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In this paper I aim to reintroduce the poetry of Joanne Kyger, a contemporary and intimate of the Beat poets, whose first volume of poetry, The Tapestry and the Web, re-reads classical mythology as a female-centered nontraditional narrative. Kyger eschews traditional definitions of 'epic' in favor of a poetics that allows for the inscription of the female poet as a 'maker' or artisan, who crafts a text like a tapestry, crossing and re-crossing the page in an effort to create an open space for the work of reading. Kyger deliberately employs a mythic cycle to break through limits that constrict one's ability to place oneself in the poetry, either as poet or reader. The use of myth prevents her poetry from becoming personal or confessional, yet, it is a female-centered 'epic,' a category that in and of itself breaks down conventional poetic barriers. Thus, Kyger's poetry transforms the Odyssey into a multi-vocal, transgressive narrative, which de-centers and destabilizes the epic masculine narrating 'I.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Renaissance poet and scholar Angelo Poliziano draws on Ovid's Tris-tia, Ibis, and Epistulae ex Ponto to shape his own experiences as a "poet of exile" during a six-month period of self-imposed absence from Florence in 1479-80. In four Latin epigrams, the Sylva in scabiem, and a lengthy letter of apology from the Gonzaga court in Mantua Poliziano appeals to his patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, to call him back to Florence. Poliziano's appeals to Lorenzo invoke Ovid's appeals from exile to the Roman emperor Augustus, who becomes in turn a model for a Renaissance ruler well aware of the importance of historical precedent. In appealing thus to his patron to have himself restored to Florence, Poliziano also lays claim to a powerful poetical exemplum in the figure of Ovid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief critique, in a first part (pp. 507-510), of previous scholars' biographical approach to the politics of translating Virgil, this paper proceeds to offer an alternative approach by looking at the "linguistic ideology" underpinning translations (especially of the Aeneid) (parts II and III [pp. 510-512 and 512-517]). What emerges is a contradictory tension between the idea of a single, unifying national vernacular and competing varieties or kinds of English. Inherent to this tension is the question of whose English (and consequently who) was to be included in the constituency of the "our" in "our English tongue"-a recurring phrase in translators' comments on their work. In a fourth and final part (pp. 517-527), these linguistic--and political--stakes are shown to have accrued around a critique, by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), of Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the opening lines of the Aeneid. Specifically, this critique is taken up in the following decade (the 1590s), and the politics of its hierarchical and exclusive linguistic ideology opposed, on the one hand, by Richard Carew, in an important essay on the English language, and, on the other, by William Shakespeare, in two of his early plays, most importantly, The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play unique in the Shakespearean canon for its focus on "our English tongue," a focus which is here precisely placed in its intertextual relation to contemporary debate surrounding Richard Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]