The Exordium of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Poetry

The background of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí (1921 – 2017) was steeped in the Ọyọ̀ ́ Yorùbá culture. He had a princely connection to the throne of Ọyọ̀ ́ having been born by Dúrówadé Àyìnkẹ, a granddaughter of Prince Adé ́ ṣọ̀kàn, Bàbá Ìdódẹ, Aláàfin Àtìbà’s son, to Àkànbí Fálétí. Àkànbí Fálétí was a royal oral artist in the palace of Aláàfin Ṣiyanbọ́lá Oníkẹẹ̀ pé Ládìgbòlù (1911 – ́ 1944). He later practiced outside the palace, leading his own band, going about Ìlọrin and its environs and parts of Northern Yorùbáland. The late Pa David Adéníji of Ìwó, we reliably learnt, was one of his followers. Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí spent his early life in Ọyọ̀ ́ villages such as Àgbóóyè, Ọbanàǹkò and Kúrańgà (Ọlátúnji 1982a). Adébáyọ Fálétí learnt many Yorùbá tales and garnered other ̀ native wisdom from his father and other relations. Such relations include Jímọ̀ Ọládẹ̀jọ, who was adept in proverbs, and his childless aunt, an oríkì (charcterizational) poetry exponent. The western education he acquired and the Christianity he embraced were also part and parcel of his background. His primary school education was at Ọyọ̀ ́ (1939 – 1945), his secondary school education at Ìbàdàn Boys High school, Ìbàdàn, (1951 – 1955) and his University education at the University of Ìbàdàn (1965 – 1968). He took a bachelor’s degree in English with a subsidiary in French. There is no doubt that Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí would have been influenced by Yorùbá literary artists of his time, all of whom he studied in school. Among such Yorùbá literary precursors were A. K. Ajíṣafẹ, D. A. Ọbasá and D. ́ O. Fágúnwà. Adébáyọ Fálétí collected and transcribed oral poetic forms such ̀ as proverbs and oríkì following Obasá’s example before venturing into writing 110 Adedotun Ogundeji his own compositions. Though he had been writing before 1955, he did not come into the limelight until 1955, when his 719 lines long poem, “Ẹ̀dá Kò Láròpin” won the Festival of Arts award. This time may conveniently be considered the beginning of his poetic career. The poem also marked the direction which Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s important contributions to Yorùbá poetry was leaning. He adapted many traditional stories for his poetic compositions. There are 35 poems in the two collections of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Yorùbá poems (Ọlátúnjí 1984 b & 1984c), 13 in the first and 22 in the second. Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s poems, can conveniently be classified into two: the narrative and non-narrative. The narratives tell interesting stories, some of which are adapted from the Ifá corpus and other stories collected from his father, co-hunters and other sources. The non-narrative ones are made up of poetic discourses on various social and philosophical topics. There are eleven narrative poems in the two collections. The first contains ten, the second only one. It could therefore be safely concluded that the first is dedicated to narrative poems because only four of the thirteen poems in it are non-narrative. Since there is also only one narrative poem in the second, one could also assert that it is dedicated to non-narrative poems. Four of the eleven narrative poems, (‘Ẹ̀là Lọrọ̀ ’, ‘̀ Ṣàṣọrẹ’, ‘Alágbára Ilé àti Alágbára Oko’, and ‘Agbódóro ́ - gun’) are adapted from the Ifá corpus and there are strong evidences that ìjálá (Ogun poetry/hunter’s) is the original source of the story retold in ‘Adébímpé Ojẹ̀dòkun’. The poet was reported to have collected it from his father who informed him it was a true-life story (Ọlátúnjí 1982a). In our examination of the exordiums of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s poems, we shall dwell more on his narrative poems than on his non-narrative poems and limit ourselves to the aforementioned two collections (Olatunji 1982b & 1982c).

