Literature+-+Voices+from+the+Inside

Back to Theme toc As you get to know the essay, consider: is Sisyphus making a decision? If so, what motivates it—and is it rational?
 * Read //Life of Pi// by Yann Martel
 * Watch //A Beautiful Mind// and the pilot of the television cult classic Freaks and Geeks.
 * Reading The Myth of Sisyphus, a short essay by the French existentialist Albert Camus.

=** Voices from the Inside **=


 * 1) ==** Poetry: The Captive Imagination **==

· B.J. Best | “[|Frogger]”

Comment from the Poet Video game poetry

· Chris Abani | “[|Blue]”

· Edgar Allen Poe | “[|The Raven]” [|Summary, analysis, allusions, poetic structure]

· Emily Dickinson | “[|Much Madness is Divinest Sense]”

· János Pilinszky | “[|Van Gogh's Prayer]”

Ouyang Jianghe | “ Mother, Kitchen ” Ouyang Jianghe

· Mark Strand | “[|Mother, Childhood]”

· Pablo Neruda | “[|Ode to Things]” Biography of Pablo Nerudo

· Robert Browning | “[|Porphyria’s Lover]”

· Saadi Youseef | "[|The Fence]”

· Shuntaro Tanikawa | Twenty Billion Years of Loneliness

· Sylvia Plath | "[|Mad Girl's Love Song]”

· William Butler Years | "[|The Choice]”


 * 1) ==** Longer Works: The Walls of the Self **==

· Film: Ron Howard | [|A Beautiful Mind]

A Beautiful Mind - commentary Ron Howard A Beautiful mind Review Summary Review

· Novel: Yann Martel | [|Life of Pi]

Questions to consider
Summary

· Television: Paul Feig | [|Freaks and Geeks, Pilot] Freaks and Geeks Paul Fieg

· Essay: Albert Camus | "[|The Myth of Sisyphus]"

· Short Story: Arthur Conan Doyle | "[|The Adventure of the Speckled Band]" Summary

= Resources: =

http://harryhowisyou.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-mothers-kitchen-analysis.html​ @http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=13115 @http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetryconflict/attheborder1.shtml ||  BBC - GCSE Bitesize: Context  A secondary school revision resource for GCSE English Literature about the context of Choman Hardi's At the Border, 1979 Read more... ​

||  My mother's kitchen by Choman Hardi - Poetry Archive  My mother's kitchen by Choman Hardi on the Poetry Archive Read more...

@http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poemcomment/242114 ||  Read the latest issue of Poetry magazine-- the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English speaking world-- or browse over 100 years of the magazine in the archive featuring poems and prose by T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound among others. Read more... ||
 *  Poetry magazine : Published by the Poetry Foundation

= B J best =

The fogger
Dreams or no dreams, remembering people and places. To go back to sleep.

While gamers worldwide play video games for entertainment, poet and college professor B.J. Best played them to find inspiration. It was "research," he told his wife, for a book of poetry.

The fruits of all Best's thumb labor came in the form of "But Our Princess is in Another Castle," a collection of 55 prose poems in which each piece is inspired by a classic video game.

Cue a flood of jealousy from gamers the world over.

Best's collection, published this month by Chicago-based Rose Metal Press, uses details from various games as vehicles to explore broader topics like love, childhood, heartbreak, death, faith and God. In Best's book, a piece about "SimCity" morphs into a examination of childish imagination. A poem on "Frogger" mediates on trips not taken, and a composition on "Astrosmash" becomes a story about getting drunk for the first time.

"In some ways it is difficult to separate the games from my life because (the games) are wrapped up with the memories of who I was playing them with and under what circumstances," Best, 36, said with the accented vowels of a born-and-bred Midwesterner. Best lives with his wife and son in his childhood home of West Bend, Wis.

Best's employment of classic video games as the avenue to larger themes got the attention of Kathleen Rooney, co-founder of Rose Metal Press.

"Any time an author undertakes what is essentially an ekphrastic project," she said, "they need to not just describe the art compellingly, but also to add value and texture to it .... In the way he uses classic video games as the jumping off points for his own prose poems, B.J.'s book (does that)."

The universal nature of the themes Best examines will resonate with gamers and non-gamers alike, but parts of some poems will click only with people who've played certain video games.

"It's almost a little Easter egg-y," he said. "The (game references) are not necessarily hidden, but someone who has played a (given) game and knows it well will probably be able to identify various details from that game in the poem."

These "Easter eggs" appear throughout the book. The chapter titles are a nod to the various "worlds" of video games, the book's title is a direct quote from "Super Mario Bros.," and even the book itself, a perfect square, is made to look like the TV on which these games would be played.

Best began writing poems for this project in 2004 and submitted a manuscript to Rose Metal Press in 2007. It was rejected, but Best continued to work on the collection. The book was accepted for publication in 2011.

Best, a self-described "planner," never thought he would end up a poet. At Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, he studied actuarial science but was drawn to poetry during an emotional moment in his young life.

"I was never that interested in poetry until I got to my freshman year of college and I was separated from my high school girlfriend," he said. "I turned inward and wrote all this sappy, moody, angsty poetry that people in such situations do."

After quitting three "awful" actuary jobs and receiving a graduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Best got a position at Carroll and settled into life as a poet and professor.

Like how Mario must keep searching for his princess, Best wants the book to encourage readers to continue seeking whatever or whoever makes them happy. He also hopes the book will help legitimize video games as art form.

"An important part of the project is to rescue video games from those people who say they are worthless and they are rotting your brain," he said. "(I wanted) to show that video games can have deeper meanings and can be used for artistic purposes and can even be useful for understanding ourselves as people."

[|Chicago Tribune]

[]

= [|Chris Abani] = b. 1967

POET’S REGION [|Africa]

SUBJECTS [|Social Commentaries], [|History & Politics] , [|Race & Ethnicity]

Describe dreams or living experiences of a slave in different parts of the world

Chris Abani is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in that troubled African nation. Abani began writing at a very young age and published his first novel,//Masters of the Board,// while still a teenager. The plot of the novel, a political thriller, proved uncomfortably close to actual events; it mirrored a coup that was carried out in Nigeria not long after, and Abani was thrown in jail for six months on suspicion of having helped organize this attempted political overthrow. He continued to write after his release from jail, but was imprisoned again two years later, after the publication of his novel //Sirocco.// The author was again released after a year of detention, but following another two years of writing, during which he composed several anti-government plays that were performed on the street near government offices, Abani was once again imprisoned and placed on death row. Able to escape after eighteen months, thanks to the bribes his friends paid to prison officials, the writer immediately went into exile and settled in England for several years. Since 1999 the writer has been a resident of the United States.

