Canvas Embroidery: Lesya Ukrainka’s Versification Skillfulness in the Poems of the Cycle “Rhythms”

The article under studies deals with the form of Lesya Ukrainka’s poetic works that comprised the verse cycle “Rhythms”. The meaningful unity of the cycle proems has been emphasized by a specifically defined syllable-tonic meter – pentameter iamb, which, however, does not cause the feeling of monotony of the verse form. The purpose of the article is to determine the means, used by the poetess, in order to diversify the structure. The structure of each verse of the cycle is considered separately. The curriculum verse-dialogue “De podilysia vy, holosniyi slova…”, which opens the cycle and develops the theme in the following poems, is extensively analyzed and statistically examined in the aspect of conveying emotions through the verse rhythm. It has been ascertained that the final verses of the cycle (seventh and eighth) differ in the type of the rhythm (“alternated” – “transitive”), the nature of the caesura, the hierarchy of the forms used, the presence or absence of the lines with a different meter, the number of enjambments, and the strophic structure. Thus, despite the fact that the six poems and the second parts of the two polymetric constructions of the cycle “Rhythm” have been written in pentameter iamb, they are far from being similar. Most often, the distinction is in terms of rhythm and syntax. Among the rhythmic means, there prevail the type of the caesura and the forms of the rhythm; then – the percentage of the lines with a different meter, the verses with out-of-scheme stresses and the type of the rhythm; next – the percentage of the stressed feet and the verses with masculine endings. The syntactic means are represented, above all, through enjambments and “sentences-stanzas”, more rarely – through the division into “periods” and anaphors.

Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

The Translation of Verse Form. A Revision of Holmes’ Model Based on the Spanish Translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

While an essential component of poetry, form has been frequently overlooked in research on poetry translation or has been addressed under rather prescriptivist approaches, with notable exceptions (Holmes 1994, Jones, 2011, among others). This paper deals with the translation of the poetic form from a descriptivist perspective from a corpus of 69 Spanish translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published between 1877 and 2018. It addresses, particularly, the outer form or macrostructure of the poems using one sonnet of each translation as a prototype. This analysis will serve as a basis for classifying these translations according to James S. Holmes’ metapoem forms and for proposing a revision of this model. While there are certain forms or patterns repeated throughout, the diverse solutions show that there is no single favoured way of rendering these sonnets, not even during a specific period (beyond the preference for verse over prose).

Prosody and Meter: Twentieth Century

If the 19th century was marked by competing systems, debates about how to write metrical poetry in English and disagreement over how to read and teach that poetry once written, then the 20th century was marked by first an artificial consolidation and subsequent rejection of so-called 19th-century “traditions” by the poets and critics associated with literary modernism and second, a reification of stress on the one hand (via Pound and the increased acceptance of “accentual-syllabic” verse form) and the attempt to measure verse form, in all its valences, scientifically, linguistically, and objectively (though never successfully) on the other. On the literary side, debates about “form” and value cycled throughout the century. On the linguistic side, unseating the false dominance, and abstraction, of stress as the main feature of meter was a main goal. Though overviews, histories, theories, and practical guides presented contrary paths, most focus on an unspoken concept of “the literary” as opposed to “the vernacular.” This bibliography therefore has not included a variety of work relating to particular prosodic traditions (Welsh, Irish, “African American,” Black) nor has it included the robust history of Black poetics, with its complicated relationship to the very terms “English prosody” and “English meter” and the latter’s underlying concepts of meter and rhythm. Indeed Black poetics deserves its own bibliography, as does Native American poetics, quite apart from the often exclusionary critical tradition outlined here.

Four Poems by A.V. Koltsov on A.S. Pushkin’s Death

The article substantiates the need to supplement the canonical corpus of A.V. Koltsov’s poems with three poetic works, which are contained in the poet’s letterto A.A. Krayevsky, a publisher, and dedicated to the death of A.S. Pushkin. One of these works is presented in the specified epistolary text in a standard verse form, while the other two have a prose design. The authors propose a re-construction of these two poems based on the principle of minimal interference in the content with graphic ordering of the form. The article shows that A.V. Koltsov’s poems reconstructed and restored in their rights are connected with other works not only within the poet’s artistic world, but also within Russian literature with individual images, catchwords, and motives.

Futures Honed

This chapter comprises an interview between Barbara Adam and the editors, and is followed by Adam’s ‘Honing Futures’, which is presented in four short verses of distilled theory. In the interview Adam reflects on thirty-five years of futures-thinking rooted in her deeply original work on time and temporality, and her innovative response to qualitative and linear definitions of time within the social sciences. The interview continues with a discussion of the way Adam’s thinking on futures intersects in her work with ideas of ethics and collective responsibility politics and concludes with a brief rationale for writing theory in verse form. In ‘Honing Futures’, a piece of futures theory verse form, Adam charts the movements and moments in considerations of the Not Yet and futurity’s active creation: from pluralized imaginings of the future, to an increasingly tangible and narrower anticipated future, to future-making as designing and reality-creating performance. Collectively, the verses identify the varied complex interdependencies of time, space, and matter with the past and future in all iterations of honing and making futures.

“Rejoice, Mary!”: modification of the prayer of praise in the works by Vira Vovk and Pavlo Tychyna

The paper comparatively analyzes the modification of the laudatory prayer “Rejoice, Mary!” in the poems by V. Vovk and P. Tychyna. The comparison helps to reveal the peculiarities of the authors’ styles in the modifications of the prayer and makes it possible to see the deep unity of emigrational and continental literature. The prayer of Vira Vovk has its sources in the akathist to the Mother of God. In the poem “Rejoice!”, the poetess retains the general structure of the akathist, modifying some details: she uses twelve lines instead of thirteen and keeps the address “Rejoice!” not in every line but only in odd numbers. In the poem “Celestial Tit”, the akathist acquires the features of a verse form, and the address “Rejoice” is present only in the first and ninth lines. However, the second strophes of the poems “Rejoice!” and “Heavenly Tit” give grounds to consider these texts as variants of the same work. The works by Vira Vovk show a combination of images being characteristic of the church akathist to the Mother of God (lilies, roses, universe of joy, virgin and mother) with individual authorial ones (heavenly forget-me-not, four-leaf clover, sparkling star, chorale of winged, celestial tit). The address “Oh, rejoice, Mary!” from the poem “The Dolorous Mother” by P. Tychyna refers to the scene of the Annunciation and the prayer “Ave, Maria” (“Rejoice Mary, full of grace”), which is part of the rosary prayer. Despite the address “Rejoice”, P. Tychyna’s poem is imbued with sorrow. The events of the poem take place after the Crucifixion, before the Resurrection. The address “Oh, rejoice” is contrasted with the drama of a mother looking for a crucified son and also with Ukrainian history and the landscape. In V. Vovk’s piece “Dormition”, the events take place after the Resurrection, and therefore the Mother of God is not sad but smiling, full of joy; she merges with the landscape and not contrasts with it.