Evolution and Permanence in Cuban Poetry- The Poetry of Lazaro Castillo

This flyer promotes the lecture "Evolution and Permanence in Cuban Poetry- The Poetry of Lazaro Castillo" by Lazaro Castillo, a leading young poet in Cuba. His texts are characterized by his interest in daily life, a collection of itinerant anecdotes, and the amorous vocation that precedes pain. This lecture is cosponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and was conducted in Spanish. It was held on November 20,2015 at FIU Modesto A. Maidique Campus, CBC254.

Modelling the generation of customised poetry in Jess

The present paper presents an application that composes formal poetry in Spanish in a semiautomatic interactive fashion. JASPER is a forward reasoning rule-based system that obtains from the user an intended message, the desired metric, a choice of vocabulary, and a corpus of verses; and, by intelligent adaptation of selected examples from this corpus using the given words, carries out a prose-to-poetry translation of the given message. In the composition process, JASPER combines natural language generation and a set of construction heuristics obtained from formal literature on Spanish poetry.

States of poetry - Victoria : state editor's introduction by David McCooey

Introduction to an anthology of Victorian poetry (part of ABR's 'States of Poetry' anthology). The full anthology is published online, with extracts appearing in the print edition (in press).

"The whole reflected world shuddering": active aesthetics and contemporary Australian poetry

This article maps the landscape of contemporary Australian poetry, arguing that that we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift that now accommodates ancient storytelling and cultures alongside emergent poetic forms and communities. It considers how contemporary poems reflect key cultural movements while themselves enacting a movement towards new forms of knowing.

When she refuses to settle: reading adolescent female sexuality and sexual abuse in the poetry of Genna Gardini and Kate Lilley

This essay compares the representations of adolescent sexual abuse and female sexuality in the poetry of South African poet Genna Gardini and Australian poet Kate Lilley. It explores Sabine Sielke's contention that differences in sexuality have predominantly constructed female sexuality as victimisation. In contrast, contemporary poets like Gardini and Lilley unsettle such alignment, demonstrating not only its constitutive limits but also providing a counter-discourse of radicalised agency.

The prose poetry project

The Prose Poetry Project was created by the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) in November 2014, with the aim of collaboratively exploring the form and composition of prose poetry. The ongoing project aims to produce both creative and research outcomes stemming from the resurgence of interest in the prose poem. It was initiated as a simple email exchange of prose poems between three founding members, with additional poets invited to join over the following months. There were no stipulations except that everyone was expected to write at least three prose poems within the year. At no stage was a definition of prose poetry imposed, or even suggested, despite the fact that some members of the group had never written prose poetry before. Through the process of making and sharing, however, various models emerged.The project was first showcased and discussed at an event within the Poetry on the Move festival in Canberra, 7 September 2015. At that stage, ten months from its inception, the project had accumulated over 600 poems. It ranged across four universities, two countries and eighteen poets (three of whom had yet to contribute). Six of those poets spoke at the event about the influence of the project on their personal practice, encouraged to do so in whatever manner they considered appropriate. Their various reflections, here collated, include: the challenges and delights of working within a form where all rules are suspended; the (questionable) distinction between the prose poem and flash fiction; the relationship with haibun; the nature of endings and a poem’s limits; and the way in which prose poems may elude some readers’ resistance to poetry in its more recognisable guise. In all these considerations, there is recognition of the benefits of working within a group, and of collaborative, creative play.

Reflection: humour in poetry: in praise of the light touch

While humour can be defined as something that is fun or amusing, it can also reference something much darker, such as l’humeur noir. André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, the first of its kind, was intended to “showcase…the Surrealist conception of humor” according to his translator, Mark Polizzoti (1997: v). The prose poems in this selection are often surreal and use a kind of gallows humour to discuss death and abandonment.