Abani's poetry collection //Kalakuta Republic// takes its title from a wing of the infamous Kiri Kiri prison in Lagos, Nigeria, where Abani and other political prisoners were incarcerated and tortured. Poems in the collection describe, in graphic detail, the horrors the writer witnessed there, particularly the various methods of torture used upon the inmates. Guards sodomized prisoners with rifle barrels, nailed them to tables by their genitals, and performed other ruthless types of torture—in one case a fourteen-year-old boy was so brutalized that he died. In his review for the //New Statesman//, Robert Winder commented that "the steady parade of torment he describes ..., along with a sense of blank bewilderment in the face of such cruelty, is acutely drawn and held very tight." Tanure Ojaide, writing in //World Literature Today,//noted that Abani "portrays the experience in indelible lines that haunt the reader as well as himself." Ojaide added that the poet "succeeds in elevating art and humanity above the meanness and inhumanity of tyrannical leaders and their cohorts."

Abani's novels include //Sirocco// and //GraceLand,// the latter published in 2004 and focusing on a teenage boy named Elvis Oke. The novel is set in 1983, and Elvis is trying to survive in the destitute town of Moroko, a slum on the outskirts of Lagos. His mother, Beatrice, died of cancer when Elvis was a young boy, but the teen still clings to the woman's diary; the old-fashioned Nigerian recipes and bits of herbalism tucked in the pages of Beatrice's journal serve as chapter dividers in Abani's novel. In flashbacks, the reader glimpses fragments of Elvis's childhood and life in a rural Nigerian village. They also witness the devastating effect Beatrice's death had upon Elvis's father, Sunday, who turns to alcohol to cope. By Elvis's adolescence Sunday has finally found some solace in a relationship with a woman appropriately named Comfort—although she is nothing of the sort to Elvis. A high-school drop-out, the teen now makes money performing as an Elvis Presley impersonator for Western tourists, despite the fact that he has few skills as a singer or dancer. According to John C. Hawley in a review of//GraceLand// for //America,// the teen's "hopeless impersonation of his namesake for white tourists is painful to imagine." Abani's story takes a turn when Elvis's friend Redemption convinces the boy that there is more money to be made in crime. Despite his initial moral qualms, Elvis is pulled into moneymaking ventures that grow successively more depraved as time passes. "//GraceLand// draws a searing picture of a country devouring its own children," Dinaw Mengestu commented in //New Leader,// the critic adding that "what you learn about Nigeria [in Abani's novel] will make you want to weep." A //Kirkus Reviews// contributor interpreted the novel similarly, commenting that "Abani paints a compelling portrait of a society in frightening chaos." However, Charlie Dickinson, in an online review for //Hackwriters//, focused on the more positive side of Abani's tale, writing that the author "delivers what might be the ultimate tribute to the King, if the Elvis myth is really about a dirt-poor boy finally catching his dream and making good."

In the novella-length //Becoming Abigail,// Abani tells the story of a woman who is sent to London from Nigeria by her father because of her self-mutilation and other disturbing behaviors, which have been fueled by feelings of guilt based on the fact that her mother died while giving birth to her. In her weakened state, Abigail also suffers sexual abuse from her relatives, and when she arrives in London to stay with her cousin Peter, she soon finds that her humiliations have just begun. Writing in //Essence,//Janice K. Bryant cited the author's "moody lyrical prose." Keven Greczek, reviewing//Becoming Abigail// for //Library Journal,// noted that Abani "offers a lyrical yet devastating account" and that his "abundant talent is clearly evident throughout." A//Publishers Weekly// contributor called the work of short fiction "a searing girl's coming-of-age novella."

Although Abani's writing is inextricably linked to suffering experienced under Nigeria's military dictatorship, the author once stated of literature: "The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about. I was a writer before I was in prison." In an online interview with //Southern California Poetix//contributor Carlye Archibeque, Abani further commented of his work: "The problem is we're looking for something that doesn't exist. We're looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art."

[| Source]

[]

= "The Raven" Edgar Alan Poe =

** Summary: **
The unnamed narrator is wearily perusing an old book one bleak December night when he hears a tapping at the door to his room. He tells himself that it is merely a visitor, and he awaits tomorrow because he cannot find release in his sorrow over the death of [|Lenore]. The rustling curtains frighten him, but he decides that it must be some late visitor and, going to the door, he asks for forgiveness from the visitor because he had been napping. However, when he opens the door, he sees and hears nothing except the word "Lenore," an echo of his own words

Returning to his room, he again hears a tapping and reasons that it was probably the wind outside his window. When he opens the window, however, a raven enters and promptly perches "upon a bust of Pallas" above his door. Its grave appearance amuses the narrator, who asks it for its names. The raven responds, "Nevermore." He does not understand the reply, but the raven says nothing else until the narrator predicts aloud that it will leave him tomorrow like the rest of his friends. Then the bird again says, "Nevermore."

Startled, the narrator says that the raven must have learned this word from some unfortunate owner whose ill luck caused him to repeat the word frequently. Smiling, the narrator sits in front of the ominous raven to ponder about the meaning of its word. The raven continues to stare at him, as the narrator sits in the chair that Lenore will never again occupy. He then feels that angels have approached, and angrily calls the raven an evil prophet. He asks if there is respite in Gilead and if he will again see Lenore in Heaven, but the raven only responds, "Nevermore." In a fury, the narrator demands that the raven go back into the night and leave him alone again, but the raven says, "Nevermore," and it does not leave the bust of Pallas. The narrator feels that his soul will "nevermore" leave the raven's shadow.

** Analysis: **
" [|The Raven] " is the most famous of Poe's poems, notable for its melodic and dramatic qualities. The meter of the poem is mostly trochaic octameter, with eight stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines. Combined with the predominating ABCBBB end rhyme scheme and the frequent use of internal rhyme, the trochaic octameter and the refrain of "nothing more" and "nevermore" give the poem a musical lilt when read aloud. Poe also emphasizes the "O" sound in words such as "Lenore" and "nevermore" in order to underline the melancholy and lonely sound of the poem and to establish the overall atmosphere. Finally, the repetition of "nevermore" gives a circular sense to the poem and contributes to what Poe termed the unity of effect, where each word and line adds to the larger meaning of the poem.

The unnamed narrator appears in a typically Gothic setting with a lonely apartment, a dying fire, and a "bleak December" night while wearily studying his books in an attempt to distract himself from his troubles. He thinks occasionally of Lenore but is generally able to control his emotions, although the effort required to do so tires him and makes his words equally slow and outwardly pacified. However, over the course of the narrative, the protagonist becomes more and more agitated both in mind and in action, a progression that he demonstrates through his rationalizations and eventually through his increasingly exclamation-ridden monologue. In every stanza near the end, however, his exclamations are punctuated by the calm desolation of the sentence "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore,'" reflecting the despair of his soul.