Intertextuality in Selected Narrative Poems of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí

The creative works of Adébáyọ Fálétí, a renowned literary writer in Yorùbá, ̀ have been the focus of literary critics. Notable among such are Olatunji (1982a; 1982b; 1982c), Ogunsina (1991), Ìṣọ̀lá (1998) and Adebowale (1999). These scholars have examined the issues of form, style and theme in Fálétí’s poetry. It has been established that Fálétí is a philosophical poet influenced by the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the society that produced his poems. According to Olatunji (1982), “the oral poetic tradition of the Yorùbá constitutes the weft and woof of Fálétí’s poetic genius.” This attests to the claim that “no artist creates in a vacuum” (Agyekum, 2007:31). It could be deduced from the above position that there is an interplay between the text of Fálétí’s poetry and the context that produced it. Using intertextuality approach, this paper, therefore, examines the interplay of the text, context and the writer in selected poems of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí with a view to determining the correlation between the Yorùbá oral poetic genres and the written form in Fálétí’s poetry and determining the continuity of the oral poetic genre in the written form. Fálétí’s biography has been discussed by Olatunji (1982). He was born at Agbóóyè in Ọyọ̀ ́ and had his elementary life on the farm, where he was exposed to the Yorùbá culture undiluted. He was a novelist, playwright, poet, scriptwriter and actor when alive. His works include Ọmọ Olókùn Ẹṣin, Thunderbolt, Baṣọrun Gáà, Fẹrẹ bí Ẹkùn, ̀ and Ogún Àwítẹ́lẹ. Fálétí’s works ̀ are greatly influenced by his family background because his father was a 120 Arinpe Adejumo and Adefemi Akinseloyin prominent member of the sàkàrá calabash beating oral poets and entertainers under Olatunji Kúdẹẹ̀ ̀fù in the court of Ọba Ṣiyanbọ́lá Oníkẹẹ̀ pé Ládìg ́ - bòlù I, the Aláàfin of Ọyọ̀ (1911-1944). Fálétí learnt a lot about narratives and ́ other techniques of rendition from his father’s poetic influence. There are also cases of intertextuality in his narrative poems and other literary works. Fálétí’s narrations and literary works are inspired by the tales he heard from his father, aunt and members of the larger family (Olatunji 1982). These influenced his narrative poems, as they reflect chronicles, heroism and expositions, which he borrowed from the Yorùbá oral poetic genre. Since oral poets are imbued with repertoires of praise poetry, legends, myths, proverbs, songs and history, Fálétí’s narrative poems are filled with the intertextuality of Yorùbá oral materials.

ПОНЯТТЯ ЧАСУ В ПОЕЗІЇ РАБІНДРАНАТА ТАГОРА: ЧИТАЦЬКА ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЯ

In the current study, readers’ interpretation of the conception of time in Rabindranath Tagore’s nonnarrative poetry is approached from the perspective of schema theory (E. Semino) and Text World Theory (P. Werth, J. Gavins). The analysis shows that in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poems about time, which were written in or translated into English, a TIME schema is instantiated through (i) linguistic units that refl ect human idea of dividing time into conventional periods – moments, days, months, years, etc.; (ii) a complex web of fi gurative devices, metaphors and similes in particular. In readers’ minds, fi gurative language prompts associative connections between several core, or basic, schemata: TIME, GOD, HUMAN LIFE, LIFE OF NATURE. Basic schemata can contain subordinate ones (TIME: MOMENT, DAY, MONTH; GOD: THY HANDS, SHUT GATE (thy gate be shut); HUMAN LIFE: CLOCK, PARODY, POEM, MEMORY; LIFE OF NATURE: BUTTERFLY, GARDEN, FLOWER, etc.). Connections between schemata on either a level or across levels indicate that the abstract conception of time is objectifi ed through physical processes and entities, which are perceptible by human senses; and that human life and life of nature have some common characteristics determined by time-related processes. Relying on schemata instantiated by the language of a poem, a reader creates his or her mental representation of the text, in other words, builds a poem’s text-world. On the text-world level, the conception of time in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poetry is presented through the use of all the three types of elements from which text-worlds are constructed: temporal deictic markers (world-building elements), function-advancing propositions (elements that describe actions, events, and states), and intensive relational processes (elements which describe physical characteristics). Text-worlds in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poems about time can be complex. His texts can contain world-switches – changes in the temporal parameters “present – future” from the perspective of the author and “present – past” from the perspective of a reader, and/or modal worlds that exist as hypothetical ones in the minds of the author and his readers. The latter concerns the poems in which time is associated with the transcendent conception of God. Key words: Rabindranath Tagore, non-narrative poetry, time, schema, text-world.

