Poetry + Electricity = Rock’n’Roll:Über Lyrik, Songtexte und Musikerromane

Uwe Schütte über Lyrik, Songtexte und Musikerromane im Zeitalter der Popkultur

Alberto Girri, or poetry as hermeneutic reason

One of the main factors that makes the poetry of the Argentine Alberto Girri (1919–1991) a whole world of its own is my argument that in a fragmentary world like the present, poets search for a formal integrity which in the act of reading creates not only their own inner world but also the readers'. It is important to insist on this turning point in which most of the Symbolist work is circumscribed. Later, this would be of capital importance for the avant-garde as well as for the post-avant-garde: Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard would make poetry something absolutely modern. An original distribution of the white and black opened a new space for the text, shifting the then dominant phonocentrism. My close reading of this author as well as the given theoretical frame avoids the failure into an instrumental use either of the page or of the writing but ignoring physical reciprocity. What follows is, that this “shift” privileged heightened vision over audition of the “musical score”. Thus, an intense materialization of the language is achieved that increases the anonymity of the text. ^ Following this new arrangement of words, so to speak, Girri's poetic work now drives deeply inside words in order to lend them dignity from meaning. I conclude that the best way to “render” this poetry with religious aim (L. “re-ligare” to bind the fragmented) is by way of the philosophy of language. I also propose that Girri's task as a translator, mainly from English poetry, represented—with Jorge Luis Borges—a paradigmatic shift in the Spanish American horizon which had been under “logocentric” French rule since the time of Independence. This seismic change of perspective in late Modernism and post-Modernism is represented by a radical screening of Romance rhetoric, it was a shift not only over the inherited mother tongue but over his own work which was increasingly moving towards transcendent and/or metaphysical poetry. ^ Therefore, I did find that Girri's poem was constructed as a mirror closely related to that which was represented in the angelological tradition. ^

Women defending themselves: Cuban Romantic feminine voices (poetry and short stories)

Throughout history, women have played an important role in literature. Nevertheless, since Sappho's poetry until now, feminine voices have had to struggle for recognition of their works. ^ Before the nineteenth century, women were almost ignored in Spanish literature. Society kept them as “ángeles de la familia,” taking care of their homes, husbands, and children. Some of them, such as María de Zayas y Sotomayor in Spain and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico, complained about their situation in their writings. However, they expressed their fight not as a generation but as individuals. ^ In the nineteenth century, the ideas and ideals of Romanticism, were brought to Latin America from Europe. Cuba was among those countries where the new movement took roots. Initiated by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, a group of women began to participate in literary reunions, and to found newspapers and magazines where works authored by women, dedicated to feminist ideas, were published. They indeed through literature started to live out womanhood in order to intellectually leave the ideological prisons where society had been keeping them. ^ This study scans the literary works of all Romantic women writers in Cuba. It specifically analyzes poetry and short stories, and investigates how these authors expressed themselves in their works against the patriarchal society, where they lived and wrote their books. An eclectic critical method has been used. ^ Findings were very revealing. Only three of the fourteen writers studied in my dissertation had been previously mentioned by major critics. Most of them had been ignored. However, the greatest discovery was that they prompted something new: For the first time they projected themselves as a group, as a collective consciousness, and this fact established a difference with former women writers in Cuban literature before Romanticism. In other words, they produced a “Renaissance” in Cuba's literature. In spite of how they lived between 1820 and 1900, their struggles for women's rights have linked them to our current times. ^

Grey Slate

GREY SLATE is a collection of poems that focuses on the natural world in order to explore the mysteries of life with the intent to create a meditation on what it means to be a human being interacting with this world. Inspired by John Keats’ theory of Negative Capability, GREY SLATE does not seek to explain, but to dwell in the mysteries it explores. The poems are tied together through similar images or ideas in order to mimic the way the mind works as it jumps from thought to thought. GREY SLATE also mixes different types of poems: from haiku to sonnet to paradelle, and from lyric to narrative to prose poem. GREY SLATE hopes to inspire readers to take a break from searching for truths and indulge in the beautiful mystery that is life with no need for answers.

The Cuban Poetry of Alfonso Camín, Father of Afro-Cuban Poetry : Lecture by Victor Puertodan

This flyer promotes the event "The Cuban Poetry of Alfonso Camín, Father of Afro-Cuban Poetry : Lecture by Victor Puertodan" cosponsored by the FlU Initiative for Spanish and Mediterranean Studies.