Like a number of Poe's poems such as "Ulalume" and " [|Annabel Lee] ," "The Raven" refers to an agonized protagonist's memories of a deceased woman. Through poetry, Lenore's premature death is implicitly made aesthetic, and the narrator is unable to free himself of his reliance upon her memory. He asks the raven if there is "balm in Gilead" and therefore spiritual salvation, or if Lenore truly exists in the afterlife, but the raven confirms his worst suspicions by rejecting his supplications. The fear of death or of oblivion informs much of Poe's writing, and "The Raven" is one of his bleakest publications because it provides such a definitively negative answer. By contrast, when Poe uses the name Lenore in a similar situation in the poem "Lenore," the protagonist [|Guy de Vere] concludes that he need not cry in his mourning because he is confident that he will meet Lenore in heaven.

Poe's choice of a raven as the bearer of ill news is appropriate for a number of reasons. Originally, Poe sought only a dumb beast that was capable of producing human-like sounds without understanding the words' meaning, and he claimed that earlier conceptions of "The Raven" included the use of a parrot. In this sense, the raven is important because it allows the narrator to be both the deliverer and interpreter of the sinister message, without the existence of a blatantly supernatural intervention. At the same time, the raven's black feather have traditionally been considered a magical sign of ill omen, and Poe may also be referring to Norse mythology, where the god Odin had two ravens named Hugin and Munin, which respectively meant "thought" and "memory." The narrator is a student and thus follows Hugin, but Munin continually interrupts his thoughts and in this case takes a physical form by landing on the bust of Pallas, which alludes to Athena, the Greek goddess of learning.

Due to the late hour of the poem's setting and to the narrator's mental turmoil, the poem calls the narrator's reliability into question. At first the narrator attempts to give his experiences a rational explanation, but by the end of the poem, he has ceased to give the raven any interpretation beyond that which he invents in his own head. The raven thus serves as a fragment of his soul and as the animal equivalent of Psyche in the poem "Ulalume." Each figure represents its respective character's subconscious that instinctively understands his need to obsess and to mourn. As in "Ulalume," the protagonist is unable to avoid the recollection of his beloved, but whereas Psyche of "Ulalume" sought to prevent the unearthing of painful memories, the raven actively stimulates his thoughts of Lenore, and he effectively causes his own fate through the medium of a non-sentient animal.

[]

=Emily Dickinson=

Much Madness is divinest Sense

This poem states that what is often declared madness is actually the most profound kind of sanity (“Much Madness is divinest Sense –“), when viewed by someone with “a discerning Eye.” What is often called sense or sanity is in fact not just “Madness,” but profound madness (“the starkest Madness”). It is only called “Sense” because it is not defined by reason, but by what the majority thinks (“’Tis the Majority / In this, as All, prevail –“).

Since the majority rules, the act of agreeing, no matter to what, means that you are, in the public mind, sane (“Assent – and you are sane –“). If you disagree, or even hesitate in your assent, you are not only declared crazy, but dangerously so (“Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –“). The act of disagreeing with the majority leads to a loss of freedom (“And handled with a Chain –“), thus one can either be physically free, but ruled by the majority, or imprisoned with their own beliefs.

Analysis
“Much Madness is divinest Sense –“ is a difficult poem to read without thinking of Dickinson’s biography. The poem can certainly be read and understood without reference to her life, as the message itself is, while powerful, fairly simple to understand—what is called madness is often actually the truest sanity, but as long as it differs from the perspective of the majority who defines what is right and wrong, it will be called madness.

Knowledge of Dickinson’s life, however, can add layers to the poem, especially as she was often called mad, both in her lifetime and after her death. This poem, then, can be seen as a defense of her reclusion from society. Dickinson had participated in a fairly full social life into her twenties; her seclusion was a conscious choice to remove herself from this, and so she fully knew what she was missing out on, and could thus judge it—what society defined as “Sense”—in her poetry.

Thus although many have presented this reclusion as a symptom of her insanity, it was actually just a decision not to live the way the majority did, just because the majority said it was the way that she should live. In her seclusion, she wrote incredibly prolifically, freed from the constraints of societal responsibilities. She chose her art over society, and while she may not claim this was “divinest Sense,” it was certainly not an insane choice just because it was different, and many more have profited from it, in reading her poetry, than would have profited from her presence in society in her lifetime.

This poem is not just concerned with the judgments of “Madness” or “Sense,” however, but with the prospect of any judgments that have important ramifications, and with who has the power to make them. In this poem, the judgment of a person’s insanity is made “straightway,” and only because this person chooses to “Demur” from the majority. The diction here, especially in the contrast between the extremes of these two words—“straightway” is as fast as a decision can be made, while “Demur” is a rather weak form of objection, as opposed to, say, a rebellion.

There is no slow, steady, rational process of judgment before this person is labeled insane and “handled with a Chain,” it is instead simply a kneejerk reaction, yet one that takes away the “insane” person’s freedom. The use of the word “Chain,” too, has a hint of violence to it, so it is not just a loss of freedom, but potentially a violent one. Dickinson is, throughout her poems, very concerned with the issue of truth, and the fact that it is almost impossible to ever really find it. If this is the case, then passing judgment in any fair way is inherently impossible, and to do so quickly is a horrifying crime.

[]

=** //János Pilinszky// **=

[|**Van Gogh's Prayer**]

 * An Introduction **

HUNGARIANS CONSIDER János Pilinszky to be one of their best living poets. Sándor Weöres, a towering poet, and nobody’s lipserver, calls him ‘our greatest’.

Pilinszky’s special quality is not easy to define. He recognizably belongs to that generation of East European poets which includes Herbert, Holub and Popa, but his differences draw any discussion of him into quite another context. Hungarians tend to set him a little outside their ordinary writers, and his poetry a little outside ordinary poetry. The reason for this is something essential to Pilinszky’s character. Critical judgement cannot rest in the aesthetic excellence of his work: it inevitably ends up arguing the ethical-religious position of Pilinszky himself, not at all a simple one in modern Hungary or anywhere else, but one which his poems and other writings and his life define with such poignancy and authority that it confronts the critic with a problem — a private, existential challenge. His ‘greatness’, then, unlike Weöres’, is not a greatness of imaginative and linguistic abundance. It has more to do with some form of spiritual distinction. The weight and unusual temper of his imagination and language derive from this.