Structural approach of Sangam Poetry

If a linguistic information is considered a literary work it means that it has a structure of its own. It is not possible to consume literature without a copy of this descriptive system. It was on this basis that the poet's approach to perceiving the internal form of life with its external forms in the language system also appeared. Every art has form and meaning. Form reflects the excellence of literature from the external system and the material internal system. Exploring such a literary structure in a structural approach becomes a necessary one. Anatomy is found only in Tamil as a new dialect. Because Thoughts such as exploring the structure of songs and defining their elements can be seen in the Tamil world before this review. The verb elements spoken in Tholkappiya porulathikaram set out to illustrate the structural nature of the poem. This seems to be close to the ‘overall’ thinking that the organizer refers to. This article explores the Sangapakal through such thinking and reveals the Thinai kotpadu found within them, as well as the structural structure of the Sangapakal, which the Sangapakal see as narrative poems.

Buttered Nostalgia: Feeding My Parents During #COVID19

The author uses poetic inquiry as CFIC (critical family and interpersonal communication) methodology to tell a story of cooking, cleaning, and caring for her elderly parents in the house she grew up in during the COVID-19 pandemic for 11 days in March 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns began in the US. The piece is organized as a series of daily menus, lyric reflections, and narrative poems about family stories, family values, and the enactment of supportive behaviors that detail how a family deals with political differences, identity negotiation, and crisis. The author asks: (1) What does it mean to be a good daughter, and how is this complicated by discourses about the meaning of marriage?; (2) How does one reconcile family differences in political views and hold true to family and personal values?; and (3) How does one decide what obligations to focus on during a moment of personal and international crisis? The use of poetic inquiry shows how public cultural discourses influence private experience.

“I Quit!”: White Privilege, White Fragility, and White-Hot Rage: A Poetic Response in Five Acts

This work consists of five narrative poems that correspond to five moments, Acts, related to a lesson about institutional racism and White privilege, presented to preservice teachers, via Zoom. That White privilege, White fragility, and institutional racism exist is well established, as is the necessity of commitment to preparing preservice teachers for cultural competence and responsiveness. Therefore, the poetry is presented without a literature review, in an effort to highlight the layered tensions of the author’s lived experience, the precarious positionality of tenure-track faculty, and the potential consequences of choices made, to teach (or not) controversial content.

Leonid Dolgopolov’s Unpublished PhD Thesis on Alexander Blok’s Narrative Poems ‘Retribution’ and ‘The Twelve’

Russian Modernism scholar Leonid Konstantinovich Dolgolopov (1928 –1995), known for his studies on Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, completed his PhD thesis on Blok’s narrative poems “Retribution” and “The Twelve” in 1960, received his degree in 1962, but never published the text (now in the author’s possession). Its major parts were published as papers, its principal propositions and conclusions were developed in Dolgopolov’s later research works, but the thesis was never printed as a whole, and, from the author’s point of view, is worth being published as a valuable source for history of literary studies on Russian Symbolism as well as an original work useful and readable even now. The article presents Dolgopolov’s unpublished PhD thesis. Chapter One deals with “Retribution” and presents a comprehensive study of the poem’s plan, plot, and literary history, its genre peculiarities and historical scenes. Chapter Two analyzes evolution of Blok’s political views during the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and also its reflection in Blok’s lyric poems of this period. Chapter Three is the first of Dolgopolov’s numerous studies on “The Twelve”, the work he considered to be Blok’s highest literary achievement. Dolgopolov analyzed the poem’s ideas and images (especially Jesus Christ), its formal and rythmic novelty, its place among other contempopary poetical works on Russian revolution.

