually mellows with the passage of time barring some transitional time, nevertheless, poet submission towards almighty remains unchanged during this period.

“A Wild Sort of Note”

This chapter addresses Hawaiians' roles in the multicultural environment aboard European and American sailing ships during the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on the expressive culture of American whalers. Whaling ships began regularly calling at Hawaiian ports in 1820, and over the next six decades thousands of Hawaiian men shipped out as whalemen, joining one of the most cosmopolitan workforces in the world. The chapter begins by describing the social conditions aboard American ships that enabled a variety of performing arts to flourish and encouraged intercultural bonding. It then explicates the different styles and contexts of shipboard music starting with the work song tradition known as the sea chantey (or shanty). It describes the recreational music-making activities of sailors, distinct from the work song tradition, providing accounts of Hawaiian singing and dancing aboard ships at sea and in various global ports, and the responses of Euro-American sailors to that music and dance.