The bulk of his work is quite slight. His forms are traditional — varying only between tightness and looseness. The quality of his actual style is notable: it is simple, unambiguous, direct, but Hungarians agree that it is a marvel of luminosity, unerring balance, sinuous music and intensity — a metal resembling nothing else. Through translation we can only try to imagine that (though working as closely with the originals as I have worked, one soon picks up a very distinct idea of it). But even a rough translation cannot completely blanket Pilinszky’s unique vision of final things, or the urgency and depth and complexity of his poetic temperament.

He was born in Budapest, in 1921. Certain known factors, which have had a vital influence on the mature form of his work, are worth mentioning. Perhaps one of the most decisive has been what might seem the most trivial. His syntax, for all its classical finish, is quite idiosyncratic. This can be felt clearly in a word-for-word crib — though it is less easy to translate further. Something elliptical in the connections, freakishly home-made, abrupt. It would not be going too far to say there is a primitive element in the way it grasps its subject. Yet this peculiarity is deeply part of its most sophisticated effects, and its truth. His own words give the best idea of it:

Should someone ask, what after all is my poetic language, in truth I should have to answer: it is some sort of lack of language, a sort of linguistic poverty. I have learned our mother-tongue from my mother’s elder sister, who met with an accident, was ill, and got barely beyond the stage of childlike stammering. This is not much. No doubt the world has added this and that, completely at random, accidentally, from very different workshops. This I // received //. And because the nice thing about our mother-tongue is exactly this fact, that we receive it, we do not want to add anything to it. We would feel it detrimental to do so. It would be as if we tried to improve our origin. But in art even such a poor language — and I must say this with the pride of the poor — can be redeemed. In art the deaf can hear, the blind can see, the cripple can walk, each deficiency may become a creative force of high quality. (1)

This ‘mother-tongue’ and especially his attitude towards it, as he describes it here, is a revealing clue to Pilinszky’s whole poetic character.

Another pervading factor, which almost every word he writes forces us to take into account, has been his Catholic upbringing and education. His continuing allegiance to certain aspects of Catholicism is evident in small things — his publishing many of his poems in Catholic journals, his joining the staff of the Catholic weekly // Új Ember // in 1957. The poems demonstrate, however, that his inner relationship to Catholicism is neither simple nor happy. He has been called a Christian poet, even a Catholic poet, and the increasing density of Catholic terminology and imagery in his work provides argument for this. But he rejects those labels absolutely. There is no doubt that he is above all a religious poet. A rather dreadful sun of religious awareness, a midnight sun, hangs over all his responses. But his loyalty to a different order of revelation — which at first seems a directly opposite and contradictory order — comes first.

In 1944 he was called up for Military Service — just in time to be scooped up by the retreating German Army. His last year of the war was spent moving from prison camp to prison camp in Austria and Germany.

Whatever he met in those camps evidently opened the seventh seal for Pilinszky. It was a revelation of the new man: humanity stripped of everything but the biological persistence of cells. After this experience there emerges, at the heart of his poems, a strange creature, ‘a gasping, limbless trunk’, savaged by primal hungers, among the odds and ends of a destroyed culture, waiting to be shot, or beaten to death, or just thrown on a refuse heap — or simply waiting in empty eternity. The shock of this initiation seems to have objectified and confirmed something he had known from childhood: the world of the camps became the world of his deepest, most private, poetic knowledge.

His first collection of poems appeared in 1946. It was a literary event in Hungary. He became leader, with Ágnes Nemes Nagy, of a new school of poets, and co-edited their magazine. Silence soon descended, however, and ten years had to pass before his poems began to emerge again. His second book containing eighteen poems reprinted from his first, and thirty-four new poems came out in 1959. It was acclaimed, at once, as the major achievement of a major writer.

Those comparatively few poems have gradually established his international reputation. It was recognized, from the start, that he spoke from the disaster-centre of the modern world. What was also clear, though, was that his words escaped, only with great effort, from an intensifying, fixed core of silence. That bleak, lonely condemned one, at the heart of his poems, spoke less and less.

The next thirteen years added only sixteen new poems. Then in 1971 and 1974 two new collections, projecting a new line of development from what had seemed impossible to alter, contained ninety-seven fresh pieces. Yet these pieces, if anything, only deepened the fixity and silence. All are short, fragmentary, and some hardly more than a sentence or couplet. The first of these collections was titled // Splinters // — splinters, that is, from the cross. The title of the second can be translated // Denouement //. The change, however, was there. The mood and imagery of his earlier work survived through an inner transformation which seemed uncompleted until, in 1975, he published // Space and Relationship //, a collection of poems interspersed with photographs of the sculptures of Erzsabet Schaár. The urgency and immediacy of his work, in this latest book, suggests a whole new phase in his writing. The possibilities of development suddenly seem wide open, and we can be sure that with a poet who has hung on to such a course with such tenacity, they will not be neglected.

‘I would like to write’, Pilinszky has said, ‘as if I had remained silent.’ He is not alone among modern poets, particularly those of his generation and experience, in his obsession with personal silence. As it is used by those Indian saints who refuse to speak at all until the ultimate truth speaks through them, or as Socrates used it before his judges, or as Christ used it before his accusers, silence can be a resonant form of speech. Pilinszky, who is rarely ironic and never messianic, makes us aware of another silence.

It is impossible not to feel that the spirit of his poetry aspires to the most naked and helpless of all confrontations: a Christ-like posture of crucifixion. His silence is the silence of that moment on the cross, after the cry.

In all that he writes, we hear a question: what speech is adequate for this moment, when the iron nails remain fixed in the wounds, with an eternal iron fixity, and neither hands nor feet can move?

The silence of artistic integrity ‘after Auschwitz’ is a real thing. The mass of the human evidence of the camps, and of similar situations since, has screwed up the price of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ and ‘understanding’ beyond what common words seem able to pay. The European poets who have been formed by this circumstance are well known. They have only continued to write, when at all, with a seasoned despair, a minimal, much-examined hope, a special irony. But because he is as he is, above all a passionately religious being, Pilinszky has shifted the problem into other dimensions — which are more traditional but also, perhaps, broader and older, more intimately relevant, more piercing.

This is not to suggest that his poetry is in its inmost spirit necessarily Christian. The poems are nothing if not part of an appeal to God, but it is a God who seems not to exist, Or who exists, if at all, only as he exists for the stones. Not Godlessness, but the imminence of a God altogether different from what dogmatic Christianity has ever imagined. A God of absences and negative attributes, quite comfortless. A God in whose creation the camps and modern physics are equally at home. But this God has the one almightiness that matters: he is the Truth.

We come to this Truth only on the simplest terms: through what has been suffered, what is being suffered, and the objects that participate in the suffering. The mysterious thing is that in Pilinszky the naked, helpless quality of this truth is fused with the utmost spiritual intensity. The desolation of his vision is equalled by its radiance. The revelation of this particularly bleak God is the flashpoint in all his poems.