Virgilio Piñera: Poetry, Nation, and Differences, Book Presentation by Author Jesús E. Jambrina

This flyer promotes the event "Virgilio Piñera: Poetry, Nation, and Differences, Book Presentation by Author Jesús E. Jambrina" and is part of the SIPA at Books & Books series. Hosted at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

Okay Cool No Smoking Love Pony

This poetry collection moves from the narrator’s childhood in the marshes of Canada to her coming of age in a new, southern swamp in South Florida. Many of the poems use free verse as well as fairly recent poetic forms like the Golden Shovel and the Pecha Kucha. Others rely on wordplay and nonce forms. Influenced by Hector Veil Temperly, Matthew Zapruder, Dorothea Lasky, Laura Kasischke and Anne Carson, the poems often employ simple language in stream of consciousness, and oscillate between lyric and narrative. These poems are feverish creations inspired by the oracular tradition and induced by the psychic crush of modern life: depression of the body and mind, cultural paranoia, and the decline of nature. The reader is privy not only to the personal biography of the narrator, but also to the inner workings of the narrator’s mind as it encounters and interprets the world.

Firefly curios and sundry lights

Firefly Curios and Sundry Lights contains 33 poems and 55 pages, mostly free verse lyric narratives issuing from various geographic, emotional, and temporal landscapes. The book is divided into four sections which might roughly be titled: "before," examining themes of childhood and death: "on-the-road," relaying the compulsion to travel, "odd-and- ends-limbo," including pieces which have no context within the time line; and "in-one- place-for-now," reflecting modes of communication, ordering, and longing. Other concerns include speculations about existence, observations of nature, and the importance of science as a means of apprehending the world. The work reveals a belief in the interconnectedness of mind and matter, combines seriousness and humor, and displays a sonic sensibility. These poems of solitude and observation are themselves vehicles, their motion a means of dislocation in order to find the self. Firefly Curios and Sundry Lights is smaller than a bread box and you can dance to it.

Chords

CHORDS is a collection of diverse lyric and narrative poems. The book is primarily composed of free verse in the colloquial tradition of James Wright. CHORDS employs the Romantic device of a strong narrative "I," and utilizes four thematic sections, each named after a specific musical chord, which correspond to four periods in the narrator's life. Section one, "Suspended," follows the young narrator through a tumultuous childhood, underscored by family loss and the disruption of a move from Miami to rural Kentucky; section two, "Diminished," details his adolescence and young adulthood, a period of rebellion and confusion; section three, "Augmented," finds the adult narrator contemplating several life-changing events-marriage, the break-up of his rock and roll band, and the dedication of his life to Christ; finally, in "Resolved," the narrator comes to accept the complexities of his life, and to build, from its dissonant notes, a final chord of resolution.

Dar a ver Sertão e Sevilha: matizes hispânicas na poética de João Cabral de Melo Neto

Dar a ver Sertão e Sevilha: matizes hispânicas na poética cabralina is a study on the lyric reading possibilities of Cabralian poetry, from the work of the poet from Pernambuco, that shows the intercultural dialogue and the Spanish poetical approach absorbed by João Cabral de Melo Neto during his Andalusian experience. Hispanic interfaces incorporated by the Cabralian poetry through literature or through the direct contact with the culture are registered on the 133 poems that have Spain as theme, in which we can see the matrix of Hispanic tradition, rich in its diversity, was the preponderant element for the poet João Cabral to discover the core of his lyric backwards. From Hispanic corpus, it will be explored the aesthetical assimilation of Spanish poetry in the work of João Cabral de Melo Neto, with the objective of demystifying the issues of lyrical dullness and anti musicality on Cabralian poetics in which, from the appropriation of Hispanic elements investigated as a signal of lyrics and musicality, originates a reading unattached from the constructivist signal, tessitura evidenced by the critic Antonio Candido since the origin of JCMN poetry with the poem Pedra do sono (1942). The mentioned aesthetics was adopted later on by the literary critics that named it as “brain poetry��� for its hermetical configuration, tessitura of rigor, concreteness of language and stiff metrics. The results obtained from this study aim to induce a reading that favors the lyrical acoustic of the Cabralian poetry in the effort to ease the aspects of the arid construction.

Constructing desire : Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman and the development of homoerotic desire in elegiac poetry

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Spic'ing into Existence: Epitaph, Epithet, and the Ethnopoetic Imagination

