Contemporary poetry, almost all over the world, faces extinction chiefly because people have lost their earlier reading habits. Human culture has undergone a massive transformation. Considered stochastically the print media might be actually receding; normal custom of reading books at bed-time tends to get replaced by the more relaxed activity of watching television. There is also some issue with form, more noticeable among others being the surreal obscurity of verse, the veneer of disjointed post-modernism, the lack of metre. It is however encouraging to note that there are poets who belong to the archaic and ever vanishing community of ritual man. Judith Wright, Frederick Turner, Mary Freeman, Cynthia Zarin have contributed to English poetry even in times as ours. I shall excerpt a few poems and let them speak for a slice of life. But they symbolize the spirit of a millennium that hosts human grief, joy, fear, or self-exhorcising creation in its lines. Keep Reading
Saddik M. Gohar, United Arab Emirates University
Abstract
This paper underlines the attitudes of Palestinian / Arab poets toward the issues of exile and identity integral to their traumatic experience of Diaspora and displacement. From a historical context and within the parameters of colonial / postcolonial theory , the paper advocates a new critical perspective exploring the dialectics of exile and identity in Palestinian / Arabic poetry in order to argue that exile , in contemporary world literature , becomes a signifier not only of living outside one’s homeland but also of the condition caused by such physical absence. Aiming to reach a state of reconciliation rather than conflict, the poetic voices, analyzed in the paper, reflect a sense of nostalgia and emotional attachment toward their homeland. The paper argues that Palestine, for the Palestinian poets, is not a paradise or an idealistic utopia that only exists in their poetry and imagination but a geographical reality caught up in national and religious limbos and rooted in the trajectories of colonial history and diabolical power politics. Keep Reading
Rumpa Das, Maheshtala College, South 24 Parganas, India
Abstract
Contemporary English poetry by Afghan women presents a remarkable reading experience. Critical explorations, at ease with post-colonial conditions, minority solitude and feminist readings, have largely remained inimical to the unique, yet chequered history that women poets such as Zohra Saed, Sahar Muradi, Sara Hakeem, Fatana Jahangir Ahrary, Fevziye Rahzigar Barlas and Donia Gobar document in their works. Most of them write in their native Dari and Pushtun languages as well as in English and often their English compositions have smatterings of their native tongues. Even though individual experiences differ, these women delve into the collective memory of oppression, pain and unrest to give vent to their feelings, and seek to reach out towards a sorority of shared angst. This paper seeks to explore the complex cultural contexts which have given birth to Afghan women’s poetry in exile. Keep Reading
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Shelly Bhoil, Research Scholar, Barzil
Abstract
The displacement of Tibetans in exile has also displaced the Tibetan language to some extent among the new generation of Tibetans who are born or educated in exile. However, with the new languages and forms of expression in exile, they are negotiating their culture, identity and aspirations. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan woman poet in English to be published in the West, is one of the representative voices of New Tibetan Literature in English (NTLE). Her first book of poems Rules of the House was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003, and brought NTLE to academic attention. This paper is a thematic study of the philosophical and the social aspects of language in the poems from Rules of the House. Keep Reading
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Lamia Khalil Hammad, Yarmouk University, Jordan
Abstract
This paper discusses black feminist discourse of power in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who have considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. The work depicts the struggle of black women through a rainbow of experiences. At the end, the girls arrive at ‘selfhood’ by finding God in themselves. This paper focuses on how the patriarchal discourse lead to their suffereing and how they were able to claim back their identities as black females who only need to be loved and appreciated. Keep Reading
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Ashes Gupta, Tripura University, India.
Abstract
Dennis Cooley has attempted to unsettle several complex issues relating to post modernity, intertextuality, mingling of genres, decentering authority et al. His poetry is rich in complexity and in dealing with the problems of the text. He has published three books of poetry. Leaving (Turnstone 1980), Fielding (Thistledown 1983) and Bloody Jack (Turnstone 1985). His poetry reveals his interest in formal departures from the tyranny of orthodox running rhythm, and the left hand margin. From Leaving to Bloody Jack, Cooley has decentred authority from its traditional formal and ideological strongholds including the author, and placed it in the mind and heart of the reader. In his books of poetry, especially Bloody Jack, Cooley tends to deal with flexibility, knowledge and tolerance and seeks to voice the sparsely populated and neglected space of the Canadian prairie. This paper is an attempt to read Dennis Cooley’s Bloody Jack from the semiotic perspective of his use of colour as sign-code in it and the other related issues that it voices. Keep Reading
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Gargi Bhattacharya, Rabindra Bharati University
Abstract
John Ashbery (1927- ) takes the postmodernist polysemy of meaning in interpreting a work of art and the polyphony of styles in composing as his forte. He questions the various linguistic codes and makes us aware of the artificiality of the language. All political, ethical and aesthetic imperatives are rhetorical constructs. The writer uses language to persuade the reader to accept the formulated truth and he intervenes in the process of perception by his/her politics of representation. Though his iconoclastic approach towards writing and individuality of style has kept him aloof from mainstream academic syllabi, yet he has now become a prominent figure in Contemporary American Literature. It is interesting to note how Ashbery’s poetry revives the Romantic sensibility while applying the digitalized methods and the postmodern syndromes of immediacy, indeterminacy, disjunctive syntax, open-ended and multiplicity of interpretations. This paper explores the aesthetics of John Ashbery’s poetry. Keep Reading
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Matt Shedd, University of Oregon, USA
Abstract
Bob Dylan’s recent albums have returned to a more basic sense of American vernacular and poetics, employing stock phrases that evoke a rural America of the past. However, the past does not provide any shelter from modern day angst and impending devastation. We see this particularly in the 2001’s Love and Theft, coincidentally released on the day of the Twin Towers attack. By foregoing concepts of radical artistic individuality, Dylan use more traditional folk poetics to provide a historical and communal account of the descent of the United States into what Dylan calls “an empire in ruins.” Keep Reading
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Dipanjan Maitra, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to explore the relation between poetry and survival taking as a point of focus the poetry of the post-war European poet Paul Celan. By drawing attention to the French thinker Jacques Derrida’s several influential studies of Celan’s poetry on the problems of “witnessing”, “testimony” and the “idiomatic” this paper finally examines the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “remnant” to understand a poetics of survival. Keep Reading
Susmita Paul, Independent Scholar
Abstract
Memory as a narrative is a vindicated thesis in academia. In the article, the author focuses on the nature and the function of ‘memory’ in the poetry of Joy Harjo, an indigenous American poet with tribal affiliations. Instead of using only Eurocentric discourses of performance studies and theoretical studies on memory, the author attempts to assess the distillation of Harjo’s independent ideas on memory in her creative oeuvre – written and performed poetry. Further, the author probes how Harjo’s ‘theory’ of memory connects the past, the present and the future. Keep Reading