In each poem, we find the same diamond centre: the post-apocalyptic silence, where the nail remains in the hand, and the wound cannot speak. The rich scope of Pilinszky’s religious feeling seems concentrated in that. That is his fixity. The only possible directions of movement are away from the nailed wound, or out of the flesh, both of which he reflects. Death has staked its claim in Pilinszky’s universe, and there is nothing life can do about it. Yet out of this one moment, from which theology retreats in confusion this hole of silence, which Christianity has managed to cover only with a loud chord of faith, Pilinszky makes his statement.

In the final biological humiliation and solitude, the poems say, nothing at all can help. Yet we hear so many precious things clamouring in that helplessness. The most harrowing voice of all is sexual love. Almost as frightening is the voice which gropes for just somebody — anybody, in the radiant emptiness. In Pilinszky’s love poems ‘he’ is separated from ‘her’ as the flesh is separated from meaning and hope, and as the spirit is separated from any form of consolation. Yet his horror at the physicality and wretchedness of the trap is without any taint of disgust.

And how is it, we might well ask, that this vision of what is, after all, a universe of death, an immovable, unalterable horror, where trembling creatures still go uselessly through their motions, how is it that it issues in poems so beautiful and satisfying? How do his few poor objects, his gigantic empty vistas, come to be so unforgettably alive and lit? The convict’s scraped skull, the chickens in their wooden cages, the disaster-blanched wall, which recur like features of a prison yard — all have an eerie, glowing depth of perspective, like objects in an early religious painting.

Though the Christian culture has been stripped off so brutally, and the true condition of the animal exposed in its ugliness, and words have lost their meaning — yet out of that rise the poems, whose words are manifestly crammed with meaning. Something has been said which belies neither the reality nor the silence. More than that, the reality has been redeemed. The very symbols of the horror are the very things he has redeemed.

They are not redeemed in any religious sense. They are redeemed, precariously, in some all-too-human sense, somewhere in the pulsing mammalian nervous-system, by a feat of humane consecration: a provisional, last-ditch ‘miracle’ which we recognize, here, as poetic.

By this route, Pilinszky’s poetry proves itself to be almost a religious activity. Once we have said that, though, we realize it is also a by-product. The chief task is something else, an attitude, and more than that a sustained commitment to certain loyalties, which involve Pilinszky’s whole life at every moment. And it is true, his personality and his life are as exemplary, for Hungarians, as his poems: they are a single fabric. This insistence of Pilinszky’s on paying for his words with his whole way of life, has confirmed the authority of his poems. And this is how they come to be an existential challenge to all who are deeply drawn into them.

It is characteristic that his affinities are not with other poets, but with such figures as Van Gogh, certain of Dostoevsky’s characters, and, above all, perhaps with Simone Weil (2). These extreme individuals, the nature of their inner struggles, the temperament verging on the saintly or the suicidal, zigzag like naked lightning through the magnetic atmosphere of Pilinszky’s writings. They personify his most vital element, the electrified steely strength under his passivity and gentleness.

If the right hand of his poetic power is his hard grasp of a revealed truth of our final condition, then his left hand, so much more human and hurt, is his mystically intense feeling for the pathos of the sensual world. ‘Mystical’ is an unsatisfactory word, but one feels the nearness of something like ecstasy, a fever of negated love, a vast inner exposure. The intensity is not forceful or strenuous, in any way. It is rather a stillness of affliction, a passivity of transfiguration. At this point, when all the powers of the soul are focused on what is final, and cannot be altered, even though it is horrible, the anguish is indistinguishable from joy. The moment closest to extinction turns out to be // the // creative moment. Final reality, a source of extraordinary energy, has been located and embraced. It is like an eclipse of the sun: each image of living death, in all its solid, earthern confinement, has a halo of solar flames.

So we feel, finally, no revulsion. The result is not comforting. But it is healing. Ghastliness and bliss are strangely married. The imagery of the central mysteries of Catholicism and the imagery of the camps have become strangely interdependent.

=** Mother, Kitchen **=

= [|OUYANG JIANGHE] =

Ouyang Jianghe is one of China's most prominent living poets, but he has rarely been translated into English. He is an influential art critic and president of the literary magazine //Jintian//.

Chinese critics consider Ouyang's poetry to be some of the most challenging avant-garde verse written in China. His poems, which have the intricate, sculpted quality of fugues, are concerned with dissecting the layers of meaning which underlie everyday objects and notions like "doubled shadows."

[]

the [|translator’s notes] make for interesting reading:

// “…a scattering of observations about how one thing relates to another: notice a horizontal thing here, a vertical thing there; here black, here white; here in, here out. And yet, I came to learn, this is the music of his poetry. Sonority matters little to him—yet he arranges the elements of a poem as a composer structures a piece of music, through stylized repetition, juxtaposition, and development of motifs. He’s like Bach busy at his fugues, moved more by math than passion, building stark, intricate cathedrals to vault our minds above the everyday. My job is to capture this music of ideas…” //

[]

Pablo Neruda Ode to things [|http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda#poet] Pablo Neruda wrote three books of odes during his lifetime. “Oda a las cosas” appeared in the book //Odas Elementales// in 1954. Neruda wrote and published a vast number of poems, which spoke of love, existentialism, and political travesty. His odes — poems of praise to laziness, a tuna, things — celebrated the day-to-day — the simple ordinariness of life itself. []

[] = Robert Browning | “ [|__Porphyria’s Lover__] ” =

“Porphyria’s Lover,” which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning’s dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she “worship[s]” him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society’s pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.
 * Summary **

** Form **
“Porphyria’s Lover,” while natural in its language, does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of Browning’s later poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming //ABABB.// The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker’s reasoned self-presentation.

This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Like most of Browning’s other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.

** Commentary **
“Porphyria’s Lover” opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian “prudery” constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in “Porphyria’s Lover,” sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria’s girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality.

For the Victorians, modernity meant numbness: urban life, with its constant over-stimulation and newspapers full of scandalous and horrifying stories, immunized people to shock. Many believed that the onslaught of amorality and the constant assault on the senses could be counteracted only with an even greater shock. This is the principle Browning adheres to in “Porphyria’s Lover.” In light of contemporary scandals, the sexual transgression might seem insignificant; so Browning breaks through his reader’s probable complacency by having Porphyria’s lover murder her; and thus he provokes some moral or emotional reaction in his presumably numb audience. This is not to say that Browning is trying to shock us into condemning either Porphyria or the speaker for their sexuality; rather, he seeks to remind us of the disturbed condition of the modern psyche. In fact, “Porphyria’s Lover” was first published, along with another poem, under the title //Madhouse Cells,// suggesting that the conditions of the new “modern” world served to blur the line between “ordinary life”—for example, the domestic setting of this poem—and insanity—illustrated here by the speaker’s action.