Bibliography of N.M. Minsky’s Works. Part 1. Poetic texts

This publication is the first part of the bibliography of works by the famous poet, playwright, critic, translator Nikolai Minsky (1855/1856–1937). It includes a list of the first publications of Minsky's poems (lyrics, narrative poems, poetic dramas). Both the works included in lifetime collections and those published in periodicals, as well as those remaining in manuscripts, are taken into account. When compiling the list, the author relied on the data of A.D. Alexeyev (Pushkin House), as well as personal continuous viewing of journal and newspaper periodicals, both domestic and émigré, for 1877–1937. In total, about 50 titles of journals, newspapers and almanacs of the pre-revolutionary period and about 17 titles of the same branches of periodicals of the émigré period were viewed. When describing the title of an individual poem, the compiler of the list took into account its following components: title; subtitle; revision of the first line; the presence or absence of dedication. The list reflects cases of changes in each of these components for all author collections. Reprints in non-author collections are not included. It is planned to continue the bibliography in the next issues of the journal.

The Ethical Discourse: The Female Writing in the Modificated Process of For Jiao Zhongqing's Wife

In the early 20th century, the interpretation of the poem "Wei Jiao Zhongqing Qi Zuo" or "For Jiao Zhongqing's Wife" was mainly based on the social context at the time, which, however, might deviate from the original purpose of the female writing in the work. The poem once witnessed several modifications from the late Eastern Han Dynasty to the Southern Dynasties when the development of traditional Confucian code of ethics took off. The rewritings of female writing in literature works were to adapt to the male-dominated moral codes and discourse system at that time. Based on that, the female writing in the poem was processed, and evidence would be that from the perspective of content, the persona of Liu (Jiao's wife) portrayed in the poem changed greatly while characters like Jiao Zhongqing and Mother Jiao (Jiao's mother) were enriched. In addition, some new plots and characters were created for example, Brother Liu (Liu's brother) and Mother Liu (Liu's mother). In regard to the narrative strategy, the processed version intentionally emphasized the absence of "father" and "unrighteousness" of the brother to serve to the plot of suicide for love of Liu. This type of narrative poems conveying both criticism and praise was a tool used to complete and consolidate the ethical discourse and restrain women's influence on men, and it also echoed the traditional view of women passed from the Qin and Han Dynasties which for sure further confined women's free choice.

Angifi Dladla (1950–2020): An Embodiment of Ku Femba as a Poetry Teaching Philosophy for Renewal

Angifi Dladla’s poetry and teaching doctrines are considered tools for consciousness raising, healing and popular education for decoloniality. Through ku femba, an age-old practice that serves as a channel to cast away evil spells in a society bedevilled by violence, Dladla displays the relationship between man, ancestors and the otherworldly as a vehicle for decoloniality. His feisty narrative poems, “I Failed My Children” and “Marikana Chorus”, explore the spiritual dimension and infinite possibilities of experience rooted in oral and written tradition. Dladla’s Femba Writing Project, based on his philosophy of teaching poetry, affirms that poetry rooted in decoloniality reflects not only the poet’s political convictions, but a shared communal experience of those on the edges of existence who are capable enough to challenge the master’s voice (the voice of the Western canon) that often defines quality in poetry. Dladla is steeped in direct knowledge of the precarious life in South African townships; he draws on his accrued knowledge and on the complexities of history and memory to create and teach compelling poetry that resonates with the ordinary without falling into the trap of ghettoising his experience. Dladla’s poetry and teaching philosophy challenge the colonising practices that have shaped and continue to influence the teaching of poetry in South Africa. They form part of a wider agenda of defining African selfhood in a decolonial context.