Quién Es, Quién Somos? Spic’ing into Existence claims a four-fold close-reading: first, analysis of texts: from theoretical meditations to (prison) memoir and film. Second, a half dozen central figures appear, largely Latinx and black American. They cut across a score of registers, socio-economics, ideological reservations, but all are, as Carl Carlton sang, poetry in motion. Writers, poets, theologians, pathologists, artists, comedians, actors, students whose vocation is invocation, the inner surge of their calling. Third, the manuscript draws from a series of historical moments—from radical liberation of the late 60s, to contemporary student activism. Finally, this body of work is movement, in all its social, gestural, and kinesthetic viscera. From this last heading, we peel away layers of what I call the ethnopoet, the fascia undoing that reveals its bio-political anatomy, dressing its bare life with kinship speech. First, the social revolutions of the Civil Rights, Black Power, abolitionism, the Black Panthers and Young Lords, boycotts and jarring artistic performances. These events are superficial not in vain sense, but key epicenters of underground murmurings, the workings of a cunning assailant. She robs not lavish estates, but another day to breathe. Gesturally, as perhaps the interlocutor, lies this author, interspersing his own diatribes to conjure her presence. The final branch is admittedly the most intangible. Kinesthetically, we map the nimbleness, footwork lígera of what I call the ethnopoet. Ethnopoet is no mere aggregate of ethnicity and poetry, but like chemical reaction, the descriptor for its behavior under certain pressures, temperatures, and elements. Elusive and resisting confinement, and therefore definition, the ethnopoet is a shapeshifting figure of how racialized bodies [people of color] respond to hegemonic powers. She is, at bottom, however, a native translator, the plural-lensed subject whose loyalty is only to the imagination of a different world, one whose survival is not contingent upon her exploitation. The native translator’s constant re-calibrations of oppressive power apparatuses seem taxing at best, and near-impossible, at worst. To effectively navigate through these polarized loci, she must identify ideologies that in turn seek “affective liberatory sances” in relation to the dominant social order (43). In a kind of performative contradiction, she must marshall the knowledge necessary to “break with ideology” while speaking within it. Chicana Studies scholar, Chela Sandoval, describes this dual movement as “meta-ideologizing”: the appropriation of hegemonic ideological forms in order to transform them (82). Nuestros padres se subieron encima de La Bestia, y por eso somos pasageros a ese tren. Y ya, dentro su pansa, tenemos que ser vigilantes cuando plantamos las bombas. In Methodology of the Oppressed, Sandoval schematizes this oppositional consciousness around five principle categories: “equal rights,” “revolutionary,” “supremacist,” “separatist,” and “differential.” Taken by themselves, the first four modes appear mutually exclusive, incapable of occupying the same plane, until a fifth pillar emerges. Cinematographic in nature, differential consciousness, as Sandoval defines it, is “a kinetic motion that maneuvers, poetically transfigures, and orchestrates while demanding alienation, perversion, and reformation in both spectators and practitioners” (44). For Sandoval, then, differential consciousness is a methodology that privileges an incredible sense mobility, one reaching artistic sensibilities. Our fourth and final analytic of movement serves an apt example of this dual meaning. Lexically speaking, ‘movement’ may be regarded as a political mobilization of aggrieved populations (through sustained efforts), or the process of moving objects (people or otherwise) from one location to another. Praxis-wise, it is both action and ideal, content and form. Thus, an ethnic poetics must be regarded less as a series of stanzas, shortened lyric, or even arrangement of language, but as a lens through which peripheralized peoples kaleidecope ideological positions in an “original, eccentric, and queer sight” (43). Taking note of the advantages of postponing identifications, the thesis stands its ground on the term ethnopoet. Its abstraction is not dewey-eyed philosophy, but an anticipation of poetic justice, of what’s to come from callused hands. This thesis is divided into 7.5 chapters. The first maps out the ethnopoet’s cartographies of struggle. By revisiting that alleged Tío Tomas, Richard Rodriguez, we unearth the tensions that negatively, deny citizenship to one silo, but on the flipside, engender manifold ways of seeing, hearing, and moving . The second, through George Jackson’s prison memoirs, pans out from this ethnography of power, groping for an apparatus that feigns an impervious prestige: ‘the aesthetic regime of coercion.’ In half-way cut, the thesis sidesteps to spic into existence, formally announcing, through Aime Cesaire, myself, and Pedro Pietri, the poeticization of trauma. Such uplift denies New Age transcendence of self, but a rehearsal of our entrapment in these mortal envelopes. Thirdly, conscious of the bleeding ethnic body, we cut open the incipient corpse to observe her pathologist. Her native autopsies offer the ethnic body’s posthumous recognition, the ethnopoetics ability to speak for and through the dead. Chapter five examines prolific black artists—Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar—to elide the circumvention of their consumption via invoking radical black hi/her-stories, ones fragmenting the black body. Sixth, the paper compares the Black Power Salute of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to Duke’s Mi Gente Boycott of their Latino Student Recruitment Weekend. Both wielded “silent gestures,” that shrewdly interfered with white noise of numbed negligence. Finally, ‘taking the mask off’ that are her functionalities, the CODA expounds on ethnopoet’s interiority, particularly after the rapid re-calibration of her politics. Through a rerun of El Chavo del Ocho, one of Mexican television’s most cherished shows, we tune into the heart-breaking indigence of barrio residents, only to marvel at the power of humor to, as Friday’s John Witherspoon put it, “fight another day.” This thesis is the tip of my tongue. Y por una vez, déjala que cante.

Constructing desire : Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman and the development of homoerotic desire in elegiac poetry

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.