This poem, like much of Browning’s work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language’s sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in poetry? Why does society see both sex and violence as transgressive? What is the relationship between the two? Which is “worse”? These are some of the questions that Browning’s poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his society’s simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation; “Porphyria’s Lover” explores this contradiction.

[]

Browning’s most important poetic message regards the new conditions of urban living. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the once-rural British population had become centered in large cities, thanks to the changes wrought by the [|Industrial Revolution]. With so many people living in such close quarters, poverty, violence, and sex became part of everyday life. People felt fewer restrictions on their behavior, no longer facing the fear of non-acceptance that they had faced in smaller communities; people could act in total anonymity, without any monitoring by acquaintances or small-town busybodies. However, while the absence of family and community ties meant new-found personal independence, it also meant the loss of a social safety net. Thus for many city-dwellers, a sense of freedom mixed with a sense of insecurity. The mid-nineteenth century also saw the rapid growth of newspapers, which functioned not as the current-events journals of today but as scandal sheets, filled with stories of violence and carnality. Hurrying pedestrians, bustling shops, and brand-new goods filled the streets, and individuals had to take in millions of separate perceptions a minute. The resulting overstimulation led, according to many theorists, to a sort of numbness. Many writers now felt that in order to provoke an emotional reaction they had to compete with the turmoils and excitements of everyday life, had to shock their audience in ever more novel and sensational ways. Thus violence became a sort of aesthetic choice for many writers, among them Robert Browning. In many of his poems, violence, along with sex, becomes the symbol of the modern urban-dwelling condition. Many of Browning’s more disturbing poems, including “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess,” reflect this notion. This apparent moral decay of Victorian society, coupled with an ebbing of interest in religion, led to a morally conservative backlash. So-called Victorian prudery arose as an attempt to rein in something that was seen as out- of-control, an attempt to bring things back to the way they once were. Thus everything came under moral scrutiny, even art and literature. Many of Browning’s poems, which often feature painters and other artists, try to work out the proper relationship between art and morality: Should art have a moral message? Can art be immoral? Are aesthetics and ethics inherently contradictory aims? These are all questions with which Browning’s poetry struggles. The new findings of science, most notably evolution, posed further challenges to traditional religious ideas, suggesting that empiricism—the careful recording of observable details—could serve as a more relevant basis for human endeavor, whether intellectual or artistic. In exploring these issues of art and modernity, Browning uses the dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue, to paraphrase M.H. Abrams, is a poem with a speaker who is clearly separate from the poet, who speaks to an implied audience that, while silent, remains clearly present in the scene. (This implied audience distinguishes the dramatic monologue from the soliloquy—a form also used by Browning—in which the speaker does not address any specific listener, rather musing aloud to him or herself). The purpose of the monologue (and the soliloquy) is not so much to make a statement about its declared subject matter, but to develop the character of the speaker. For Browning, the genre provides a sort of play-space and an alternative persona with which he can explore sometimes controversial ideas. He often further distances himself by employing historical characters, particularly from the Italian Renaissance. During the Renaissance in Italy art assumed a new humanism and began to separate from religion; concentrations of social power reached an extreme. Thus this temporal setting gives Browning a good analogue for exploring issues of art and morality and for looking at the ways in which social power could be used (and misused: the Victorian period saw many moral pundits assume positions of social importance). Additionally, the monologue form allows Browning to explore forms of consciousness and self-representation. This aspect of the monologue underwent further development in the hands of some of Browning’s successors, among them Alfred Tennyson and T.S. Eliot. Browning devotes much attention not only to creating a strong sense of character, but also to developing a high level of historic specificity and general detail. These concerns reflected Victorian society’s new emphasis on empiricism, and pointed the way towards the kind of intellectual verse that was to be written by the poets of high Modernism, like Eliot and Ezra Pound. In its scholarly detail and its connection to the past Browning’s work also implicitly considers the relationship of modern poets to a greater literary tradition. At least two of Browning’s finest dramatic monologues take their inspiration from moments in Shakespeare’s plays, and other poems consider the matter of one’s posterity and potential immortality as an artist. Because society had been changing so rapidly, Browning and his contemporaries could not be certain that the works of canonical artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo would continue to have relevance in the emerging new world. Thus these writers worried over their own legacy as well. However, Browning’s poetry //has// lasted—perhaps precisely because of its very topical nature: its active engagement with the debates of its times, and the intelligent strategies with which it handles such era-specific material. [] = Saadi Youseef | " [|__The Fence__] ” =

Talks about a house that now is not like it was. The garden destroyed and flowers run over by dogs. And the lack of memories on how the house was built by grandfather

born in Iraq in 1933. Left when Hussein raise to power He worked in teaching and journalism in Kuwait, Algeria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Yugoslaia, Yemen, and France. His works include fifteen volumes of poetry, a novel, three books of criticism, and translations of Whitman, Cavafy, Ritsos, and Ngugi wa Thiongo, among others. He left Iraq in 1979 and now lives in Jordan. (1998) = **// Shuntaro Tanikawa //** =

**// Alone in Two Billion Light Years //**
// (Japan, 1931) //

[]

S ** huntaro Tanikawa has been a phenomenon in Japan since the publication of his first collection, //Alone in Two Billion Light Years//, in 1952. In the book’s prefatory poem, Tanikawa’s mentor, Tatsuji Miyoshi, introduced him as a young man who “has come from a distant land, unexpected [. . . ] bearing the weight of being alone”. Indeed, he seemed to be totally unencumbered by Japan’s post-World War Two psyche. Over the past 50 years, many different editions of this first collection have appeared; //Alone in Two Billion Light Years// has remained a favourite among readers. In 2008, a Japanese/English pocket edition was published in Tokyo, attracting a new wave of young readers. **

Born in 1931, Tanikawa was a middle-school student at the end of the war. He was just young enough to have been spared the pain and despair experienced by those poets who faced death, loss and devastation during the war. And yet his thoughts were never too far away from death, which was colourlessly woven into his worldview, lending his work philosophical depth.

F ollowing the end of World War Two, a group of young Japanese poets who had survived the battlefield and military oppression were determined to create a new poetry of their own, one which totally negated the poetic conventions and traditions of the pre-war era. Their poetry was characterised by angst, pain and fear, and was overshadowed by death. Out of this poetic movement came a series of anthologies, based on the group’s new poetics. //The Waste Land//in 1951 was the first of these annual anthologies, which continued to 1958.

In 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect, marking the end of the Occupation by Allied Forces begun in 1945. Japan was well on the path to recovery from the war’s devastation under its new democratic constitution. Socio-political changes were generating hope and creative energy within society.

It was against this background that Tanikawa launched his career as a fresh voice, set apart from those of the post-World War Two poets, resonating with the spirit of new times. On the occasion of the publication of Tanikawa’s first//Collected Poems// in 1968, poet and critic Shiro Murano wrote, “Right from the first volume, //Alone in Two Billion Light Years,// no book of poetry in post-World War Two [Japan] has been as spectacular as Tanikawa’s. It is astounding to see that his poetry is so widely beloved, yet shows absolutely no sign of compromise.” In the decades since, Tanikawa has maintained the position of being the foremost poet in Japan, in terms of both his widely acknowledged artistry and his unprecedented popularity, having garnered a huge following among the general public.

Tanikawa has published over 60 books of poetry, encompassing lyrical poems, analytical prose poems, narrative poems, epic poems, satirical poems and highly experimental poems. In virtually every book of poetry he consciously and artfully adopts a different mode and style and has been at the cutting edge of contemporary Japanese poetry throughout his career. His words are clear, his lines are easy to understand, yet his poetry is highly sophisticated. He says he writes like Beethoven – who was said to have written music through great pain and with considerable effort – and yet makes his lines look as effortless as the work of Mozart, known for the ease with which he could compose. As singer-songwriter Akiko Yano writes: “A very complex wiring is employed, but it’s as if his methods and techniques are all hidden beneath the surface, which is itself fully covered by a pretty stainless material. . . and I think to myself ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be great if I could write a poem like that?’”

Over the years, Tanikawa has been actively involved in poetry readings and has participated in poetry festivals both in Japan and around the world. He has visited all continents except for Antarctica and has collaborated with various international writers, creating linked poems and dialogue poems. His poetry has been widely translated into Mongolian, Korean, Chinese and most Eastern and Western European languages. He has received many awards, recognitions and prizes for his poetry. His work (in Tian Yuan’s translation) was widely praised across China, where it received two awards, of which one was the prestigious Zhongkun International Poetry Award of Beijing University in 2011.

Tanikawa has also been very active in promoting and supporting the translation of other contemporary Japanese poets, helping to make their work available to readers around the world.

PIW Japan will feature Tanikawa’s poetry in three instalments. Although these instalments can never hope to cover the full spectrum of his work, they will serve as a tribute to this great poet. Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, the editor of PIW Japan, will select poems for each issue from //Tanikawa Shuntaro: The Art of Being Alone: Poems 1952–2009// (Cornell East Asia Series, 2011). Yasuhiro Yotsumoto is himself an award-winning poet, and is also the author of //Shuntarology// (Shichosha, Tokyo 2011), a 300-page critical essay on Tanikawa’s poetics.

In the first PIW issue presenting Tanikawa, Yotsumoto has drawn 15 poems from //Journey// (1968) and //Watashi// (I, Myself) (2007). Tanikawa said of the selection, “They are both about myself; I mean, they are somehow based on my personal life. I suspect that’s why Yotsumoto selected these two collections as a pair.”

= Sylvia Plath =

[|http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/#madgirl] Mad Girls love song Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath is a poem about a girl who spent her whole life waiting for a man she gave herself to, against her beliefs, who was never to return. The most visible device the author used in this book is**repetition**. One phrase the narrator repeats is “(I think I made you up inside my head).” The emphasis repetition puts on this quote is that the narrator is wishing that this man is made up, and trying to convince herself of it. The quotes signify that these are thoughts to her, and not out loud, which means she is trying to convince herself it is true. The narrator also repeats the line, “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.” This, along with the reference to God, Satan, and Seraphim, mean that getting “into bed” with the man the narrator was speaking to was a sin, and therefore they never married. When the narrator tries to sleep, “All the world drops dead,” which could represent nightmares and visions of hell because she feels guilty for her sin. Plath uses repetition to emphasize certain phrases so the reader can decipher the true meaning. Another device the author uses is **personification**. In the second stanza the narrator describes “the stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in.” Clearly, stars can not waltz and blackness can’t gallop. Stars “waltzing out” and blackness galloping in are used to describe how they are leaving her without a second thought, self-assured, easily, and quickly, as the man who left her might have done. The narrator continues to say “I should have loved a Thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again.” The narrator is giving a car, Thunderbird, the personification of being able to love and return to its lover, as she wished her man had done. The narrator is also relaying the message that the car is a better man and companion than her lover is. Personification in this poem is very meaningful and powerful to the underlying theme. The first thing that struck me with this poem is the title, “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” The title has two underlying meanings. One, the girl is mad, or angry, about the love in her life. This is true, because the narrator is very upset that she gave herself to a man who left her. Also, that the girl is mad, or insane, over convincing herself that this lover is “made up” and does not exist. The second thing about this poem that caught my attention is the author, Sylvia Plath, who is extremely emotional and troubled. I liked the religious undertones of the poem, which represent that sex before marriage is a sin to the narrator, and she is regretting her actions. “Mad Girl’s Love Song” is cynical view on a bad relationship, and I enjoyed reading it. [] = = = Mark Strand =

[]

was born in Canada on Prince Edward Island. He studied at Antioch College, where he took a BA. He also received a BFA from Yale, where he studied painting. At the University of Iowa, he worked closely with poet Donald Justice, completing an MA in 1962. He spent a year in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship, and later taught at Iowa for three years. In 1965 he spent a year as Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Brazil, where he was deeply influenced by contemporary Latin American poets (especially the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade). Strand has moved around a good deal, teaching at many American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Utah, where he is now professor of English.

Strand's poetry is known for a clarity reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and for a deeply inward sense of language. Many of the poems aspire to the condition of dreams, shot through with images possessing a strangely haunting vividness, as in 'The Ghost Ship', which summons a mysterious ship that floats 'Through the crowded streets ... / its vague / tonnage like wind'. He frequently invokes everyday images, as in 'The Mailman', where a wraith-like mailman visits the narrator at midnight to deliver 'terrible personal news'. In 'The Last Bus' the poet imagines Rio de Janeiro, calling the sea 'a dream' in which the city 'dies and is reborn'. The poem is surreal in a manner that combines the dreamlike quality of Pablo Neruda with aspects of nightmare that recall such European expressionists as Georg Trakl.

Strand's first book, // Sleeping with One // // Eye Open // was published in 1964. His second, // Reasons for Moving // (1968), attracted widespread attention from critics; it includes 'Eating Poetry' which begins: 'Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.' This antic surrealism also animates poems like 'Moontan', 'The Man in the Tree', and 'The Marriage'. // Darker // (1970) was an obliquely autobiographical volume, containing such poems as 'My Life' and 'My Death'. These poems are full of a quiet, ironically pictured anguish as the poet teeters on the brink of self-consciousness in pursuit of his // via negative. // In 1973 Strand published // The Story of Our Lives //, more explicitly autobiographical than anything he had written before. It includes a striking elegy for the poet's father.

// The Late Hour // (1978) is among the strongest of Strand's several books, containing poems for the poet's son and daughter, and a number of poems (such as 'The Late Hour', 'Snowfall', and 'The Garden') that possess a deeply elegiac quality. In this book, Strand began writing with a freshness and simplicity that recall the poetry of ancient China.

As the Mexican poet Octavio Paz has written: 'Mark Strand has chosen the negative path, with loss as the first step towards fullness: it is also the opening to a transparent verbal perfection.' Strand's // Selected Poems // (New York, 1980) adds to previously published work a number of beautifully realized autobiographical poems, including 'Shooting Whales' and 'Nights in Hackett's Cove'. Strand has also published a book of short stories, several translations from European and Latin American poets, and an anthology of contemporary poetry. For criticism, see Richard Howard, // Alone with American // (New York, 1969).

Many of Strand's poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his childhood on Prince Edward Island. Strand has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and Rene Magritte. Strand's poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, Strand said, "I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealist techniques, and a strong narrative element." [] use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems = = = William Butler Yeats =

The choice born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the // fin de siècle // in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. // The Countess Cathleen // (1892), // The Land of Heart's Desire // (1894), // Cathleen ni Houlihan // (1902), // The King's Threshold // (1904), and // Deirdre // (1907) are among the best known.

After 1910, Yeats's dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes // The Wild Swans at Coole // (1919), // Michael Robartes and the Dancer // (1921), // The Tower // (1928), // The Winding Stair and Other Poems // (1933), and // Last Poems and Plays // (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.

[] = Sir Arthur Conan Doyle =

[] video [] [] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the creator Sherlock Holmes, the best-known detective in literature and the embodiment of scientific thinking. Doyle himself was not a good example of rational personality: he believed in fairies and was interested in occultism. Sherlock Holmes stories have been translated into more than fifty languages, and made into plays, films, radio and television series, a musical comedy, a ballet, cartoons, comic books, and advertisement. By 1920 Doyle was one of the most highly paid writers in the world.

Doyle was born on May 22, 1859 at Picardy Place, Edinburgh, as the son of Charles Altamont Doyle, a civil servant in the Edinburgh Office of Works, and Mary (Foley) Doyle. Both of Doyle’s parents were Roman Catholics. His father suffered from epilepsy and alcoholism and was eventually institutionalized. Charles Altamont died in an asylum in 1893. In the same year Doyle decided to finish permanently the adventures of his master detective. Because of financial problems, Doyle’s mother kept a boarding house. Dr. Tsukasa Kobayashi has suspected in an article, that Doyle’s mother had a long affair with Bryan Charles Waller, a lodger and a student of pathology, who had a deep impact to Conan Doyle.

Doyle was educated in Jesuit schools. He studied at Edinburgh University and in 1884 he married Louise Hawkins. Doyle qualified as doctor in 1885. After graduation Doyle practiced medicine as an eye specialist at Southsea near Porsmouth in Hampshire until 1891 when he became a full time writer.

First story about Holmes, [|A STUDY IN SCARLET], was published in 1887 in ‘Beeton Christmas Annual.’. The novel was written in three weeks in 1886. It introduced the detective and his associate and friend, Dr. Watson, and made famous Holmes’s address at Mrs. Hudson’s house, 221B Baker Street, London. Their major opponent was the malevolent Moriarty, the classic evil genius who was a kind of doppelgänger of Holmes. Also the beautiful opera singer Irene Adler caused much trouble to Holmes.

The second Sherlock Holmes story, [|THE SIGN OF FOUR], was written for the Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. The story collects a colorful group of people together, among them Jonathan Small who has a wooden leg and a dwarf from Tonga islands. In the Strand Magazine started to appear ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’

In 1893 Doyle was so wearied of his famous detective that he devised his death in the Final Problem (published in the Strand). In the story Holmes meets Moriarty at the fall of the Reichenbach in Switzerland and disappears. Watson finds a letter from Homes, stating “I have already explained to you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this.”

In [|THE HOUND OF BASKERVILLES] (1902) Doyle narrated an early case of the dead detective. The murder weapon in the story is an animal.

He was knighted (“Sir Arthur”) in 1902 for his work in Boer War propaganda (particularly the pamphlet // The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct // ) — and, some said, because of the publication of [|THE HOUND OF BASKERVILLES].

Owing to public demand Doyle resurrected his popular hero in The Empty House (1903).

“I moved my head to look at the cabinet behind me. When I turned again Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and last time in my life.”

—(from ‘The Empty House’)

In these later stories Holmes stops using cocaine. Sherlock Holmes short stories were collected in five books. They first appeared in 1892 under the title [|THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES]. The later were [|THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES] (1894), [|THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES] (1904), [|HIS LAST BOW] (1917), and [|THE CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES] (1927).

During the South African war (1899-1902) Doyle served for a few months as senior physician at a field hospital, and wrote THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA, in which he took the imperialistic view. In 1900 and 1906 he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. Doyle was knighted in 1902. Fourteen months after his wife died, Conan Doyle married in 1907 his second wife, Jean Leckie. He dedicated himself in spiritualistic studies after the death of his son Kingsley from wounds incurred in World War I. An example of these is THE COMING OF FAIRIES, in which he supported the existence of “little people” and spent more than a million dollars on their cause. He also became president of several important spiritualist organizations.

Conan Doyle’s other publications include plays, verse, memoirs, short stories, and several historical novels and supernatural and speculative fiction. His stories of Professor George Edward Challenger in THE LOST WORLD and other adventures blended science fact with fantastic romance, and were very popular. The model for the professor was William Rutherford, Doyle’s teacher from Edinburgh. Doyle’s practice, and other experiences, seven months in the Arctic as ship’s doctor on a whaler, and three on a steamer bound to the West Coast of Africa, provided material for his writings.

Doyle died on July 7, 1930 from heart disease at his home, Windlesham, Sussex.

“My contention is that Sherlock Holmes is literature on a humble but not ignoble level, whereas the mystery writers most in vogue now are not. The old stories are literature, not because of the conjuring tricks and the puzzles, not because of the lively melodrama, which they have in common with many other detective stories, but the virtue of imagination and style. They are fairy-tales, as Conan Doyle intimated in his preface to his last collection, and they are among the most amusing of fairy-tales and not among the least distinguished.”